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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.
URL please?
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!
the slashdot editors can use the software to learn english?
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.
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make install -not war
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 ...
No, you just have to watch them along with studying. If you just spend 1/2 an hour a day 5 - 7 days per week, open-ended, working with the books, and watching Hindi movies after you build up some vocabulary, then you will start to enjoy them.
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. Officially, Hindi is its national language, but not all non-Hindi states (like Tamil Nadu) like that.
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?
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.
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.
Making the datafiles may be tedious, but that actually helps you learn. It's like taking notes in class. I rarely ever looked at my notes afterwards, but the the act of notetaking itself helped me internalize the information.
Sure, most language software is next-to-useless, but the market slants heavily towards very basic learners. So even if you have a good program, the material it covers is likely to be so basic as to make it ineffective at actually teaching the language.
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://www.newsinchinese.com
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.
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.
I really, really hate Slashdot sometimes.
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Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
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.
Just a bit of trivia, but Coptic, the liturgical language of the Coptic (Egyptian) Orthodox Church, is basically Ancient Egyptian written with Greek characters.
-daniel
http://www.wordchamp.com
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.
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
Stop with this damned "could care less" nonsense. Think about what that means!