Answers
Aug 11, 2011 - 11:33 AM
It looks like you are from Corée du Sud, or République de Corée. You are un coréen (du sud). I would imagine that most people know where South Korea is.
Aug 11, 2011 - 01:07 PM
It seems like the program's writers had four choices: 1) mention no country at all and hurt no sensibilities, 2) mention all countries and delete a great deal of other material, hurting most learners,3) make different choices in terms of people to hurt, so specify South Korea and Vietnam, but group together Latin Americans, people from the Middle East as well as the Maghreb, Eastern Europeans, as well as other regions, managing in the process to spare you but potentially hurt others, 4) create as you suggest an additional glossary, which they haven't done yet because probably so many things would have to be included that ultimately someone would be feel ignored or worse. In the end it looks like they created this platform for people to help each other regarding these gaps...
Aug 11, 2011 - 04:39 PM
I think Charles spells out the issue pretty well. At the core, we strive to create the best language learning courses in the world. Our #1 priority is to get you speaking the language. If we were to spend time teaching the name of every country, we'd have far less time teaching key grammar concepts and sentence structures that really enable you to speak the language.
As for including some kind of supplement that lists these countries, there are plenty of free sites on the internet where you can find this information (this one for example). We spent a long time trimming our box down to its current size, and received plenty of complaints from users about the environmental wastefulness of the red box we used prior to that. So I think we'd have a hard time justifying the use of more paper in order to print up a list of country names :)
As for including some kind of supplement that lists these countries, there are plenty of free sites on the internet where you can find this information (this one for example). We spent a long time trimming our box down to its current size, and received plenty of complaints from users about the environmental wastefulness of the red box we used prior to that. So I think we'd have a hard time justifying the use of more paper in order to print up a list of country names :)
Aug 12, 2011 - 06:40 AM
Yeah, yeah, I totally understand. I also happen to be outside your major target customer population. FLUENZ is primarily for English speakers in English speaking countries, right? Eric, your explanation and the support from Karen and Charles ease my hurt somewhat, and supplements in the printed form would have crammed the neat red box which I myself really love. But I wouldn't have been hurt at all in the first place if Caroline had expressed some regret about not being able to spell out all the names of countries and nationalities. She DID mention OIF, but OIF doesn't include such far-east countries as Japan, China and "A little insignifiicant Asian country the name of which you haven't even heard of if you are not a wierd geography maniac", and she still mentioned Japan and China and.. not mine. well, I'm just being cross and maybe I'm jealous of them, I mean those guys from countries who won't buy FLUENZ anyway. She could have mentioned http://french.about.com/library/vocab... instead of OIF and I wouldn't have been writing this sullen comment on a Friday night :)