By Omar L. Gallaga
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, July 29, 2007
¿Hablas podcast?
Jade Lindquist, a former part-time teacher at Austin Community College, hopes many commuters and owners of MP3 players do.
For the past two years, she’s been working in Austin on Edufone, a Web site and cell phone-based service for those who want to learn Spanish or English.
The learning is done through free podcasts available on her Web site and on iTunes, as well as cell phone-based vocabulary-building quizzes and games. Lindquist is hoping listeners and cell users will like the service enough to sign up for a $9.99 or $12.99-a-month cell phone download or a $14.95 membership that includes expanded podcast features and downloads on the Web site.
Lindquist says she started the project two years ago as a way to spend more time at home with her young daughters Ava and Elissa (both now fluent in Spanish). One day, she said, she did a Web search and found a site called ChinesePod, which offers podcasts for learning the language.
“I’d put on my Chinese headphones and burn CDs (of the podcasts) and I was learning,” she said.
She decided to adapt the idea for local friends who wanted to learn English. So she used her skills in language and IT (she has master’s degrees in English literature, information systems and library science) to build a Web site, learn how to create podcasts and teach herself how to program in Java, a language that can be used for cell phone applications.
Door de taal heen breken.