First of all, if anyone is not familiar with Librivox, it is a resource that is invaluable for linguists, book lovers and anyone who enjoys hearing a good story. A volunteer organization, they provide free, public domain audio books of works whose copyright has expired. You might be surprised at what is out there, including works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and others. And since all Librivox recordings are in the public domain, there is a wealth of recordings of native speakers reading texts in various European and even some non-European languages (you can search by language from the advanced search page).
Recently Librivox released the second of a series of recordings of language learning materials, primers and descriptive grammars. There's some good Middle Eastern materials (Egyptian Arabic, Arabic and Persian) in this release, and some historical languages (Latin, Anglo-Saxon) as well as some early linguistic work.
The usefulness of some of the works varies, and certainly few people will be interested in all of the languages available. I, for one, will probably not be teaching myself Esperanto or Anglo-Saxon anytime soon. However, reading along with the text version (available through the Internet Archive), I found the course on Egyptian Arabic a useful adjunct to more up-to-date material.
And, you know, they are FREE. So, if your not happy, you can always get your money back.
Monday, March 7, 2011
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