Kawsay Vida: A Multimedia Quechua Course for Beginners and Beyond

Kawsay Vida is a course book and interactive multimedia program for the teaching and learning of the Quechua language from beginner to advanced levels. The course book is based on contemporary Bolivian Quechua, while the multimedia program contains a section on Bolivian Quechua (beginner to intermediate levels) and a section on southern Peruvian Quechua (advanced level). The book provides a practical introduction to spoken Quechua through the medium of English, while the multimedia program offers a choice of English or Spanish as the medium of instruction. The video clips introduce us to Quechua speakers in the valleys of Northern Potosí (Bolivia) and Cuzco (Peru), giving a sense of immediacy that the printed page cannot achieve, and highlighting the social and cultural settings in which the language is spoken. The multimedia program is available for both PC and Macintosh platforms.

The book contains twenty-two units of study. As students work through these, cross-references take them to relevant sections of the multimedia program. The Bolivian and Peruvian Quechua sections of the multimedia program are divided into thematically and grammatically ordered modules, which introduce users to different aspects of Andean life, while progressing language learning in a structured way. Users engage with the audio, video, and visual material contained in the program through a range of interactive exercises, which reinforce listening and comprehension skills. Once familiarity with the language is acquired, the multimedia program may be used independently from the book.