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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?"
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
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
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.
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.