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.
Forgot something (Score:3, Insightful)
URL please?
Re:Forgot something (Score:5, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language [wikipedia.org]
But as for the comparison and programs, you're on your own. This is Slashdot. "News for Nerds." Nerds are supposed to have all the answers, right?
Re:Forgot something (Score:2)
from the my-excuse-is-laziness dept.
Is that so? (Score:4, Insightful)
And not a single of them are accessible since there's not a single link to the comparison anywhere in the write-up.
Great job editors!
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:Is that so? (Score:2)
Akkadian language (Score:4, Informative)
maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:maybe (Score:2, Funny)
should be None of the programs compared is free
Re:maybe (Score:3, Funny)
I have no oranges.
I have one orange.
I have two oranges.
All your oranges are belong to us.
Re:maybe (Score:5, Funny)
No, no, all your orange are belong to us!
Take off every "S"! For great grammar!
Microsoft.com (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Microsoft.com (Score:2, Interesting)
Ahhahahahha.... Re:Microsoft.com (Score:5, Funny)
/me Wishes he could mod you up.
It's hillarious, words cannot describe the pain of laughter I recieve from seeing such a professionally made website describing "leet speak"... and being so incredibly serious about it.
Re:Microsoft.com (Score:3, Funny)
Pascal and Other Dead Languages I know (Score:5, Funny)
Dead Languages I was once fluent with:
Pascal
Paradox
DB-III
68000 Assembly
Countless Application specific scripting languages and APIs
Re:Pascal and Other Dead Languages I know (Score:2)
Watch pr0n in that language.. (Score:2)
Subtitles are your friends.
Re:Watch pr0n in that language.. (Score:2)
Illiteracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Hindi! (Score:2)
Anyway, let me get to my question. I want to learn Hindi, but what I've tried from Rosetta Stone to Pimsleur seems relatively weak. Well, the Pimsleur stuff is EXTREMLY good for a small introduction, but
Also watch Hindi Movies (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Also watch Hindi Movies (Score:2, Informative)
This is because the english subtitles that even allow me to enjoy the movie, in the slightest way, tend to me a terrible translation of the hindi. I end up half ignoring the hindi and just paying attention to the subtitles.
Perhaps, I'm watching these movies incorrectly?
Re:Also watch Hindi Movies (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't have the link for it, but the Indian Government's Central Hindi Directorate has a very good Hindi correspondence course. And a real human grades you, too!
The Indian government has a comprehensive program to practically make Hindi its national language. Offi
Re:Hindi! (Score:3, Informative)
points out my discusses (Score:2)
timothy what are you on?
free Hebrew learning (Score:2)
erm how useful.. (Score:2)
Re:erm how useful.. (Score:2)
I want to learn it to play various RPGs. I also hope to travel there in the future to see what it's really like to break the steriotypes you have brought up.
Learning German (Score:2)
Re:Learning German (Score:5, Informative)
I am moving to Germany in June for 2 years and started learning it using that. Let me impart a bit of advice to you, make sure you learn to listen and speak before you delve deep into grammar and vocab. I made the mistake with learning Japanese purely by book until I took a few classes at my college. Even though I lived there for 6 months, to this day I can still write/read Japanese with ease but I have trouble listening to it.
Re:Learning German (Score:2)
Re:Learning German (Score:2)
Re:Learning German (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/German [wikibooks.org]
Re:Learning German (Score:2)
This is true, but I don't really find a website subscription as fulfilling as say a college course. Ideally, I would like a course because of it's increased live interaction. There I'd be expected to have a live conversation and whatnot and websites just aren't up to that level I want.
The point? (Score:2)
Talk about a slow news day.
Best thing about learning a dead language? (Score:5, Funny)
"Why yes, I do know Akkadian. Listen to this: xlsdke didue sdkfjhds dudys dk,d! I just said may your ancestors live a thousand years, thus confusing your family reunions no end. Prove I didn't just say it."
Re:Best thing about learning a dead language? (Score:2)
Wow, that really sounds profound!
Re:Best thing about learning a dead language? (Score:2)
The original, nonsensical post (Score:3, Funny)
from the my-excuse-is-laziness dept.
UmmRa points out his discusses 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."
---
I think we've all been duped. This isn't a crappily edited post. It's actually an ironic post! Didn't you notice? It's from the my-excuse-is-laziness dept.!! What a clever joke! lol@our expense!!!
PS - "points out his discusses"!!!
Google is your Friend... (Score:3, Informative)
In conclusion, there's more than a few references for any language online, learn the basics, then start from the ground up in "Real Life"(tm). Like a kid that's learning his first tongue. Only other advice I can give is to learn the language on its own, use the basics of the language as a catapult to learn the rest with sites that use that actual language and if you don't know the meaning, use a dictionary (don't translate, just define). If you try to learn a language by becoming a walking babel-fish... you'll sound like it when having a conversation. And that ain't a good thing. You get the whole immigrant accent going on. My parents have that...
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
The pitfalls of learning Japanese from anime (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, yes, this is a very real danger. An acquaintance of mine once tried to show off his "Japanese skills" to me. As he started talking in the feminine mode, with plenty of the affected speech patterns so typical of ojou-san types in anime, it didn't take me long to divine the origins of his "skills". The clincher was his consistent use of the soft feminine wa to terminate sentences.
Learning by rote, i.e. parroting the phrases you hear in TV or films
Re:The pitfalls of learning Japanese from anime (Score:3, Insightful)
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 wi
Learn any foreign language in one word (Score:5, Informative)
Only if chatting is your goal (Score:3, Informative)
memaid (Score:2)
http://memaid.sourceforge.net/index.php [sourceforge.net]
Pauker is a java program:
http://pauker.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
I've tried sort of half-heartedly to get memaid to work, but I didn't have a lot of luck. I didn't push, though, and I didn't post any questions on the mail list.
Learning Chinese, software and resources... (Score:4, Informative)
WenLin chinese editor/dictionary environment: http://www.wenlin.com/
It's really helpful to paste some Chinese into the editor and be able to hover the mouse over words to get instant dictionary lookup.
Pleco Palm Chinese English dictionary:
http://pleco.com/oxford.html
Best thing to have on your palm/phone in China.
Flash Palm chinese flash cards:
http://www.andante.org/chinese_pilot.html
This is free and easy to use... Pleco software also has flashcards.
As for books: The old standard Practical Chinese Reader series is good, but I like the newer "Integrated Chinese" by Yao and it has CDs available with listening exercises.
Also, if you have a sat dish check out CCTV9 (now free on Dish network) for their 15 minute daily "Communicate in Chinese" show... I'm encoding these to MP4 and putting them on my Treo650...
Pat
Re:Learning Chinese, software and resources... (Score:5, Informative)
There's an open source project doing exactly this for the simplified character set at:
http://www.adsotrans.com
Neatest feature is the collaborative backend database, which is also open source and downloadable. The Beijing-based server is a bit slow for trans-Pacific, but there is a language learning news portal using it which loads much faster. I use it as my homepage:
http://www.newsinchinese.com
live languages (Score:3, Insightful)
To learn a live language, no amount of flash cards will teach you, you need live people and live conversation. Otherwise all you can do is read and write.
What? (Score:2)
Data files (Score:2)
Re:Data files (Score:3, Insightful)
What does it mean to "learn" a language? (Score:3, Insightful)
So when s/he talks about learning 3 dead languages, s/he learned to read 3 languages, probably also by learning some grammar.
When I talk about learning a language, I mean learning to speak in a language and being able to understand others speaking...put the two together and you're talking about a conversation. That's not something you learn from flashcard programs. The way you successfully learn languages, meaning speaking and aural comprehension, is by engaging in conversational practice after preparation and study with things like flashcards and audio materials, or computer programs.
And you do that by living in the country, taking a class, or both. There is a world of difference between studying dead languages and studying living languages.
Pimsleurs (Score:4, Informative)
I planned on just listening to the MP3's at my desk, but it was erie talking to my computer monitor and I could never find the time. So I've been burning them to CD to listen in my car. Definitely the way to spend a long drive.
WORDS (Score:2)
Hi, my name is ellem and I RTFA (Score:2)
Flash Cards Are The Best Way To Learn A Language.
and they're what? like
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: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
But interaction with natives gets pretty close (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
To be blunt, if your only tools are memorization and dictionaries, then you'll never reach real fluency. Languages are living things, and the only way to comprehend them is to talk with living people who use it.
Okay, maybe that's overstating it a little. But speaking with natives will help you much, much more than any amount of staring at dead trees or computer monitors. I spent my first year of Japanese study taking university classes and playing Japanese RPGs (with a dictionary at the ready, of course). Then, in my second year, my teacher introduced me to a native Japanese living in the area, with whom I practiced Japanese conversation once a week--later expanded to more people and more days. I don't think it's a coincidence that my Japanese skills skyrocketed during that second year.
One other thing I might point out is that you can't become fluent in a language as long as you're mentally translating back into English; you have to comprehend the language as-is. (How do you translate the distinction between the first-person pronouns "watakushi", "watashi", "boku", and "ore"? Short answer: you can't.) As long as you stick with reading materials, you'll always have the leeway to stop and think, so unless you have pretty strong willpower, you'll always be thinking in English. With conversation, however, you don't have that opportunity; you have to be able to think in the language to hold your own in a conversation--which in turn means that as your conversation skills improve, so does your overall fluency.
Pauker is a good flashcard program (Score:3, Insightful)
pop-up hints for learning Chinese/Japanese (Score:3, Informative)
Core word list (Score:3, Interesting)
Pauker (Score:4, Informative)
Pauker helps teach you the words and quiz you on them. I've found it to be the best open-source flash card program available.
Another similar program (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Super Memo scheduling (Score:4, Informative)
In learning languages, some things are just easy - for example words similar in the new language and in the language(s) you already know, and some things are plain hard, for example words that look/sound similar, but mean different things (like arena meaning sand in Spanish), or similar words with significantly different conotations (phrase verbs in English coming to mind here - make vs. make out).
In Super Memo (and I don't know about the other programs, but the article mentions the scheduling algorithm as one of the advantages of Super Memo) you'll be shown the easy stuff once a year and the hard stuff once a week, if necessary, and it's all on a personal basis, so hard stuff for me can be easy for somebody else and the program will reflect that.
My experience with Super Memo was a very positive one and it would have continued, had my Palm not broken. 8-)
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.
The one that works... (Score:3)
His dictum was to move to the country, and take a lover who spoke no English.
Obviously, it worked....
mark
Re:Egyptian? (Score:3, Informative)
Egyptians long ago gave up the Egyptian language [wikipedia.org] and started speaking Arabic.
Gave up? Nay, forced by Muslims (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying that Egyptians just decided to "give up" Coptic and start speaking Arabic is as offensive as saying that Native Americans "gave up" their lands and languages and "decided" to start speaking English.
For a history, see copts.net [copts.net].
Re:Gave up? Nay, forced by Muslims (Score:5, Informative)
Coptic isn't derived from hieroglyphics, but from the Greek alphabet. It has 24 letters from the Greek alphabet, 7 letters to represent sounds that Egyptian had but Greek did not, and one monogram.
However, Coptic is a written version of the Egyptian language, as are hieroglyphics, which might be what you are thinking of.
Re:Egyptian? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Egyptian? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not free? Not for me. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not free? Not for me. (Score:2)
BTM
Re:a little too bold isn't it? (Score:2)
Re:a little too bold isn't it? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:a little too bold isn't it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:why learn a dead language (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:why learn a dead language (Score:3, Informative)
Actually they don't carry over at all. The subject-object-verb structure is a Romance development which replaces the classical Latin complex inflection system in which word order is almost entirely irrelevant. Grammatically, the Romance languages and Latin couldn't be much further apart than they are.
Also, word recognition based on classi
Re:why learn a dead language (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, more often than not the problem is that the word has been relegated to some other form, or variations. E.g. "patria" means what? "country"? How are those connected? They're not. But try "patriot" and you'll see the connection.
I speak quite well Norwegian, English and German, and I can usually read most of a latin sent
Re:why learn a dead language (Score:2)
Latin's not dead; it's just Roman around.
Re:why learn a dead language (Score:3, Insightful)
That being said, some ways of doing things work. If you're still studying Mandarin, for instance, you might find the following site useful. Great for building up vocab, while the highlighting improves one's ability to rapidly parse Chinese text mentally:
http
Re:The first thing anyone needs to learn.... (Score:2)
For real, there's a HUGE difference between learning to communicate fluently in a foreign language (for example, a native English speaker learning Spanish) and perfecting one's mastery of a language's grammar and syntax (for example, learning the difference between adjectives and adverbs).
Your goals will decide which one (if either) you will study. Whether I s
Re:Life Experience (Score:2)
The summer of that year, I had the opportunity to spend two weeks in Spain with close friends, and by the end of our first day in Barcelona, I had learned more functional vocabulary than I had in those two years of studying. I was nervious at first--trying to follow those ridiculous scenarios in S
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 motiva
Re:Latin isn't dead either (Score:2)
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.
Re:Latin isn't dead either (Score:3, Informative)
While 'Legal Latin' is highly complex in its written form, it is however doubtful that the common populace spoke Latin with all its fine nuances in everyday life.
Re:Latin isn't dead either (Score:3, Informative)
Also, while you might be technically right about Romanian not being as close to Latin, I can read and UNDERSTAND Latin MUCH better than my Italian friends. I guess that just makes me smarter. Not!
Besides, if you can read Romanian, go here http://www.dr-savescu.com/carte/ [dr-savescu.com] and see that Latin was the language of the people living in what is now Romania and it was the Romans that "borro
Re:Latin isn't dead either (Score:3, Informative)
Romanian has 5 cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and vocative and their identification is much more clear in the text than you think (a subse
Re:Latin isn't dead either (Score:4, Informative)
A "real, live Romanian" is no doubt expert at speaking Romanian, but is not necessarily an authority of any sort on how closely Romanian resembles Latin. Furthermore, this sort of thing is a matter of national pride in some countries, which means that people believe all sorts of silly things. A majority of the Greeks that I have known were firmly convinced that ancient Greek was pronounced just like Modern Greek, in spite of the mass of evidence to the contrary, the fact that the language has obviously changed in other ways (which they know because they learn to read Ancient Greek in school), and the fact that every other language is known to change over time.
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:2, Informative)
Rosetta Stone is a little pricey, though: about $150 per course. It's worth it as far as I'm concerned if you're serious about learning the language.
Not very useful, except for absolute beginners (Score:4, Insightful)
And nothing beats really learning grammar. It's tedious, but just as there isn't a royal road to geometry, there isn't one for languages.
Re:Random Latin/English sentences (Score:3, Funny)