Importing books

I’m trying to import Kato Lomb’s book “How I learn languages”. I would like to know if there is an easier way to do this than to create hundred lessons coping and pasting isolated small sessions of the text.

Thank you very much.

I don’t really know of a quick way to import books, so you’ll probably just have to do it a chapter at a time. If you’re looking to break the book up in to smaller pieces (i.e. split a chapter into 4 or 5 lessons) I might suggest just importing the whole chapter and using the bookmark feature. Just open the lesson, click the bookmark icon at the top right (next to the pencil) then drag the bookmark next to where you left off up into your bookmarks bar.

Ok. Thank you, Alex

I’ve got about 1000 chapters of books imported into LingQ for Dutch (about 1/3 of them having been read/listened). It’s certainly a bit of work to get everything on the site but it’s totally worth it.

Talking about Kató Lomb, why don’t you guys contact the publisher of “Polyglot. How I Learn Languages” to ask for permission to share it on LingQ? After all, it is downloadable for free, so they may allow us to have it here, too.

Has the book been recorded yet? If so, it might be worth a try.

Not as far as I know, but you could find someone who would record it.

It would be wonderful to have an audio of this book, but I can’t help the project with my horrible pronunciation, haha.

I’m thinking to translate this book to Portuguese, maybe it would help someone.

My wife is learning Portuguese and I’ll learn it after my current 3/4. So, I think it would be useful.

Nice, I will begin as soon as possible.

I think that it would be a great project if we were to talk to the publishers about starting a translation project and sharing it here on LingQ. In turn we can give them ready made pdf files with the translations.

I agree. Who are the publishers?

I have absolutely no idea. Perhaps someone with the book can tell us.

My pdf version is the edited by a man called Scott Alkire, but obviously he is the publisher of the English version. We need to see some printed version with more copyright details.

Marcos, I think the printed version is the same as the pdf. There is no hint to the original Hungarian publisher, but maybe it’s still worth to get in touch with TESL-EJ (http://www.tesl-ej.org/), the publisher of the English edition, as reported on the book.

I did consider translating the book into Italian, however my professional ethics have refrained me from doing so, because translating a book from an existing translation is never a good idea. Every translation involves some losses, so translating from a translation increases the distance between the new translation and the original, and can even lead to mistakes of different kinds.

I understand and agree with you, Mike. However, I think we must be realistic: I don’t know any Hungarian speaker and probably I am not an exception. At my point of view, it would be better to have an imperfect translation than nothing. In my country maybe only 5% of the people can read in English and this translation could help someone to begin his/her language studies.

But, again, I respect your point of view but I think it’s better to do an imperfect work than to wait an hypothetical ideal condition.

Yes, I understand. I agree with you if I see this from a language-learning point of view. If I see it as a professional translator, things change. Moreover, there are many references to the Hungarian language in the book and it would be recommendable to know some Hungarian to be sure you are translating those parts correctly. Anyway, it would take some time to translate the book AND record it. I don’t know how many people would like to read it in Italian.