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.
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.
--
make install -not war
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.