My French is almost non-existent, but I find myself regularly having to call the police in Geneva. As a consequence I'm writing a little course for myself, it's a CALL course - computer assisted language learning - to help me. Lots of ex-pats find telephone conversations the most challenging; not being able to see the person to whom you are talking makes it so much worse. I'm guessing, therefore, there may be lots of people out there who might appreciate this little course and get a degree of comfort from it that helps them call the police when they need to.
It is an interactive conversation and is not linear. That is, I will have more than one thing I want to ask, and the 'person' the other end will have more than one way of responding, adding to the real life experience. There will be prompts/help available in English. If the system doesn't recognise you, you will be prompted to try again. You will get feedback as to your improvement.
The course itself is just a prototype for the system which permits anybody to create their own courses with whatever content they want. Another obvious one I will do for myself some time is calling the doctor. Somebody might want to develop one for a job interview.
This is a university of Geneva project, I'm just being a guinea-pig by trying it out. The ultimate idea as it develops is a social networking situation where people can help each other, as you need a native speaker of the language you are learning to translate and record your course once you have prepared the text for it. The hope is that a community of people will start exchanging 'my English for your French'. Any European languages/major Asian languages can be used.
For now I'm curious to know:
(1) does it sound like a good idea, one you might try? I would like to collect a list of email addresses for people who would be interested to try it and if possible give some feedback.
(2) is there a particular subject you might want to call the police about and don't?
My first try at this will simply include ones from my own experience sich as drug addicts in my building and noise problems. A friend mentioned they came home to their village late one night to find somebody's cows all over the road, and again, she had difficulties in her conversation with the police. But I wondered if there is any obvious one that people would really like that I haven't included.
