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Learning a New Language Using Open Source?
cmstar asks: "It's been several years since my High School Spanish courses and I'm finding myself quite a bit rusty. Add to that a new found desire to learn Japanese, and I find myself on a quest to find a good cheap set of language learning/teaching software. There are plenty of commercial packages available, but I'm poor. A quick check of Google and Sourceforge didn't produce any immediate results. I know speaking with a native is usually the best way to go about this, but with little time or money, and something portable that I could use at home and work, in my spare time, would be handy to freshen up on my skills and learn something new. Any suggestions?"
Anybody have an open source language translation engine? Wouldn't be too hard to recompile for a flashcard program for Pocket PC (or somebody other than me, for Palm) if it can readily be translated into C (or VB for PocketPC).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Do you want to learn Japanese, or do you want to understand anime without the subtitles? There's a pretty big difference here.
writing as an ESL teacher in japan, here's a general breakdown of how (INMHO, natürlich), to learn a language if you aren't going to pay a lot of money/take course/whatever....
the grammar/vocab/sylabaries/kanji can all be brute forced, that's not a problem (other than the obvious common learning problems, but we'll ignore these and assume you have the motivation and intelligence to brute force these)
the hard parts are pronounciation, listening comprehension, and cognitive/production skills. without a native speaker to practice with, its next to impossible. so, here are my techniques (with which i've been having some success with french and german recently (i decided not to bother learning japanese, i need only a very tiny little bit, even living in a fairly rural part of japan) )
also, note that my suggestions are based on the techniques we use at the english factory where i work
1. pronounciation-- use internet based streaming video or audio of news casts. news is good because even if you only understand 2% of the story, you can read about it your own language and that helps with knowing whats going on. do short 1-2 phrase listen and repeats with the clip, trying to get your speach to match that of the speaker, and if you can find bits that use the grammar or vocab you're brute forcing, all the better
2. listening comp-- same as above. pick a few vocab words or target structures, and just listen for those. as your vocab grows, it will help tremendously to get used to just identifying those words used in natural speach in a variety of contexts
3. cognitive/production skills-- after every lesson, the most important thing is to REACT to what you've just seen/heard/read about by saying whatever you possibly can, out loud, in whatever rudiments of the language you have. getting used to have to think in the language, and produce your own language will aid fluency and long-term learning
best of luck!
on another note, another poster menioned babelfish... its okay for one or two words at a go, but not for anything longer (and its japanese is really quite attrocious).... i use it to communicate with a friend in paris, but i always have to strugle through a lenghty reality check of what it gave me, and ive gotten in the habit of only giving it content one clause at a time (and thankfully french grammar is so close to english that i can get away with this, it won't work in japanese)