New course up for learners of German: Das warme Polarland, by Ernst Constantin (Login - LingQ). Both the use of audio (Librivox) and text (Projekt Gutenberg) are compliant copyright-wise, to the best of my knowledge. Even the thumbnail is AI made in Stable Diffusion and is unique to LingQ and the course.
The LingQ German library has had another course based on the same book since 2008 (Login - LingQ). I stumbled upon it whilst looking over some of the older book shelf courses. I thought it would be nice to resurrect this curious blast from the past with its cute li’l penguin thumbnail. However, the more I delved, the more I realised: the book’s subject matter isn’t all that cute (it’s an adventure story); the audio quality of the attached reading is shocking; and it’s lacking the final chapters.
So, kurzgesagt, the newer version finally, after 14-15 years, lets LingQers know how the saga of Das warme Polarland comes to an end. I’ve run some cleaning effects in Audacity on the Librivox audio, which was suffering from jingly mp3 compression jank, and I like to think the quality is now vastly improved.
Unless someone wants to speak up for the 2008 version of the course, I’ll quietly delete it in the coming weeks.
Cheers,
Steve