The Canadian Language Portal says no to LingQ.

I recently posted about a new Canadian Government initiative called the Canadian Language Portal. The site is intended to help Canadians improve their language skills by making Canadians aware of the many resources available for language improvement. Their criteria included the following

• a wide range of resources, references and tools produced in Canada and made available on-line by federal, provincial and territorial organizations, educational institutions or the private sector;
• on-line data and resources in both official languages.

So, I emailed them to ask how LingQ could get mentioned. Here is their reply.

"Good morning,

Thank you for your interest in the Language Portal of Canada.

In the About the Portal section (http://www.noslangues-ourlanguages.gc.ca/prps-bt-eng.html), you will find the editorial guidelines :

• The Language Portal of Canada does not publish any content (an article or hyperlink) that promotes a particular product or service, in accordance with section 23 of the Communications Policy of the Government of Canada (http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=12316).

Have a good day."

Yet their site promotes lots of particular products and services, mostly those funded by government.

I am not surprised. I have gone back for clarification. I will keep you posted.

Comments

[NB]

The language portal seems such an old-style internet concept -- like something from the 1990s. In an era of mass-collaboration and social media, their site just seems so out of touch.

I'm guessing the Canadian Language Portal is going to become one of those many Canadian government sites that is never updated and eventually dies a slow, anonymous death.

The really sad thing is the amount of money and wasted effort on something that most Canadians will never access.

[chris/blindside70]

There are some things that reek government, your Canadian language portal is one of them... Good luck, but governments only tend to say they like new, different, and interesting ideas...

[John B.]

I checked out the website but not surprisingly, although I am very interested in languages and have a huge collection of books, software and links to really interesting websites, I could not find anything worth surfing through the many layers of the portal to keep my interest. I tried the termium but couldn't find a dictionary, I eventually did find a dictionary of some description but it gave me an error message when I tried to use it and when I went back to try and use it again, lo and behold, I couldn't find it anymore! And wow, I found out that the majority of people from Red Deer who could be bothered to respond to a survey about this, prefer to be called Red Deerians! I checked out a few other links that connected me to more boring pages but it was not really worth the 12 minutes it took me to figure out that this web site is a waste of time and not worth searching through further. I think I'll go back to the LingQ website see who's saying what on the forum, read and listen to some more French and maybe even make a few lingQs!! I might even learn some French from doing that, which I certainly won't from surfing around this latest éléphant blanc courtesy of Canadian taxpayer money!

[Scott Young]

Remember what country we're in, Steve.

I love Canada too, but these little side-projects our government likes to engage in are usually just a big waste of money. Both as a business owner and promoter of language learning, I wouldn't sweat it if Canada's gov-sponsored language learning website won't link to LingQ.

You don't need them.

-Scott

[Ilya L.]

Karl Marx could have classified the Canadian government bureaucracy as a privileged class of the exploiters.