Learning a Language in the Digital Age 450
UmmRa points out his discussion of four flash-card programs for language learning, excerpting "As someone who has learned three dead languages in the past six years (Latin, Egyptian, and Akkadian) I have had my share of experience with language software....If there is one thing I have learned from the experience, it is that no program is a panacea. Until we all have Matrix-esque jacks at the base of our skulls, learning a language will be a process that requires some amount of work and time. However that does not mean there isn't cheap (or free!) software out there to greatly simplify the process." None of the program compared are free (or Free), though two are shareware; two of them are for Windows only, one is Mac-only, and the other is "Java based, so it can operate on any platform." Update: 03/21 02:34 GMT by T : The actual link got dropped -- my fault -- in editing this post; now fixed.
Re:Is that so? (Score:3, Interesting)
True, the post would have been a lot more informative with some links.
I hate to point out the obvious, but if someone is genuinely curious, one of the best links is pretty simple: http://www.google.com [google.com].
For example, I am learning Spanish, and a LOT of resources can be found just by Googling Spanish [google.com].
Re:Microsoft.com (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:why learn a dead language (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:a little too bold isn't it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Life Experience (Score:3, Interesting)
I am in the process of learning Spanish now (one year of formal study and counting), and I have asked several people who are fluent in more than one language the best way to improve in a non-native language.
Surprisingly, the most common answer by far was "Get a girlfriend who speaks Spanish but little or no English." The rationale (which makes sense, when you think about it) is that I would be a lot more motivated to learn the other language if it's necessary to communicate with someone close to me.
I've observed this anecdotally. I have a buddy who married a girl from Chile. She speaks fluent Spanish and English, and was somewhat familiar with English before they got married. At this point, he knows very little Spanish.
They have a couple friend, a guy from New York and a girl from a Spanish-speaking country. He is fluent is Spanish and English, and was someone familiar with Spanish before they got married. At this point, she knows very little English.
We were all having dinner one night, and I commented on it. They all said the same thing: The person who is bilingual is generally the person who is more familiar with the other language to begin with. Once that person is bilingual, the other person gets lazy to the point of not really bothering.
I guess I need to find a girl who knows exactly as much English as I know Spanish.
Conoces a alguien?
Rosetta Stone (Score:2, Interesting)
The interface is intuitive - you don't need english explainations for everything, which is helpful because you don't need to switch between languages in your head while learning.
What really impressed me was that after 1-2 hours of completing the first course, I was *thinking* directly in french. Many other courses will teach you the language but you may end up thinking first in english and converting / translating it to yourself in your mind.
I'm well impressed and highly recommend it.
Re:why learn a dead language (Score:1, Interesting)
There's no magic way to learn a language (Score:5, Interesting)
How I did was brute force, using the Breen dictionary site and various on-line Japanese new sites. I'd find an article, and read it. Words I didn't know, I'd look up. Then I'd read another article and do the same thing. Over a year, I had built up a good vocabulary. I was working a Help Desk, so believe me, I had nothing but time to keep looking up the same word over and over until it stuck.
I wrote my own flashcard programs (one in JavaScript and one in VB) that brought in audio and pictures. Unfortunately, this method (for me) was not long term effective. I'd gain an extra 500 words of vocab that I'd loose just as fast. For me, only words that I saw all the time really stuck. Pictures, audio, etc., although nice, didn't seem to add much to my learning effort. Just straight and constant reading and watching TV and looking up words is what did it for me.
The hardest challenge is crossing the line to real fluency and reading novels. I can get through the newspaper fine but can't get past page one of a novel yet. The reason is all the words that every Japanese person knows that only show up rarely in written material (English is the same, how often do you say "ermine", "demarcation" or "orbital insertion" in conversation?). I've gone back to the flash cards for words of this type.
In short, there's no magic to learning a language. It is a grotty, tedious, intense and rather lonely project involving memorization, dictionaries and lots of time.
Re:Latin isn't dead either (Score:5, Interesting)
Hardly. Romanian is by no means "almost exactly Latin". For example, Latin had seven cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, vocative, locative - the last residual) while Rumanian has only three, and only a subset of feminine nouns distinguish all three, and then only in the singular. Latin did not have articles. Rumanian has articles attached to the end of nouns. As far as vocabulary is concerned, if anything Rumanian words resemble their Latin ancestors less than in languages like Italian and Spanish. Look at the loss of vowels in final syllables as seen in Latin campus becoming Rumanian camp, where the vowel (in a different quality) is retained in Italian campo. Rumanian has also borrowed quite a few words from Slavic languages. Rumanian is conservative in some respects, in retaining more of the case system, for example, than other Romance languages, but overall it cannot be said to be consistently more conservative, and it certainly isn't almost the same as Latin.
Core word list (Score:3, Interesting)
Movies w/ English Subtitles (Score:2, Interesting)
In the beginning, the language as actually spoken by a native speaker will occur so fast it's hard to catch it. And especially so in a movie where you cannot see the speaker's mouth clearly. But with the English subtitles it is amazing how many words you already knew in the sentence but just didn't catch.
The cool part about this is that your brain sort of already understands what's being spoken, because your eyes see the words. So you don't have the tendency to translate word by word, which you otherwise would (and most people advocate against word by word translations once you move beyond the elementary level). So at first you can focus on catching the primary words in the sentence to match up w/ the translation. And later on you can catch finer details of seeing conjugations and other tenses, etc.
One problem that would seem to be a hindrance is that very often the subtitles don't match exactly the audio, even for the same language. But sometimes this works to your benefit because even as a beginner you can often hear deviations that occur. But since you have the basic idea of the translation it makes it easier for your brain to pick out the deviations.
For example, while learning Spanish, I was watching some dumb movie with Spanish subtitles and English audio, and after a question with an obvious YES answer the guy replied "Is a frog's ass watertight?". But the translation was "Is the sky blue?". And you'll be amazed, even at an elementary level, when you can find even less subtle discrepencies between the translations.
Re:Google is your Friend... (Score:3, Interesting)
I heard a review of " Wrong About Japan" [amazon.com] on NPR a while back and the premise is pretty accurate. People from outside of Japan tend to put either too much meaning, the wrong meaning, or totally miss the meaning of many things that are basic in Japan. It isn't something you can prevent but you can be ready for it by keeping an open mind (which you most likely already have.) Just don't let your anime and web experience cloud your view.
I can't find the link but someone had a pretty accurate view of Japanese language students and the misconceptions or "reasons" they think they know Japan and its' culture (but are typically wrong.) The best bet is to accept you don't know and go with it...
Re:There's no magic way to learn a language (Score:4, Interesting)
Most language programs (whether Pimsleur, Living Language, Rosetta, whatever) focus more on the part that most (i.e., non-serious) students care about - fun little cultural exercises that teach you next to nothing. I wasn't able to find anything that really worked for me, so I ended up writing my own vocabulary drill website [wordchamp.com].
In the end, if you want to learn badly enough, you'll make it. And if you don't, you'll find something else that won't cause you as much heartbreak (French?).
All I can tell you is that it's worth it.
-daniel
Re:Latin isn't dead either (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW, the Romanian I referred to is an engineer and quite well educated and can speak several languages - including Latin. So, I tend to believe her statement that Romanian is almost exactly Latin.
Use real flashcards (Score:3, Interesting)
While working in Germany, I wrote my own simple Java flashcard program. I found there were many opportunities to study when I couldn't pull out my laptop (on the bus/train, while waiting for a friend, etc.).
I then wrote a program for J2ME, so I could quiz myself on my mobile. That worked better but it was a bit of a pain to deal with uploading new 'cards' (I'd have to modify a text file, put it in a
These days, I can almost always be found with the day's stack of 40 cards (10-15 new words and some 'problem words' from previous days). Writing new cards is easy (especially now that I've moved to Japanese) and dealing with subsets of cards is even easier.
The benefit of the computer approach is that I could create virtual flashcards: both programs would generate and translate random numbers/times/phrases.
digitize old berlitz tapes to mp3 (Score:3, Interesting)
tapes from 1958 containing six hours of graduated conversational
german - digitized these into mp3 files, and i just play them
on endless repeat on my ipod.
over the course of three months, for each itteration,
i find i keep filling in more and more of the words
as i keep coming back to the same parts on the tape.
i keep repeating until i catch every single word
without missing any - the more effort you put into
trying to say the words you hear also helps.
for reading - the best thing was peter hagboldt's [bsu.edu]
graduated german reader - they have stories with a
several hundred word vocabulary, and each chapter
adds in a dozen new key words, with definitions in
the footnotes for each new instance. the graduated
nature of these readers helps a lot, because it uses
a core grammar, and then introduces the new words
gradually as you're getting used to using the words
you already know. --if you can OCR, or find digitized
versions of one of his texts, you can download it
into a palm pilot, and practice reading with a text
editor.
there are no shortcuts to learning a language.
there is no technological solution. but using an ipod
with endless repeat on some good audio language content,
or using a palm pilot to read practice texts
can help facilitate the process.
the next step is to set my google news page to german...
hab ein guten tag!
john.
Re:The pitfalls of learning Japanese from anime (Score:3, Interesting)
No, we're talking about the terminal wa that attaches to copula desu, and specifically appears in feminine speech modes in hyojungo. Not standing alone, mind you, but attached to a number of other feminine speech patterns, this has a rather comical effect when uttered by a forty-year-old male.
I'm well aware that you can almost always find a dialect somewhere in Japan which contains a speech pattern which, when considered in the context of hyojungo, appears ridiculous - even though I am far from familiar with all of these dialects. I can usually tell the most well-known and distinctive dialects apart, though...
What about VocabWorks? (Score:2, Interesting)