Miskito/Discussion

	Miskitu Aisas! Miskito Language Course
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If you have any feedback, questions, comments or suggestions about Miskitu Aisas!, this is the place! Please bring this project to life with your comments and participation. Tingki pali! (thank you)

i=I am Very Impressive ==

Wow, this is an amazing wikibook! I think it's the best one I've seen on the whole of Wikiboks! I am trying to add you to the languages bookshelf to make it more visible. Poppy 20:17, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment (which I didn't see until today, unfortunately). Cheers, Alan --A R King 11:54, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

I am trying to learn miskito as part of a plan to go there and help.

This is a tremendous help because learning resources are scarce. I have learned how to express wanting something, but not how to express need separately from wanting. If I try to teach people to use self discipline in managing their affairs, this is a critical concept. Can anyone help with this?

I must also agree with the above statement, this is probobly the best language wikibook. Anyway, it would be helpful if at the bottom of each lesson page there was a navigation templete to go to the next lesson. It is a little inconvenient to have to scroll up to the top of the page. Thanks!--122.164.151.90 06:34, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the praise and the suggestions! Alan --A R King 11:50, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I've implemented your suggestion: what do you think? --A R King 14:55, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Exercises

This is certainly the best language wikibook I've seen so far. I have no background in language teaching apart from learning English, some Latin and currently Spanish (apart from failed attempts to learn French and Italian); however, I'm currently working on a "wikibooklet" for a Spanish audio course under a creative commons license, i.e., I'm writing transcripts of the Spanish dialogues, vocabulary lists, and exercises for each lesson. I have some questions about how to do this:

I noticed that many of the templates of the Miskitu wikibook, which reveal answers/translations etc. by clicking, always reveal a bunch of answers at the same time. Is this done on purpose? Wouldn't it be better to reveal the answers individually in order to give the learner an immediate feedback for each question without revealing the answers of all questions?
In Miskito/Method#Composing mini-exercises there is a list of nine exercise types:

True or false: You give Miskito sentences, the learner says if what they say is write or wrong.
Order the sentences: You give a series of Miskito sentences out of order, the learner puts them into the right order to form a coherent text.
Miskito-English translation: You give the Miskito, the learner gives the English.
Order the words: You give a Miskito sentence with the words in the wrong order, the learner puts them in the right order to form a sentence.
Sentence transformation: You give a sentence, the learner changes it in the way you specify (e.g. changing singular to plural).
Filling in blanks: You give Miskito sentences with a part missing, the learner provides the missing part and completes the sentence.
Combining: You give one or more elements of a Miskito sentence (but not the whole sentence), the learner gives the whole sentence combining or manipulating the elements in the way you have specified.
English-Miskito translation: You give the English, the learner gives the Miskito.
Answering questions: You ask questions (in Miskito), the learner answers them (in Miskito).

I've ordered the types of exercises according to their difficulty (does everyone agree on the order?). My first question would be: does it make sense to have many different types of exercises just for the sake of variation? I recently worked through a Spanish audio course, which had the same four kinds of exercises for each lesson in a fixed order (1. translation of English words to Spanish words, 2. translation of sentences from English to Spanish, 3. role play (similar to asking and answering question in the foreign language), and 4. multiple-choice answers about the text) and my impression was that this fixed scheme of exercises establishes a certain routine, which I liked as a learner because after three lessons I knew exactly how the exercises work.

My second question would be, which exercises are the most important ones if I have limited resources to create them? If the goal of the exercises is to give users feed back on their abilities, I would think that English-foreign language translation and answering questions in the foreign language are the two most important exercises. If users can do this, they almost certainly are able to do all the other exercises. Or am I missing something?
In my experience a problem with answering questions in the foreign language is that I'm often missing vocabulary to express what I want to say and I need someone to check my answer because it is very often too different from the one or two possible answers that are proposed in a textbook. Thus, I would think that this type of exercise is more appropriate for a class room situation with a teacher than for a self-studying course.
Thus, I'm currently planning to have only translations from English to the foreign language. However, I realize that this might be rather difficult for users and therefore a bit frustrating. Therefore, the exercises come in three flavors of different difficulty: 1. given the English translation of one sentence of the lesson text, the user only has to remember the original sentence of the lesson text in the foreign language, 2. same as 1. with variations of the lesson text (but using the same vocabulary and exactly the same verb forms), 3. same as 1. but varying the person and gender (singular and plural, formal and informal, masculine and feminine). I think these restrictions simplify these translation exercises to a very manageable level while still practicing and testing the important ability to translate from English to the foreign language. (I should mention that the whole course I'm working on is for beginners; a more advanced course should probably provide more difficult translation exercises.) An important feature of this choice is that the creation of these kinds of exercises appears to be quite manageable even for a non-native speaker of the language taught by a text book. Any comments on this choice would be very welcome! --Martin Kraus (talk) 13:18, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Sound?

This is an interesting featured book. But it would be really nice if at some point you can arrange to collect matching sound files for the exercises from a native speaker. Personally I'd just be curious how the sound changes in a non-European language with different word order when people say things with different meanings but the same text, e.g. "Good job!" honestly vs. sarcastically, or how questions are asked with perhaps non-rising tone endings (e.g. English "Would you like me to put it there?" when "there" is already a known location and stress goes on "like" or "put"). Wnt (talk) 02:25, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Navigation

Exercises

Sound?