Tuesday, January 22, 2013

New Resource: QUICKBUILD (QB) Theocratic Phrase Books

An interesting new resource has recently become available: The QUICKBUILD (QB) theocratic phrase books. These files show equivalent phrases or expressions, not just individual words, in various languages, and they are organized by subject. Many languages are supported, including Mandarin.


Note: The listed folders are named according to the language you are starting from. E.g., if your mother tongue is English, it would be best for you to use the files in the ==ENG folder. However, since the files show equivalent phrases in different languages lined up next to each other, any of the files with Chinese content could be used to learn Chinese, although the files that have Chinese as the starting language just use characters with no Pinyin or other romanization. (In the filenames, CHI-py stands for Pinyin, CHI-s stands for Simplified Chinese characters, and CHI-t stands for Traditional Chinese characters.)


The development of the QUICKBUILD files was led by the same person who developed the well-known and well-regarded Mandarin Course from Budapest. (There is a folder at the QUICKBUILD site for Budapest course files as well.)


Translation work is ongoing, with help currently needed in the following languages: Romanian, Polish, Bulgarian, Yoruba, Swahili, and Lingala. If you would like to volunteer to help with the translating of the QB material, please send an email regarding that to budapestcourses@gmail.com.


UPDATE (2013-08-27): A short link is now available for the QUICKBUILD resources:

tiandi.info/qb