Towse: views from the hill

Found a link to this site from someone I know who is working through the Japanese language course and thinks highly of the experience.

MIT OpenCourseWare is

a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.

Japanese, German, Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, French, tralala come under “Foreign Languages and Literatures” as do classes about cultures and texts written in those languages such as “A Passage to India: Introduction to Modern Indian Culture and Society,” “Twentieth and Twentyfirst-Century Spanish American Literature,” “East Asian Cultures: From Zen to Pop.”

The Chinese I class, f’rex, includes a downloadable textbook and other study materials. The course assumes you know absolutely NOTHING about the language.

The purpose of this course is to develop:

• Basic conversational abilities (pronunciation, fundamental grammatical patterns, common vocabulary, and standard usage)
• Basic reading and writing skills (in both the traditional character set and the simplified)
• An understanding of the language learning process so that you are able to continue studying effectively on your own.

Or you could take Introduction to Aerospace Engineering and Design, Computational Cognitive Science, Urban Design Politics, or Special Seminar in Applied Probability and Stochastic Processes.

The list of Readings for Bestsellers: Detective Fiction changes each time the class is given but the Fall 2006 session uses the following books:

• Doyle, Arthur Conan. Six Great Sherlock Holmes Stories. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1992. ISBN: 0468270556.
• Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1999. ISBN: 0679723420.
• Poe, Edgar Allen. Tales of Terror and Detection. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1995. ISBN: 0486287440.
• Cain, James M. The Postman Always Rings Twice. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989. ISBN: 0679723250.
• Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989. ISBN: 0679722645.
• Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. New York, NY: Berkley Publishing, 2004. ISBN: 0425200477.
• Weber, K. J. Five Minute Mysteries. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 1989. ISBN: 0894716905.
• Sobol, D. J. Two Minute Mysteries. New York, NY: Scholastic, 1991. ISBN: 0590447874.
• Browning, Robert. My Last Duchess and Other Poems. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1993. ISBN: 0486277836.
• Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1991. ISBN: 0486268772.

The world is my oyster and MIT Open Courseware is a pearl.