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Foreign Language Education Software For Linux?
torinth asks: "Once upon a time, long, long, ago, I took some French classes in high school. I had to drop them, eventually, to provide more time for silly engineering courses, but now I want to get to back to learning the language a bit. Obviously, the best approach is to move up to Montreal or Paris for a bit and learn through immersion, but I really wouldn't mind getting a refresher first. There's a lot of Windows software for learning languages, but I just nuked my Windows partition, so now I'm wondering: Do any language educational programs exist for Linux?"
My friend from the Georgian Republic (former Soviet republic) used Dragon's speech recognition system when learning English. He practiced English sentences until the engine was able to recognize them. This might be a good way to practice pronounciation because it helps unbias your accent. You speak a clear and in some sense 'pure' form of the language. There was quite a bit of mention on Slashdot about open source speech recognition engines.
I know that I learned a lot about Portuguese grammar when I was trying to learn by talking to people from Brazil who were learning English. They would directly translate into English, so I would get a good idea of how to construct Portuguese sentences (eg: For to go there. The Maurio is arrived.) by observing interesting constructions in English. Maybe using Babelfish or something on the language of your choice would help you in this respect.
"Politics is for the moment, an equation lasts eternity" -A. Einstein
French is French. I live in Montreal, I'm Anglophone & my sweetheart is Francophone. We deal all of the time with folks from other parts of the world and yes, they're understandable. Some of the folks from Gaspasia are a bit difficult but it's all French.
The French here is different then that spoken in Pais, as that differs from that spoken in Tolouse, Martinique, etc. Is any one of them "right"? Well Parisian French is generally considered (mostly by Parisians) to be the goal but that's about as realistic as BBC Received English being a big deal to most English speakers.
The same as English varies from that garble spoken by Scots to the record-played-at-half-speed of the deep US South to the twisty pronunciations by folks from India French varies and learning any of them, particularly for the extrememly isolated/insulated US population is always a good thing.
By the way, all written French is identical.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I'm not supposed to say a lot right now, but rest assured that things like this are coming and I'm trying to use GNU code. Also, my undergrad work was a BA in la litterature francaise, so I'm really looking to bend this towards teaching anglophones French.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Well the question really is, are there more english speakers (not just native speakers) in the world than chinese speakers? I think if you cruise around Asia you will find that chinese is a damn good language to know and if, as you say, english is spoken widely all through Europe then I guess I've got it covered cause I already speak english! So really, about the only other language that I should wish to learn based on this popularity thing is spanish. Personally I'd like to learn german because the german language is everywhere in our society. You can watch popular movies and hear german, but for similar reasons it makes sense to learn chinese, so I dont have to read the subtitles on Jacky Chan flicks.
Oh, and here I was thinking I could get through a single day of posting on slashdot without having someone insult me. Check your attitude dude and try to show some repect for your fellow man.
How we know is more important than what we know.
When I was teaching English over in Japan, I visited more than one school which had invested in fancy, expensive language teaching technology. The students' desks had headphones and microphones and lots of buttons to push. The other teachers and I shook our heads. It's expensive, it's technological, so it must be good.
As for me, give me a blackboard and chalk, a decent textbook, and an ample xerox allocation, and I'll do just fine; that's what I need to do the best job I can. I don't think having computers in my classroom improves the class, except perhaps in a writing class where a word processor comes in handy. (Maybe I should add that it's not that I dislike computers in general; I've worked as a programmer and have been a hacker from way back. I've just come to the conclusion that computers aren't the right solution in this case.)
Don't forget to tell CNN that your home page is for France, tell your Netscape browser that French is your preferred language, tell Google to use French, tell your web mailer to use French...
There's always been lots of communication between Cajun, it's parent Acadian, and with Quebecois and French-from-France. There was never any revelation that Acadian or it's derivitive Cajun were related to a dialect spoken historically in certain parts of France. Families retained ties, histories are well documented and of course there was always commercial & social interaction.
By the way the same is true for English spoken in certain parts of the Canadian Maritimes. It's remains the closest to that spoken in parts of the UK in Shakespeare's time and there's been a great deal of study done to understand vowel-shifts etc. from historical times to present; much of it towards identifying exactly how Shakespear expected his iambic pentameter to sound.
- Michael, who enjoys watching his Acadian friends and his Quebecois friends try and figure out exactly what belongs in a torttierre.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Secondly clearly you've never been to N. Africa, the Caribbean, Polynesia, etc. Indeed apparently you've never been outside Paris. French is spoken in all of these places and it's not your ideal-French either. Try Corsica sometime if you want 'different' French in France. Heck, even in Paris one finds a wide variety of French and again it's not all your dream-textbook French.
As I tried to make clear there's as much variation in French as there is in English. The same as da boyz in da 'hood may use their own talk the fine folks in Gaspasia have Joile (sp?)
French is a living language and contrary to the ideals of apparatchiks like Language Ministers (and apparently yourself) it's complicated, varied, and vibrant.
Yes learning French in Montreal would leave someone with an accent that would make a Parisian cry (generally considered a good thing in most parts of the world outside Paris.) However it would no less be French and would no less be useful.
I presume you speak English (as I know you write in it.) Is your accent the ideal you hold up? Would your voice be heard on a 1950's BBC World Service broadcast? Are your vowels properly rounded, your elocution studied and pronounced, your spoken structure direct out of a 1920's Oxford guide?
If not then I think you have no point: you're debating class and culture not language.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Here's a handmade translation of this obviously babelfished piece of text
Glory to The Fish !You are a bit without value of droppings of babboon. Your ask the question of Slashdot was the bit of cut-downs the most without value on which I ever laid some eyes. If I meet you ever I will give a kick your donkey. No, draft who, I will rape your donkey. And you will appreciate it. Have a pleasant day.
Thomas Miconi
Of course not. In that case, there's be about 7 billion english speakers.
For that matter, just being born and rasied in the U.S. doesn't mean that someone can speak english. One of my students actually used "gonna" on a test last semester . . .
While more people speak Mandarain as a first language, more people speak English (including second & third languages) than any other language.
(OK, so those who speak it as a first language rarely speak a second, but that's another issue.)
hawk
I'm currently learning Vietnamese using Rosetta Stone, and find it to be absolutely first rate. It's implemented in Flash, I think, so getting it running under Linux might be possible. The system teaches you language behaviouristically: there's no grammar lessons or suchlike. You just get thrown right in at the deep end. You fire up the program and straight away you hear someone say something in the language you're trying to learn. You then have to click on the picture which corresponds to what they've said. After no time at all you'll realise you're learning words and grammar without knowing how you're doing it. Brilliant! And some lessons involve speech recognition: the system compares your intonation with an ideal sample and gives you a rating.
There's a Flash demo of the system online at http://www.trstone.com/ which allows you to select French or several other languages (lots of them, actually, including Swahili, Japanese, Arabic, Welsh, Hebrew, Latin, French, German and Italian). Trying the demo in your native language (such as US English) is fun!
I'm not sure whether it's possible to get the online demo running under Linux. I'm convinced, however, that a Linux version would be feasible, and that the immersive learning system is the best way to learn a second language. Sometimes (quite often, actually) the simplest ideas are the best.
Oh, I should say that one drawback with the software is that it's expensive. But no more expensive than a year of lessons would be, and more effective in my opinion.
Yes, you can run WINE without a Windows installation -- though reliability sometimes suffers without the native DLLs to fall back on. As for installing new software, just run the installers -- WINE has supported most installers for (around) the last 4-6 months.
A quick search for "language teaching" revealed: LingoTeach.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Do I lack the ability to perform even the most basic research on my own?
Tommorrow's 'Ask Slashdot':
Will someone please help me answer this C++ programming class assignment?
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Second I don't know what axe you're trying to grind but nowhere did I "hold it up and say it's more French than what they speak in France."
You keep setting up straw-men and then tearing them down. I'm sure it's entertaining but aside from any masturbatory joy you're getting out of this it's a poor form of rhetoric and in this case neither impressive or useful.
I'd also recommend you stop trying to imply these straw-men are from anyone other then from yourself and strive for a bit of intellectual honesty.
I did point out that even in France, and indeed in Paris folks don't live in the linguistic purity you seem to be obsessing about. You can go from there wherever you want but please don't credit me for your words or ideas.
Finally, as I noted before you're debating class & culture and apparently now aesthetics. Aside from my own feeling that's a particularly pointless effort it's also not one I give a damn about. You're welcome to your ivory tower, I've more interesting things to do with folks both more entertaining and more honest.
Cheers.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
ok. I asked this question to someone I knew who was doing research into speech recognision of Cantonese. Apparently Cantonese is very easy for a computer to recognise - much more so than english -- and see that it is the most popular language in the world, I wouldn't mind learning it. So my question to this person was: If they computer can recognise speech then couldn't I learn to speak Cantonese with a text only Cantonese -> English translator? So imagine the process goes like this: The computer plays a sample in Cantonese. I grunt at the screen and the computer tries to recognise what I am saying. Whatever the hell it gets, it translates to english and displays back to me, along with an original (manual) translation of the original sample. I listen to the sample again and repeat and repeat until the computer can understand what I am saying. So now, the real question is, if the computer can understand what I am saying, will native speakers of Cantonese understand what I am saying? or will I just find all the bugs in the speech recognision software and the Cantonese -> English translator?
How we know is more important than what we know.
English is the one of the best speaked langs
I would like to use that line as my next Slashdot signature. Would you object?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
At least not as far as I know. I work for a language learning company and by and large there's not a huge market at all for language software, let alone under specific OS'. We've done primarily Win32 and Mac stuff, but I'd say the two biggest reasons are (1) by and large linux doesn't have a strong enough place in the "common household" (our biggest market) and (2) if under linux it would generally be understood that the company would make little money for the work, which just doesn't fly, simply because of the sheer size of the undertaking (you go ahead and master different discs of English speakers learning French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, Chinese, Russian. Making *one* distro would probably be more feasible, but a total of 13 separate discs for one product is a bit tougher) I guess the main thing would lead to cost, since every language tool we make (including machine translation) is made by us, we need to balance costs somehow, I'm assuming other companies are the same way.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
I love listening to Radio-Canada on the Internet ("Vous ecouteza la premiere chaine de Radio-Canada, en direct, sur Internet"). One of the better radio stations I've found to listen to, here in Austin, TX.
And, aside from the occasional late-night student dj tossing around the odd English phraseology, it sounds pretty clean and pure to my Anglophone ears.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Until one day a French scholar happened by the University, happened to overhear a conversation, and excitedly demanded to know how they'd learned 17th century French dialect from the northern provinces so well (his specialty apparently was 17th century folk literature of that area).
Point being -- North American French is French. It's a dialect of French that once was spoken in France but has since largely died out there, and it's a dialect of French that has to a certain extent migrated in different directions due to being surrounded by English-speakers, but it's French. My father served on sub tenders during the Korean War, and whenever the ship needed somebody to talk with the French (they were poking around in Indochina at the time), they'd haul him off of his usual duties and put him to work as a translater. It was no more disconcerting than trying to put a Southern USA English type talking to a BBC London English type, where the USA type wonders why the other is talking about pretty girls, and the BBC type is wondering why the USA type is talking about using hand carts for transporting troops and supplies. (Sorry, "truck" vs. "lorrie").
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Tell Yahoo Auctions you are a French user,... wait, don't.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
The most popular language in the world is Chinese.
The second most popular language in the world is Spanish. English ranks in at number three and is hardly limited to "americian english".
How we know is more important than what we know.
http://www.ef.com is a very nice web-based learning site. So it would be OS independent. I know a few people that have used it, they say it is real easy to learn.
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I'm a karma whore, mod me up damn you!
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58.0% slashdot corrupt
Instead of using some commercial software and wasting your time, simply join a Linux development project headed by Frenchmen and learn by immersion on the email list :)
How about Correcteur 101
Correcteur 101 is a French grammar checker that provides a complete grammatical analysis of a sentence. It analyzes, explains, and corrects grammatical and spelling errors.
It's not a educational program, but it should be able to help you get on you way.
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Hey! It's simple! Just type a whole lot of phrases into Babelfish and read the results. What could go wrong? Soon, you'll be speaking like this:
Bonjour, monsieur! Je suis un nerd! Je voudrais savoir ou je pourrais trouver une connexion de reseau et un beaucoup rapides de cafe, s'il vous plait!*
It's that simple. Heck! Get a wireless connection, and you can par-lee-voo anywhere you want!
Vous êtes un morceau sans valeur de droppings de babboon. Votre posez la question de slashdot était le morceau d'abats le plus sans valeur sur lequel j'ai jamais étendu des yeux. Si je vous rencontre jamais je donnerai un coup de pied votre âne. Non, brouillon qui, je violera votre âne. Et vous l'apprécierez. Ayez un jour agréable.
--Shoeboy
Just badly worded. Questions like this often ferret out software authors that have been working on something, but were too shy to release until such a demand came along. Also, sometimes along the way people email one another within the discussion in order to collaborate and make such a piece of software possible.
Best to interpret the question as "I can't believe that this is all of the language software that exists for un*x! Anyone out there working on something?"
I gotta say, y'all complain too much.
Hey good point. And I think it is Mandarin over Cantonese that is number one.
How we know is more important than what we know.