Slashdot Mirror
Learning a Language in the Digital Age
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.
Egyptian is a dead language? Somebody should tell the Egyptians that...
URL please?
Man, the languages I picked up, I picked up because they were all free to learn. PHP especially has got to be the easiest USEFUL language for anyone to learn, given the great documentation, community, and the fact that the "compiler" and developing environments are free.
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."
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!
Wikipedia has a pretty good, though short, article on the Akkadian language.
when there are so many people to meet who are alive?
the slashdot editors can use the software to learn english?
Learn 313375P34K
Yeah... links are a beautiful thing in contect-based stories.
Dead Languages I was once fluent with:
Pascal
Paradox
DB-III
68000 Assembly
Countless Application specific scripting languages and APIs
more entertaining than badly written software, anyway.
Subtitles are your friends.
..don't panic
Considering the grammar and spelling travesties on Slashdot, not to mention the execrable comprehension of story headlines, summaries, and TFAs themselves, this pseudoliterate community is the last place to ask that question.
--
make install -not war
I wonder how many posts we'll have about the non-content of this article...
You are seriously full of s*** if you believe that you have learned anything in 6 years out of those 3 languages. I am not sure about the 3rd one but both Latin and Egyptian are quite hard to learn an people spend 6 years on each of them before they make bold claims like you. Plus most people DONOT use software for learning a foreign language because all the software is incompleate and has a lot to be desired in terms of teaching principles and the information provided. While all printed material has gone through an editor (or many of them) software usually gets audited for programming errors and very little for content errors (compared to the time spent on programing ones). So while software might be the best way to build up a momentum in learing a foreign language it is by no means the way to go once you have passed the first couple of months and gained that momentum. The local library is there for a reason, you know ...
Well, I've always wanted to question some of you technically knowledgable guys (pun possibly intended) about how you learn languages! Good thing I jumped on this topic early, or I would never have even had the chance of having this answers (thanks to a weird commenting system, but I'm not complaining.)
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 it isn't quite comprehensive enough to gain the understanding of the language you need.
Anyway, I can't seem to find any other good locations to learn this -- and I was hoping one of you might have the insight to answer this question. Gratzi!
Where are the links?
timothy what are you on?
If you're looking for a free and cross-platform way to learn modern or biblical Hebrew, check out FoundationStone: http://foundationstone.com.au/
I'm currently trying to learn Japanese and I really find it helpful that Slashdot has turned into a blog so I now know there are a few programs which will help me, but I don't know what they are..
I like muppets.
The first thing anyone needs to learn is English! Slashdot is a fine example, but let's not go into that. How many times in a day do you hear people saying "I did good...", or even worse "I ain't"? So, let's perhaps see an article on how the digital age is allowing people to re-learn English?
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
Well you couldn't have found it all THAT helpful, I mean the page hit counter is only at 5.
Romanian is almost exactly Latin.
Oh well, what the hell...
...and VB 6 makes four.
Along with your elementary Hindi readers and text books, watch Hindi movies! In Bollywood movies they speak excellent Hindi, and it generally isn't corrupted as it is spoken by people who natively speak Gujarati, Marathi or one of the other non-Hindi Indian languages. And you also get entertained.
What about rosseta stone software for learning a language. It says that is the method used by the diplomatic service in US. Maybe is not a panacea... maybe is just a survival kit... anyone here used this particular software?!?! a comment?! a review?! a rant!?
I'm trying to learn German. I decided to learn right after my schools add/drop date. Can anyone point me to a good web resource to learn? I found German for Travellers as a good resource, I learned how to pronounce the letters now but that's only the first step. To get to the advanced part of learning on the site, I'd need to subscribe for $16/year.
I learned French by banging a French girl.
Oh crap, I forgot that this is Slashdot.
Talk about a slow news day.
"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."
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"!!!
I learn't basic Japanese with this site. Enough to start reading online dictionaries and forums. Combined with countless hours of anime... ;-) I'm about ready for my trip to Japan next year to see how it all paid off.
:-\
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...
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
immersion
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
The editor added the note, so was it the editor that removed the link?!
or else!
If anyone has any knowledge of some Linux-compatible language learning software, please let me know. I have tried two different packages under Wine with no success. I don't have any dual-boot machines or even access to dual-boot machines. I have actually started writing some of my own software in Java because there's nothing else out there that I have found.
UmmRa points out his discusses of four flash-card programs for language learning, excerpting...
and no URL? WTF?
Sprite through the nose... ahaha...
:-D
/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.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
They get paid for this? Seriously?
Oh I see he tried to fix it. Well, at least he got two out of three. Third time's the charm? Too apathetic to care?
There's a linux program called memaid:
http://memaid.sourceforge.net/index.php
Pauker is a java program:
http://pauker.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.
I've been studying Chinese for a number of years and here are a few things I've found very useful:
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
As someone who's studied both dead languages (Latin and Old English) and one live one (French), I can safely say that learning a live language is NOTHING like learning a dead one.
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.
Coffee is my drug of choice.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
I use a program called flashkard for KDE, but my biggest gripe is not being able to find many prebuilt datasets. It can get tedious making thousands of your own ones. I'd buy well put together sets of datafiles, but not the programs to display them...
Well, I took the Central Hindi Directorate course, so that's why I recommend it. A couple of dictionaries would help too. Father Kamal Bulke's English to Hindi dictionary is good for contemporary Hindi. "A Practical Hindi English Dictionary" (Hindi to English) by Mahendra Chaturvedi is also very good.
Alternatively, you might want to try snooping around Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan for elementary school books on Hindi. (Again, I don't have a link but I suspect they have a huge website.)
Right now I'm working on learning Sanskrit, a not quite as dead language as some others mentioned here. (In India you can still get the evening news in Sansrkit over the radio.)
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.
Rosetta Stone is brilliant! I'm currently using it to learn French.
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.
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
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.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
For Latin, I find that words for Linux helps.
Shockwave Flash movies are the greatest thing to happen to non-sequitur humor since Japan.
It is very difficult to learn sounds that are fundamentally different from those you grew up with. My European students have little difficulty communicating in English. Many of my Chinese students have a really miserable time. They take all the ESL courses and they are still hopeless. They can't distinguish some of the sounds necessary to understand English. They have horrible accents because they can't tell what the sounds really are.
I have often thought it would be better to teach English pronounciation the way we teach deaf people to speak.
I've seen language courses that get you to repeat sounds but don't give you feedback that you are making the sounds right. If anyone can point me to a language program that really works in this regard, I'm all ears.
So in a nutshell what he's really saying is:
.00003USD for a million?
Flash Cards Are The Best Way To Learn A Language.
and they're what? like
This
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.
Windows and Mac flash-card programs are a bit inconvenient because they run on Windows and Mac machines--not exactly portable.
For about $100, you can get a Palm, and there are plenty of flash card and language learning programs for that.
However, I would also disagree with the statement that you shouldn't bother with CDs. In fact, in my experience, while you should do some reading, most of your time should be spent with tapes/CDs. If you don't focus on learning the spoken language before you attack the written language, you will likely end up with a horrendous accent.
Foreign language-only drill-tapes are the best ones, I find (like those from Barron's). If some company shipped them as MP3s, that would be even better, but converting them yourself isn't hard.
I've used Pauker in the past and found it to be a great flashcard program. Free, opensource, and runs anywhere you have java.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
And certainly without a time machine, learning classical languages (which is what the article is about) by immersion is not practical. Even for modern languages immersion isn't that helpful for learning to read serious literature in that language. Many languages have entire tenses that are rarely spoken but play a major role in the literary form of the language.
Pauker tries to match to memory models, so you first 'learn' cards for the short term memory cycle (i forget how long that is, no stupid pun meant here). And then you get quized on those words. Pauker follows some kind of exponential memory model, so as you successively get words right, the time before they expire again increases exponentially. For quizing, you can set it so you either type the back of the flashcard, or you acknowledge that you got the card right. You can decide which side of the card to test.
The good : Pauker can use Unicode, which is a must for basically any language besides English. I was one of the few in my spanish class that consistently got accents right (for some reason my teacher didn't count accents too much, go figure).
Using the exponential memory curve, you don't have to waste your time consistently quizing words you know well.
The bad : sometimes it's annoying to deal with the preset 'learning time' cycles for new cards. Pauker has a certain 'memory philosophy' built into it, so if you don't want to deal with that philosophy it can be a pain.
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Also he's a warmonger wingnut! That is all.
I blatantly plug POPjisyo all the time. It provides pop-up hints for reading Chinese and Japanese and allows you to play a simple matching game over the contents of sites you surf. So you can read something of interest to you and then practice with the same words.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
Rosetta Stone is very attractive to beginners because it seems so easy -- why learn grammar when you can just listen and click on the picture? Except for the problem that people are lazy. It is just too easy to cheat from context. For example, a typical question in Rosetta Stone is listening to a voice say "This is a red car" in a foreign language and then having you click the picture of the red car. But the other pictures may be of kittens, boats and frogs. If you know the word for "red" or "car" you can easily get the right answer without understanding the full sentence.
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.
That was brilliant. Thanks.
I hate that.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Some people like to learn by example and build grammar on later.... I'm not one of those. I like to have the syntax hammered out before I even learn a single word. (I am currently taking a course in linguistics so I've got a got good base for a base)I know it's not for anyone but thats what works for me. I was wondering if anyone could point out a good resource/series/collection/book etc for people like me. In particular I want to learn Welsh but I have interests in exotic and rare languages in general such as basque, manx, and native american languages.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Here's the story of how some dude learned French in a year.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
I would recommend Pauker -- it is probably the best free flashcard system around -- it keeps track of when you last answered a flashcard correctly, so that you don't fall into the trap of learning a series of words and then forgetting them afterwards.
Bah, the hell w/ programs, find some chick (right, right, "opposite sex") who speaks the language and start hitting on her. If that doesn't get you to learn the language incredibly quickly, then no software is going to help...
[o]_O
Check out http://www.perseus.tufts.edu for an excellent online resource for classical texts. They've also got the texts hyperlinked, so when you click on a particular word you can get a dictionary entry (case, etymology, parsing the verb.
It's a great tool for learning.
iFlash sound like a Pron website containing martigra /spring break/girls gone wild pictures?
Damn the man!
A core list of commonly used words is a useful thing to have for a new language. Most language courses seem to have around 2000 words that they focus on, although these lists are usually proprietary. The only public-domain list (in English) I could find is here that could be a starting point for anyone interested in assembling a list for their favorite language.
I remember how some dumbass reporter near ground-zero on 9/11 had found an Israeli chick nearby, and interviewed her live. He asked her what she thought about it all (Duh...!) and she said, with the usual Israeli better-than-you smirk, "Now you know how we feel".
See, because it's all about them. It's always about them. Israelis are the most culturally, intellectually, technologically, and morally superior people around: the rest of us are just cavemen scum, who should be mowing Israeli lawns, if we're lucky.
I'm trying to learn 2 different languages now without a teacher. it would be impossible without modern technology.
Here's what I do/did:
1. (Web technology)I scoured usenet and amazon.com reviews to see which books seemed to get the best reviews for my chosen languages.
2. (Digital media)I bought the tapes, cds and dvds that accompanied these books. I've found that it is impossible to learn a language efficiently without first knowing the aural components. The character sets and alphabets are usually a lot easier than learning to speak and understand the language. This is because the characters are well defined and you can always scan text at least once. Speech is fluid and is impossible to rewind during a real-time converstation. If you're looking to learn a modern language, don't forget the audio components(speaking and listening)!!!
3. (Rippers, encoders and converters)I converted the media into portable formats so that I can listen to the audio everywhere: in my car, on my pda or on my laptop. At work, I keep the audio going on a continous loop so I feel "immersed" in the language. So during an eight hour shift, I can get 8 "contact hours" of that language.
4. I buy dvds that are subtitled so I can synch up what I hear with I see. This is invaluable. Technology also exists to extract the subtitles so that you can study the text and maybe even translate it!!!!
5. (Streaming media) There are a ton of sites that stream audio. I've found a few that stream a country's parlimentary sessions! This is great for learning a language since the speakers are usually repetitive with some degree of formality.
For those of you learning French, france2, france3 and france5 stream multimedia. Also, the Canadian federal government and the Quebec province have tons of material available in French for downloading or streaming.
Needless to say, unless I was filthy rich and could travel to exotic locales, it would be impossible to learn these languages on my own. Now, I make enough progress to know that the problem is tractable. I'm a programmer so it made zero sense for me to sit in class and listen to a teacher explain grammar to me.
All this is possible with sunk costs for the books, accompanying media and the cost of broadband(which I pay for anyway)!
You can even find sites where people are willing to chat if you help them with English!!!
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.
The Korean language has some similarities to Latin, if you can believe it. First off, the most basic sentence structure is subject-object-verb, secondly, you know which word is the subject or object based on the suffix that the word has. eg, "The man talks to Sam." vs "Sam talks to the man." In English you keep the same word, and change the sentence order around. In Korean and Latin, theoretically the order could be kept the same, but the words "man" and "Sam" would have to be altered with different suffixes to show who's talking to whom.
After this the differences start to show up -- the Korean language is populated with many more suffixes than Latin and they're used used all over the place, also as clause endings or honorific indicators. That can be a pain, but at least in Korean you don't need to know thirty different forms (single/plural * gender (masculine/feminine/neutral) * five aspects of declension) of an adjective to use it correctly.
Does anybody know how to say "shit" in 5-6 languages?
Take your pick:
Swearsaurus
It's for Linux, I think it comes with Fedora Core. Helps you with Latin forms, as I recall.
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.
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...sex--the universal motivator. Nothing forces one to learn faster than the notion of being dumped by an intensely hot companion who can give sweet, sweet love (and lessons in German) all night long.*
not speaking from experience
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Dude, have you gone mad?
... you also have to decipher the language she's talking it in.
If you try to learn a language from a chick, not only would you have to decrypt chickspeak
That's waaay too difficult man. Not to mention you'll be misled about what the hell things mean.
As someone who has learned three dead languages in the past six years (Latin, Egyptian, and Akkadian)
Ok pal - where are they hiding the Stargate?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I like Farsi: "Eeshala tah akhareh ohmret geryeh bokoney" and "Man mishaasham rooyeh saret taa kaf koneh". ("I hope you cry for the rest of your life" and "I'll piss on your head until it foams", respectively.)
Reminds me of an old joke...
- What do you call a person who speaks three languages?
+ A trilingual person.
- What do you call a person who speaks two languages?
+ A bilingual person.
- What do you call a person who speaks one language?
+ An American.
I'm writing a Mono program that's imaginatively called gflashcards (screenshot). The webpage is pretty junky and the program isn't al that great right now, but I've been putting a lot of work into both and there'll probably be cool new versions of them in around a week.</plug>
If you want something a bit more complete right this instant, check out granule
It seems like a waste of a computer's potential to display random strings of text for a user. With modern development in language education, shouldn't computers be able to do something special? Something to take advantage of what they do well, rather than displaying black on white text.
I've been collecting Latin /. sigs (including the above) in my journal, along with my feeble attempts at translation.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
More dirty hippies. I've advocated exiling our misanthropes for a while. Europe seems hippie friendly and ours whine incessantly about how much they hate the US, so why not give them a free ride over there. They could finally get around to building that socialist, agrarian utopia they all want.
That is, if they're not too stoned."
Like people in the US don't get stoned? So does a socialist, agrarian utopia sound so bad then? I doubt he's ever been to Europe. And if he did, he spent the whole time moaning that the food/people were different.
Get your own free personal location tracker
For a real treat, check out the VOD course The Western Tradition. It is composed of 52 half-hour lessons that cover the ancient world through the age of technology. Prof. Eugen Weber is amazing!
Something I've been using recently is a Learn Japanese Game named Knuckles in China Land [ http://www.tbns.net/knuckles/ ]. It is a Final Fantasy style RPG that teaches Japanese or Indonesian while you play.
From the site:
"Knuckles in China Land is an RPG designed to make certain aspects of Japanese (and Indonesian) language-learning a bit more enjoyable.
Gameplay is similar to traditional console RPGs, with the exception of the battles. In these battles enemies take on the form of Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji or Japanese/Indonesian vocabulary."
From my experience this sort of thing is a lot better at keeping the user interested in language-learning than just using a flash-card program.
There is a great open source flashcard program called Pauker. I use it to learn German and like it quite a bit.
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.
I remember watching an old episode of Millionaire back when Regis Philbin was still the host on ABC, instead of Meredith Viera on the syndicated version. There was a contestant in the hot seat who said he worked for the military (I believe it was the Army), and he was a blonde, blue-eyed fellow who said he was a Farsi translator. So Regis asked him how he learned the language, and he talked about how they studied it for 8-9 hours a day for 4 years in a row. I've always been curious as to if that's all it would really take to fully learn a foreign language or two. Imagine if, instead of going to college for four years to get a degree in this or that, and having to take general requirements for a year out of those 4 that had nothing to do with your major - imagine if, instead of that, you could spend 4 years fully immersed in a language of your choice. It would be the only thing you'd have to study, but you'd have to do it all the time. And four years later, you'd be as fluent as a native speaker in whatever language you'd chosen. I wonder if that's how the CIA and NSA train their people.
My digital rights don't need management.
I started self-teaching myself Latin a few years ago (now abandoned.) As part of the process, I wrote a Perl program that could generate random sentences, each sentence in both English and Latin.
The state of the software is very crude, and I never got past present-active-indicative, but if anyone cares to pick it up, I can slap a GPL on it and toss it to them.
Here's some sample output. The sentences could be made a bit more sensible if more care was put into the word lists and sentence forms. (And yes, there are probably some errors in the Latin too.)
I love your greedy angers.
tuas iras avaras amo.
The gate sees the life's sons to the gate.
porta portae filios vitae videt.
I am a gate.
porta sum.
You give ancient sailors with a Roman field.
nautas antiquas agro Romano datis.
We satisfy my greedy male friend.
meam amicum avaram satiamus.
I am a poet.
poeta sum.
We save your Roman boy.
tuam puerum Romanam servamus.
You conserve ancient monies with a greedy number.
pecunias antiquas numero avaro conservatis.
You owe ancient fatherlands with a great boy.
patrias antiquas puero magno debetis.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
In the digital age you don't have to remember the syntax of each word. My invention LingoX handles this like IntelliSense in Visual Studio. Descrption.
Oh ok, shouldn't have said it then, my bad ;)
For those who prefer paper flashcards and know LaTeX, I would recommend the flashcards package. It will generate high-quality flashcards and is highly configurable, plus LaTeX usually has fonts installed to handle all kinds of languages. Typesetting foreign languages become even easier with the latex-unicode package. If you are in a university setting, you can make good money by drawing up flashcards for yourself and selling copies to your classmates.
I was a little surprised they didn't mention QuizCards , which seems at or above the level of those reviewed. It's open source, and written in Java using swing for the gui.
Everything will be taken away from you.
I'm learning Hindi, and I've found a few computer programs that work okay, but I rely on learning from books, watching Bollywood movies, and talking with my co-workers from India (those that do speak Hindi).
I think that the older methods work best, just because constant immersion and practice help you retain what you're learning.
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.
Unforutunately, I don't think a computer can ever beat a teacher (whether that's a peer teaching you or a classroom instructor). Language is a relationship between people and its almost impossible to pick that "one-sided" (tapes, even shows and things).
I'm a Japanese minor, speak Bengali and English at home, and while many of my friends have been native Japanese people who come over for college, I don't feel prepared for my study abroad over there next year. I know the experience however, will improve the naturalness of my speech.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
mmm the ancient language from the land of pedophilia
with esperanto, tedious side of language learning is reduced to a (nearly) minimum.
it is the 'open source' language
Offtopic, but I really find the passé simple (the narrative past tense that you likely encountered in Flaubert's work) incredibly beautiful.
It's true, though, that it is rarely (read: never) used in day to day speech.
If you read Molière, you'll find the various examples of past forms of the subjunctive mood. Not common today, to be certain -- but very pretty.
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.
Well I speak English, American, Southern Callifornian, Beach aka "Dude-ish", and various other vernaculars... dude!
The people at http://www.freelang.net/ make a free dictionary program that performs the flash card function it has word banks for quite a few languages. It's pretty (IMO) for a free program.
If you're going to be needlessly touchy about "offensive" words, then I should point out that it is "offensive" to say that Islam was "invented".
Would you use that term for Christianity, or would you use "revealed" or "introduced" or some other term that doesn't rudely imply that the religion in question is a human creation, and not the product of genuine divine inspiration.
People in glass houses, etc.
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
Well, here's a funny twist: I have a few Japanese video game books, and I wanted to know what they say. So what did I do? I could have paid out my ass and gone through the useless hassle of a language class, I could have read one of those "Teach Yourself Blah Blah Blah in 20 Days" books and still not gotten anywhere, or I could just decode it with an online dictionary and a program called JEDict for the Mac, which swiftly looks up Hiragana.
The best way of doing these things is to go straight to the point, which involves knowing what people are writing and saying, not setting in a classroom and shoveling out money.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
I have to plug my freeware (source code downloadable) flash card program, it offers yet another "smart learning system" to optimize study time.
e is the latest beta.
It also does pictures and sounds, Unicode, and compiles for Windows, GTK and MacOS X, and is quite popular on download.com.
http://www.wadeb.com/cuecard/beta/CueCardSetup.ex
Looking for Linux / Mac package maintainers btw.
-Wade
Why? It's not like it's an already existing expression that got mangled (see: 'could care less'), it's just a new expression that got invented at some time. Plenty of expressions don't make literal sense, so I don't see what there is to hate.
that's the best way to learn new languages I find.
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, is no substitute for actually sitting down and learning the language - in all its idiomatic splendor.
Of course, if you do know the language sufficiently well already, there's a lot of practical experience to be gained from anime - just be careful. When the subject comes up in conversation, I usually point out that you don't want to learn Japanese primarily from anime, any more than you want to learn English from Looney Tunes cartoons. In real life, nobody says "I thought I taw a puddy tat" - except as a joke, of course.
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
Vtrain runs perfectly in Wine, so even linux users can use it.
One frustrating thing is that it's got a huge amount of very bad documentation, both from its inventor and from various enthusiasts. I've had a hard time understanding a lot of its features (and it has a lot of features) because there's no clear description for most of them, despite massive efforts to write them. Supermemo seems to be based on that Asimov/MENSA mindset that says that you understand something if you can regurgitate lots of crap about it. I prefer the Richard Fenynman mindset which says that you understand something if you can explain it clearly.
All religion could be seen to be "invented" depending on your viewpoint.
Would that be the same "revealed" or "introduced" that the christian white man used to oust the native americans from their land. So yes *I* would use that term for Christianity
- gentle introduction
- several courses
- vocabulary drills
- user community
- chat, forums, message boxes
- exams
- music/songs in Esperanto
- and much more...
Furthermore, it is constantly in evolution. Going through the introduction just made me want to learn Esperanto. Gxis!In case someone is learning Arabic, I've written a little program that helps you conjugate the first stem of Arabic verbs. It's GPL so don't worry about me. Here you go: http://cocoa.sprachwerker.de/programme.php check out the fa.ala.zip.
I'm a die-hard fan of real flashcards.
.jar and upload the whole thing to the phone.
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.
Yeah it's proprietary but it really is the best way to talk to native speakers of whatever language it is you are studying. And if you are a native English speaker there are tons and tons of people who would love to improve their English.
This article was poorely researched and contains numerous inaccuracies. I was one of the first developers of FlashCards on the computer and have followed most of the suites out there - which are purely tailored to the actual needs of students, at best. VTrain And Supermemo have clumsy user interface and just imitated many of the already existing programs out there. Most importantly, they are WAY TOO expansive.
Yes, shameless plug time. I developed this program as a student and made it work best in a real environment. Check out Virtual FlashCards (http://www.virtualflashcards.com). We carry most of the features these other suites do, a much better statistics and study engine, plus a better UI and a much cheaper price. The program is Shareware but you can use it indefinitely. Unlike these other guys, it was made to primarily help people study - not make money.
Enjoy!
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-)
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
The object-subject-verb structure I prefer.
Good for you, cassidyc, but the question wasn't asked of "you"-in-general, but specifically of michaelmalak, the original (and obviously "un-geek-ly" religiously biased) poster - who used the term "invented" for Islam in the first place.
As a geek first and foremost, I abhor religious closedmindedness and double standards - and that post of his exhibited indications of both.
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
what are really good online dictionaries (comprehensive, good interface)?
German-English
* LEO, from TU Munich
Spanish-English, Italian-English, French-English
* Wordreference good Sp-E
Where is a good Spanish-only dic (comparable to dictionary.com for English)?
PS: Your Kharma does get worse/better posting as AC, since the admins know your login & you won't get mod points (sniff)
I like Vocabulary Wizard. It's one of the most popular teaching tool at download.com. It's an addware, but you can get rid of it easily. See the user comment. ;)
-Dan Q.
That's why... When Saudis attack, invade Iraq. Israelis didn't like Saddam, and they wanted someone else to pay for removing him.
I also enjoy learning languages, but the Flashcards I found the most useful are the traditional paper-based ones. I can take those with me and read while I'm in the subway, waiting on a line for something etc. I scripted a program to automatize a little the process, you can check it here.
I'm a big fan of the http://www.youknowthedrill.com/ online language flashcard application. Totally free, and there are flashcard sets for dozens of languages, or you can make your own.
So now that I know the words, some german grammar would be nice....
also sprach anonymous coward!
I should have also highlighted that the oppression continues to this day. See my blog story Egyptian pro-Christian pro-democracy activist sentenced to 7 years -- page 15 of Wash Post.
wanting to improve my german, i found some old used berltiz
:D
:-P
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
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.
Check out Pimsleur.
If you don't wanna drop several hundred dollars on each one, get them via Bittorrent on places like IsoHunt or Pirate Bay.
Lots of ones available for download here.
Does anyone have any advice, tips, tricks, or books/software recommendations specifically for a beginner trying to learn Russian?
Sir Richard Burton - NOT the actor, the one in the 1800s, who was there when they were digging up Troy, and Ur, and the other ancient, pre-Biblical cities of the Middle East, spoke something like 17 languages.
His dictum was to move to the country, and take a lover who spoke no English.
Obviously, it worked....
mark
This is obviously a Coptic slanted post that leaves a lot of context out intentionally to further the "Copts are persecuted" agenda.
First, Egypt was in decline for a long time. Egypt's last empire under the new Kingdom died more than a full millenium B.C. The priests took over and there was chaos and decay. During that time, most of the royal tombs were looted, either by priests recovering the riches of long gone by pharoahs to prepare the new ones, or by robbers looking for gold. Egypt came under successive rule from foreign powers, such as the Nubians, the Libyans, the Persians, and the Assyrians.
An interesting observation is that Egypt was never ruled by an Egyptian from the time of Nectanebo II, down to 1952 when Mohamed Naguib came to power! That is about 23 centuries or so!
Then after Alexander conquered Egypt, the era of Hellenism started, where Egypt was a Greek cultural center. Egypt saw a renaissance, but not an Egyptian one, but rather a Greek one. The cultural centers of old in the south never recovered their glory. The Egyptian language fell into disuse, apart from some priests and a dialect for the peasants.
When Christianity came to Egypt, Egypt was in decline, having came under the Roman rule, and later under Byzantium. Egyptians, like others in the area, never liked their Roman overlords. They loathed them.
Under Christianity, there was persecution against the pagans, such as the mob killing of the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, and the destruction of whatever remained from the Library of Alexandria.
There are many accounts in history that Egyptians invited Arabs to come to Egypt to overthrow the Byzantines. This was a recurring theme. Even for Iberia (Andalus) the same was true.
As for the loss of language, Arabs/Muslims never enforced Arabic on the population. The simple explanation is that Arabic, being a semitic language, was close to spoken Coptic, and other Semitic-derived languages. This is why areas where a semitic language was spoken (e.g. Nabatean, Syriac, Assyrian) were all easily supplanted by Arabic, while in areas where no semitic language was spoken (e.g. Persia) the native languages persisted.
Apart from brief bouts of oppression from cruel rulers (e.g. the mad Caliph, Al Hakim) which affected both Muslims and Copts alike, or periods of chaos (e.g. Napoleon's battles in Cairo), tolerance was the norm. The very existence of Copts in Egypt, Christians in Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon is proof that this is true. Unlike other places (e.g. Sicily, Spain, where Catholic Christianity exterminated Islam and Judaism systematically by expulsion, conversion, or genocide).
Muslims and Copts lived side by side for 14 century, and will continue to do so for a long time, despite the extremists on both sides.
Mike, please, for the sake of Egypt and Egyptians, please lose the "Copt-only" stance and unite your efforts with those working for change there. The problems there are common to all, and not specifically Copt. Mubarak and cronies have been detrimental to all, and not one faction or other. Let us all try to improve the situation for all, and not just one minority, playing to the West or whatever.
Three things for you:
Ha Ha Ha
I always laugh when someone says that have learned a language, specially if this language is dead.
A language can take a life to be mastered. Learning a couple of phrases or a few words do not count as finished learning a language.
BTW, learning is an unending process, how can you speak in the past!? You have not learned, you're still learning, always. If you want to show off a little, say "I have been studying for X years..."
You'll only be good in one language if:
- You can perfectly communicate personally or by letter with natives from that language;
- If you can perfectly read classic books from authors that used that language as first language, like Goethe for German, Camões for Portuguese, Cervantes for Spanish;
In the case of dead languages, well, you'll need to read perfectly some work in that language, like Commentarii de bello gallico from Julius Caesar.
Ha Ha Ha
For what is worth, I learned Esperanto almost wholly online, it was a few months of learning before I actually talked to someone else face to face. It was amazingly easy. Resources to do so abound. It was also a great mind exercise.
Well, so long as we're all giving our $0.02 here, I'd say "invented", "revealed", "introduced" are all three both offensive and, more importantly, INACCURATE words to describe the genesis of our so-called "modern", salvationist religions.
... :^D
Terms like "perpetrated" or "inflicted" or "committed" or even "wreaked upon" would be far preferable, if you ask me
No, you misunderstand. The bunny gets replicated *through* the virus. "Fixing" the bunny is of no use. This is completely asexual bunny reproduction. Merely being in the same room with a message that is infected with the virus puts you at risk for being infected, and for producing cute bunnies from unexpected places (which places we'll not discuss here) as a side effect.
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
....on Romulus, but not on Remus.
All he said was that he was teaching himself to read Japanese. He did not say anything about building speaking, listening, or writing skills (which are all somewhat different).
My other first post is car post.
Whilst a flashcard-based approach will work with vocabulary (I wrote a simple one many years ago for the Amiga when I was travelling to new places a lot) it won't help with grammar (you still need to learn the basics the old fashioned way) or pronunciation (you need to hear people talk for that).
So, assuming that you're not talking about dead languages and that you can't visit to immerse yourself in the culture, you're best off grabbing whatever text / spoken media you can find - and on the Internet, it's everywhere. Many countries have streamed radio of one sort or another - low, middle or highbrow, take your pick. In addition to language specific newsgroups the likes of Wikipedia support many, many, languages.
http://www.yleradio1.fi/zgo.php?z=2003121313168631 4670
Finnish radio
Anyway, the wikipedia article has almost nothing about language conflicts in India, so here's my supporting evidence:
As drafted, English ceased to exist as an official language (on par with Hindi) in 1965, after which it was intended to continue as an "associate additional official language" until such time that a duly appointed committee can decide on a full-scale transition to Hindi, based on a periodic review. However, due to protests from some states like Tamil Nadu where there is low Hindi penetration, the "twin language" system is still in vogue. Due to rapid industrialization, and a bustling multinational influence in the economy, English continues to be a popular and influential means of communication in the government and day-to-day business, and moves to replace it have effectively been shelved.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Oh, and congrats on the newspaper reading! People studying Romance languages have no idea of the difficulties involved with kanji.
All religions are invented IMHO.... Man still isnt evolved enough to understand the true concept of God, if he even truely exists. And do you really think he wants to hear your whining?
Sigs are for wimps
I use a free software program called VocabWorks to use KoineGreek, but it also includes modules for several other dead languages and users can create new modules. The website is http://www.aireville.fsnet.co.uk/vocabworks/
- http://www.davemackey.net/ - http://www.daveenjoys.com/