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.

Comments

Re:why learn a dead language

[Qzukk]

Actually, learning Latin is a pretty good idea. It's a base for many European languages, and the subject object verb structure matches several more languages not based on it (and gets English speakers used to forming and reading sentences in this structure). Having a good Latin vocabulary will let people studying Spanish or French or Italian recognize words that used Latin roots, and the grammar concepts do carry over some.

There's no magic way to learn a language

[minairia]

I've spent the last three years teaching myself to read Japanese. I can now pick up a Japanese newspaper and just read 90% of the articles. Sadly, this isn't as good a way to pick up Japanese chicks as one might think. Instead of being the happy go-lucky fun-loving gaijin, you become just another crufty, bog-average business guy in a suit reading about the latest municipal garbage hauling scam in Osaka ...

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.

Re:There's no magic way to learn a language

[bratboy]

Having been through the process myself (four years of Japanese classes in college, one year of intensive study in Japan), I have definitely felt your pain. And no matter how great your classes, no matter how much you're immersed in the culture, the simple fact is that you have to spend hundreds of hours alone in a room pounding kanji. It's not sexy. It's not cool. But you have to do it if you want to get there.

Most language programs (whether Pimsleur, Living Language, Rosetta, whatever) focus more on the part that most (i.e., non-serious) students care about - fun little cultural exercises that teach you next to nothing. I wasn't able to find anything that really worked for me, so I ended up writing my own vocabulary drill website.

In the end, if you want to learn badly enough, you'll make it. And if you don't, you'll find something else that won't cause you as much heartbreak (French?).

All I can tell you is that it's worth it.

-daniel

Re:Latin isn't dead either

[belmolis]

Hardly. Romanian is by no means "almost exactly Latin". For example, Latin had seven cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, vocative, locative - the last residual) while Rumanian has only three, and only a subset of feminine nouns distinguish all three, and then only in the singular. Latin did not have articles. Rumanian has articles attached to the end of nouns. As far as vocabulary is concerned, if anything Rumanian words resemble their Latin ancestors less than in languages like Italian and Spanish. Look at the loss of vowels in final syllables as seen in Latin campus becoming Rumanian camp, where the vowel (in a different quality) is retained in Italian campo. Rumanian has also borrowed quite a few words from Slavic languages. Rumanian is conservative in some respects, in retaining more of the case system, for example, than other Romance languages, but overall it cannot be said to be consistently more conservative, and it certainly isn't almost the same as Latin.