Sign up to lingo.com and call some Europeans?

by philg

Hmm.. it appears that for $25/month we Broadband Achievers can transfer an existing phone number to www.lingo.com, an Internet Protocol telephony service, and get unlimited calling domestically and to Western Europe.  Should we sign up and start calling random people in France, Spain, Germany, Italy to discuss the big issues?


[Would multi-lingual readers please fill up the comment section with French, Spanish, German, and Italian language translations of the following potentially useful phrase:  “Why can’t you speak English like an educated person?”]


Update:  I actually did try to sign up to Lingo immediately after posting this entry and 12 hours later.  Their server responded with “No backend server available for connection” and “A java.lang.IllegalArgumentException exception was thrown and not handled by any Page Flow.”  It seems as though Java, the SUV of programming tools, is not working out too well for these folks.  Let’s hope that the actual phone service was not built by the same programmers and/or that these folks don’t suffer the same fate as my students who were using Java.

32 thoughts on “Sign up to lingo.com and call some Europeans?”

  1. French: Pourquoi est-ce-que tu ne peux pas parler l’anglais comme une personne de bonne

  6. Dutch: Spreekt Nederlandsch, of sterft!

    Seriously, do you really think that’s going to help? Americans calling random Europeans for their views on “the big issues”? We’re getting ready to vote for the European Parliament here now. It seems at most 50% of the voters will actually show up. I mean, this is the one time that Europeans can show they really appreciate democracy, but they can’t be bothered. And you want their views on the “big issues”? If it affects their lifes directly and is costing them in one way or another, maybe, just maybe they will have a view, in all other cases, they’ll just regurgitate what has been fed to them…

  8. Concerning European Election near next Sunday, they estimate a participation below 20% in Great Britain.

  9. A small correction to JR’s Italian version:

    “Perché non sai parlare l’inglese come una persona colta?”

    Or a more liberal version:

    “Perché non sai parlare un inglese corretto?”

  10. Well, this comment form broke my accents: the above should read ” Perche’ ” with an acute accent on the final e.

  11. Russian: почему вы не говорте по-английски, как образованный человек?

  13. (In english since it didn’t appear to work) PresidentPicker, Russia is not part of the EU and Russian is not the official language of any member countries of the EU. So why did you include it?

  15. I love the inclusion of Russian, because I wonder how the uneducated lot of us is supposed to figure out how to pronounce that… Or could you copy and paste it into some application and it will speech-synth it over the IP-connection for you?

    On the other hand, having heard “ex-queue-say moi” in Paris and “pur fa-vo-ray” in Rome, I wonder if it matters at all 🙂

  16. As my cable carrier has started carrying phone options, the thing that most appeals to me is paying one fewer separate bill each month.

  17. Here’s the joual translation:

    “Pourquoi tu peux pas parler anglais comme du monde?”

    Some French speakers might like that a bit less, but what the hey. That’s how we speak in Quebec.

  18. “That’s how we speak in Quebec…” ouch. Why don’t you just say “we speak poorly”?

  21. JR: In college linguistics classes we were told that various sorts of New England American English were closer to 17th/18th century British English than present-day UK English. I love to spring this trivia on Brits who make snarky comments about U.S. English.

    But seriously, immigrant communities generally speak more conservative dialects than the home country.

  22. Neil: Did you happen to think of the fact that such a thing as “present-day UK English” does not exist. If there is one country in the world in which class differentiation and seperation is yielded via a quite significant diversity in pronunciation and intonation, it is England, or the UK respectively.

    The Brits who make snarky comments are, I guess, also the ones who usually make the very same comments on their fellow countrymen.

    The interesting point in all this?

    Well, it is only some three percent that speak (the) RP and these few claim that they are well suited to this behaviour as they usually have spent nice sums of money on learning to speak ‘properly’.

    And, to get back to the Phil’s appeal:

    German (sorry, Pierre) – “Weshalb k

  25. I ordered Lingo online on Tuesday. No problems with the site. The box arrived yesterday and so far it works great. I made several calls last night and the connected parties could tell no differences from a traditional phone line. I especially like the the fact that you can access your features online. Last night I played around with the imultaneous ring feature and when I called my “lingo phone” I had it ring all of my home phone and our 3 cell phones as well. It worked! The first one to answer the phone gets the call. the other phones simply stopped ringing. Pretty cool for single point of contact for $20

    Deg

  26. Philip, you seem to have very bad luck with consumer goods. Cell phones, ISDNs, Winnebagos, computers, Lingo…

  27. Deggan: Thanks for trying this out for us! Please keep us up to date with sound quality and reliability.

    Michael: You’ve fallen prey to the classic freshman error of “sample bias”. If you send a freshman to the airport to estimate how many people are on the average airplane they’ll interview a bunch of passengers fresh off flights and ask “how full was your flight.” They conclude that the average flight is very full indeed. The sample bias here is that a full airplane contains many more people than an empty airplane.

    So you look at a personal Web site full of sardonic writing. And there are some stories about consumer goods that have sucked. So you conclude that the average consumer good the publisher owns sucks. What you’ve overlooked is the sample bias. As a writer it is very tough to say something interesting about a product that works as advertised. I haven’t written about the 6-year-old HP Laserwriter on my desk or the Apple 23″ LCD monitor that I’m staring at right now. What could I say? “I plugged them in and they worked.” The desk is supported on some Steelcase filing cabinets, which are marvels of sturdiness and reliability. Would you like to read a 5-page article on how they’ve never failed? I own about 40 cameras and lenses, almost all of which have worked flawlessly. I have written reviews of some of this stuff on photo.net but only a sentence or two about reliability.

    Remember Tolstoy’s opening for Anna K: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

    This is why you don’t seem too many cheerful churchgoing nuclear families on Jerry Springer and this is why you won’t read a long article on how the cheap Motorola Tri-band GSM phone that I bought down in St. Martin is still chugging away after 1.5 years.

  28. Philip, I understand that. But I buy a lot of stuff and not too many things seem to have gone quite as wrong as they have for you. But you’re right, it’s a pretty skewed sample…So you like the Apple LCDs? Pricey but very good resolution. I have a friend who uses one Did you have to buy the adaptor? I know, way off topic, but you own this blog and you brought it up.

  29. oh and one other thing…you also are less of a coward / lazy ass than I am. You actually follow up with the companies, I often give up & end up farkakt. So it makes sense that your tales of getting f’d over would be longer & more detailed than mine.

  30. The Apple LCD? It is fine and didn’t cost any more than other 23″ displays at the time that I got it (maybe now there are some cheapo big LCDs). When used with a WinXP machine you need some little adaptor box that Apple sells and also you need some freeware software to adjust brightness/contrast because the display does not have these controls built in (or at least it didn’t when I bought mine). I actually don’t have this software and run mine at full brightness all the time.

    As for being lazy… I have my share of stuff that died. If I’m really frustrated with a product sometimes I’ll vent my frustration by writing an article or Weblog entry. Then it doesn’t bother me any more. So the Web site is like scream therapy 🙂

    But really if indeed I have more stories to tell than the average American it is because I’m a single guy with nothing better to do with his time and money than buy lots of gadgets. And being impatient I tend to be an early adopter. Version 1.0 often entails some pain and suffering.

Comments are closed.