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Hands on With the PSP Talkman Translator
PSP News writes "Lik Sang has a review and hands on of Sonys new Talkman accessory for the PSP, which enables translation of 4 of the worlds most spoken languages. From the article: 'Traveling and meeting people from all around the globe sure is fun, but may have its drawbacks when you're not speaking the language. To ease this barrier, innovation comes via Sony which took ScanSoft's speech recognition software and created both an universal language interpreter and trainer for English and a couple of Asian languages: Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin) and Korean.'"
Sannolikt alla dessa icke språkkunniga folken som strövar över vidderna därute.
The top four are the following
1. Chinese* (937,132,000)
2. Spanish (332,000,000)
3. English (322,000,000)
4. Bengali (189,000,000)
I'm not going to stick a PSP in my ear! Have you seen the size of it? I'm sticking to my fish, proven technology.
Software solutions are great, but *be sure* to memorize (with your brain) "Where can I buy batteries?" in your target language...
If it has a phone line plug, maybe we can use it for calling tech support?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
English, Japanese, Chinese, that's ok, where is Korean one of the most spoken languages in the world?
I guess this isn't going to be as big a hit among the international business community as Sony might have hoped.
Yeah, doesn't look to stellar. Goes along with the "Wireless TV" thing for the PSP... Sort of a yawn.
That said, for the next generation of handhelds, I can see a huge opportunity for really great language learning games. Nintendo could probably pull it off. Imagine having to control a character through an adventure game by voice, where each level forces you to learn new vocabulary. ("Take the blue book" "push the button on the largest robot" "thinly slice the duck, and sautee it in a plum sauce until golden brown, then serve on the china with a floral pattern."
With a built-in dictionary, and lesson-tutor modes. Also, handwriting recognition with the touch screen. , to help you learn the alphabet of the language. Maybe FMV snippets, so you can see real dialogs with visual cues. Having interactivity could really improve the learning process, if it were done right. If you are pronouncing a vowell sound wrong, it could give you extra tutoring. Visual cues could help you understand a scene without having to resort to your native tongue as much as a pimsleur audio tape, improving your immersion. Seeing bad results of your commands could help you organise the difference between similar sounding words, which would be very abstract in a classrom, or with a text book. "Flip the cup." (character turns over soffee cup, dumping it on ground) "No, dammit, I meant SIP from the cup." (Helpful animation appears split screen showing both what the character needs to do, and the word that the player used, with text at the bottom stating the verb.) Obviously, you couldn't make it perfectly intelligent so that It would be able to make sense of every wrong statement, but you could get a lot of generic animations for verbs, and models for nouns which could be shown when the player fails to use the right word.
and a couple of Asian languages: Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin) and Korean
two make a couple
three make..mmm...err...more than a couple
Unless you are trying to say that Korea is a part of China or Japan!
--
Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why?'
I dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'
Sir George Bernard Shaw
I'm going to get one of these so I can go visit a cave and eat some butterflies.
But seriously: whom would you prefer to do business with - the guy who constantly tinkers with his PSP, or the other guy who actually bothered to learn your language?
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
do make the distinction that those numbers are only for native speakers.
those numbers for english don't even add up well when you consider that there are at least 4 english speaking countries I can think of, UK, US, Canada, and Australia. I believe there are three African countries that speak english nad then New Zealand but I'm not positive.
Those numbers ignore the millions of people in India nad China who learn english. In india, it is required to get into college(as they all are taught in english).
And how much Japanese or Korean do you know?
This stupid meme pisses me off to no end. I'm here in Japan and frankly the Japanese speak far better English than we (generally) do Japanese, and we're students learning Japanese. Yes, a lot of Japanese speak poor or no English, but very, very few Americans speak another language; further speak a non-Romance or Germanic language with any real skill. Yes, English study in high school is a joke. But on the whole, the Japanese are much better at speaking to foreigners than most American are.
And frankly, I have some rspect for the people who don't speak English. Unlike us South Asians who speak English as some post-Colonial hang up, they have their language and they use it.
Finally, it's damn hard to learn a language, especially when its so different from your native one. Japanese is not the hardest language to learn (out of what I've studied that distinction would either go to Chinese or Arabic). That some people can speak any English at all is amazing.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
The full scope and scale of this technology in the years to come. I'm a first year chinese student at Vassar College, with the full intention of becoming fluent - will learning a second language become useless and a waste of time when this technology improves to such a point that people will be able to speak quickly and naturally in their native tongue and have everyone else understand them with the help of a simple computer?
The day people will regret the Talkman existing is the day that someone takes it and attempt to translate anime with it.
Hell that might actually be pretty funny...
Given that anyone who learned the language wouldn't be interested in getting the translator software, I think a better question is:
Who would you prefer to do business with - the guy who constantly tinkers with his PSP and is making an effort to communicate, or the other guy who thinks you're mentally subnormal because you don't speak English?
Not quite.
Chinese is not Chinese. I worked at a company that employed several Chinese engineers. While they could all read the same newspaper, they couldn't all talk to each other. Those from the south (Hong Kong and surrounding area) couldn't understand those from the north.
Also, the population of Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada and the U.K. is > 322,000,000 and while you could subtract the minorities in the U.S. and Canada that don't speak English, you're still missing the 300,000,000+ in India who speak English. Throw in all the other places where English is known, to some usable degree, as a secondary language and you're probably looking at 750,000,000+ speakers.
It is also, along with Spanish and French, one of the most widely dispersed languages in the world. There may be a ton of Bengali speakers, but I'll be 95% of them are in the Bengal region of North-Eastern India and the surrounding area.
And then consider this is a Sony Japan product. Their market -- East Asia -- deals mostly in (surprise) East Asian languages and English.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Yeah, Chinese dialects are probably the world's most fragmented. While the written language is a standard, the spoken language is nuts. There are around 10,000 dialects in Chinese, and about 3 or 4 major dialects (mandarin, etc.).
English is becoming very popular in Asia just as a bridge language. Chinese may not be able to speak to Taiwanese or Hong Kong people, but if everyone knows a little English, they can get by (and do business with Europe, consequently).
Yeah, the different Chinese languages are "dialects" of each other like Spanish is a dialect of French. The only reason many Chinese like to call them "dialects" is the nationalist "One China" propaganda.
True, but you cannot extrapolate too much from your anecdote. Even by conservative estimates, the Mandarin dialect accounts for 800 million+ almost-native speakers. Your experience is colored by the fact that Cantonese is especially overrepresented in California. If you take a random Chinese person in China (or even Asia), there's a high probability that he or she understands Mandarin. It's true that the probability is much lower if you take a sample from the Chinese in the US, but there are over a billion Chinese in China and only a few million in the US. While there are indeed a lot of different and mutually incomprehensible (spoken) local variants of Chinese, in the larger scheme only two count: Mandarin and Cantonese.
Mandarin was the local dialect of the area around Beijing, and later adapted by the government as the official national language of China (both the People's Republic (PRC) and Taiwan). In absolute numbers, it is by far the most important. In the PRC, although most regions and provinces have their own dialect used in daily life, the language used on TV and school is Mandarin. This may sound like Mandarin is a second language to the local dialect for most Chinese, but it's more like a "second native" language, as 1) all courses starting from elementary school are completely in Mandarin regardless of the local dialect, and 2) the script is the same as the local dialect. Thus, the majority of Chinese from Taiwan or the PRC will speak Mandarin (in addition to their own local dialect).
Cantonese is the native dialect around Guangdong (Canton) and Hong Kong, in the south. It's less important then Mandarin, but overrepresented the West (especially California and in the UK). Its importance is due to two factors: 1) a large proportion of early Chinese emmigrants came from the Guangdong (so many later emmigrants even from other provinces learned it as it was the language of the established community) and 2) it's the native language of the economic powerhouse Hong Kong. Most younger people from HK speak Mandarin pretty decently nowadays, but not as well as those from the PRC, since (AFAIK) courses in HK schools are still taught in Cantonese, and Mandarin is indeed a second language. However, many older Chinese emmigrants in the US and their descendents only understand Cantonese.
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And how much Japanese or Korean do you know?
the concept of "engrish" isn't mocking non-native speaker's attempts to speak english, it's mocking the jaw-droppingly common practice of non-native-speaking *companies* thinking it's normal to have interns with no grasp whatsoever of the target language doing the translating for signs and boxes.
sure - my spanish is terrible - but when i'm preparing materials in spanish, i *ask a native speaker to proofread*
ergo: japanese =/= funny; engrish == funny.
> Chinese is not Chinese. I worked at a company that employed several Chinese
> engineers. While they could all read the same newspaper, they couldn't all talk
> to each other. Those from the south (Hong Kong and surrounding area) couldn't
> understand those from the north.
All people in China are taught Mandarin these days, even in the south (where a student will grow up learning both Cantonese and Mandarin now).
Many Cantonese speakers will pick up Mandarin. My fiancee moved from Hong Kong around 6th grade (pre-changeover so no Mandarin in school), and learned Mandarin in AMERICA, simply from talking with other Mandarin speakers. Pretty amazing, but it only took her a year or so, and she can converse fluently in Mandarin.
Hence a Mandarin translator is about all you need, insofar as the new generation of Chinese go, especially if you are dealing with mainland China. A Cantonese one would be nice, but you'll get much better coverage with Mandarin.
Well then, good news! It's a suppository.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I think the only way to really learn a foreign language is to get a lover who speaks that language.
Yeah, that's really useful advice to give on Slashdot, thanks....
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?