Slashdot Mirror
The Web Way To Learn a Language
theodp writes "Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, you can now sit in your underwear in Omaha and learn French from a tutor in Paris. The NY Times has a round-up of ways to learn a language over the Web. 'We offer modern-day pen pals facilitated with voice over I.P.,' said Tom Adams, CEO of RosettaStone, whose learning options include RosettaStudio, a place where a user can talk to a native speaker via video chat. TellMeMore offers a speech recognition component that analyzes pronunciation, graphs your speech, and suggests how to perfect it. Free-as-in-beer offerings include BBC Languages, where you'll find varying levels of instruction for 36 languages, with features including audio and video playback and translation. Things have certainly come a long way since the PLATO Foreign Languages Project of the '70s."
I have found that two of the best free ways to learn a foreign language online is to listen to music in that language as well as watching stand up comedy in it.
The music gives you something catchy to repeat and will allow you to memorize certain words, common phrases, etc. while the comedy will give you more of an insight into the culture (and culturally applicable words) since most comedians criticize or magnify people's behavior, discuss current topics and issues and usually use good vocabulary.
Youtube can generally take care of those two.
If you can also find websites that cover a topic you're interested and have a background in (e.g. programming or math) in that language, it won't be as harsh of a transition as you'll know about the topic before hand or you'd be very interested in it which allow you to translate your knowledge in that domain, gaining you more vocabulary/grammar.
This obviously doesn't work across the board and you may need a book or some formal training for the basics to be able to distinguish between slang and proper use of the language. But if you're already on your way (and with the abundance of free online dictionaries) it can be a huge push forward.
IRC or other online chatting systems can also help validate what you have learned and help you improve your conversation skills.
If you can't mod them join them.
I found this for myself a few weeks ago, and have been slowly working on learning Scottish Gaelic.
It's a lot more fun than when I was forced to learn Spanish in high school.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
i think we all kno how the web way to learn languege turns out from lookin at how the young netizen ppl write n speak today lol its a desaster
I took a look at your friend's site, but didn't get too far with it. I'm afraid it's all Greek to me.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
I've also found it useful to change every interface that I use into the language that I'm learning. For instance, I've changed my PS3, iPod, and various websites into my desired language. For Asian languages it helps a lot with reading, and I've already increased my reading speed as a result. I would say it's a good supplement to a standard language course.
This is a great article for me. Thanks /.
I've been wanting to learn German language for reasons that will probably only seem important to me.
I talk to myself incessantly, yeah, I'm kinda mental. I want to do it in German to add to the confusion of others.
I really do get a strange feeling when Mexican folk switch from English to Espanol in my presence and would like to throw some German into the mix to let them see how it feels.
Lastly of course, I have a German \ Italian heritage and would someday like to travel to Germany and be understood. Italy too, but that is a different matter and some Italian could be easily deciphered by Mexicans. Right now German is on my mind, so first things first.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I took a look at your friend's site, but didn't get too far with it. I'm afraid it's all Greek to me.
Promote that man! And seriously, you can't possibly consider that someone can learn a language by simply "reading" in that language. It requires some sort of introduction, at least a transliteration of the characters from the Greek to Latin alphabet. All in all, staring at encrypted data for years wont get you any closer to decrypting it without some idea of how.
Disagree != mod troll.
HTTP 1.0 has almost nothing to do with voice (or video) over the Internet.
"Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, you can now sit in your underwear in Omaha and learn French from a tutor in Paris."
Um... I'm not sure how well this will work, I can't really stick my tongue in the monitor and since it's a touch screen I might accidentally tongue the close widget in the upper right corner of the screen. Not to mention the possible shock hazard, some how I feel like that kid that was dared to stick his tongue on the flag pole in winter.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
From my experience (I speak 5 languages, only one of which is my mother-tongue), past the very beginning, the best way to learn a language is to go live in a place where people speak it.
Second best is to go there on long (at least 1 month) vacations and try to speak the language all the time (the natives usually appreciate the effort).
Third best is to expose yourself to that language is a day-to-day spoken form. For example, watch non-dubbed TV and/or listen to radio in that language. (For a while, most of my English vocabulary was learned from Satellite TV)
Fourth best is reading books/newspapers in that language.
Both of the last two can be done using the Internet (using things like YouTube clips in different languages, foreign TV channels online, foreign newspapers and such).
Being taught a language is only really worth it when bootstraping your learning, after that being taught a language is highly inneficient simply because, unless you're doing a high intensity course (i.e. several hours a day, everyday for several weeks), in between lessons you forget most of the words you learned in each lesson. This was my experience when learning Dutch while living in Holland - the 1h-lessons twice a week were only really effective for the first 2 or 3 months: beyond that you really need to learn the language by speaking it in your day-to-day. (that said, Dutch is considered a difficult language, toch!!? ).
The good news is that once you learn a language from a given family it's a lot easier to learn other languages of the same family due to the similarities in the grammar, words and even whole expressions. I can now understand some German because of knowing Dutch.
1) Go to http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php and get the free classes you want.
2) Study words using a free software like http://ichi2.net/anki/
3) Try to live as much as possible in the language studied. Listen to music in that language, TV shows, movies, etc.
4) Make friends on a website like http://lang-8.com/ where the goal is learn new languages. If you want to learn French, French people will correct you and speak with you over Skype and you do the same by helping them learn English.
Have fun!
7 Years ago, I moved to France to work, not speaking a word of French, and I'm now a fluent speaker. The internet was instrumental in my learning French, but maybe not in the way you might expect...
First, I used the net to search for and buy a program called Linkwords (I don't think it exists anymore, it was a crappy VB program). The software sucked, but the principle worked. It was a sort of flash card system that had you using vivid imagery as a mental aid. My vocab hit around 2000 words in the first couple of weeks. It was useless for learning to speak French, but the perfect lifesaver for reading signs, product packaging, etc.
Then, I used P2P programs to find MP3s of Pimsleur French. For those not in the know, Pimsleur was a Harvard professor in the 60s who developed a system for learning languagues that mimics the way children learn. It's all about stimulating the memory at programmed intervals and it is one of the best ways to learn to SPEAK a language. (While there is writing materiel supplements, they're relatively minimal). These are quite expensive (you can spend up to $1000 for the complete set) because they work. You need to have about 1 hour a day to devote to it, and it must be somewhere you quiet that you can listen, and speak. (You need to hear yourself speaking for it to work).
Next came my traditional phase, where I spent a lot of time reading BDs (the French equivalent of Manga. BD is Bande Dessinee (accents ommitted) which means comic strip. There's a very large adult BD culture in France). From there I progressed to Harry Potter (which is a surprisingly difficult read in French, lots of flowery speech, wordplay, etc.).
After this, my French was halting, but I constantly tried, and was always asking the meaning of words from my colleagues.
Then I started watching more French TV. At the time, the number of shows that were subtitled was depressingly dismal as compare to the US (though it has gotten a bit better). Again, computers and the net to the rescue, because I was able to download DVDs (the whole multi-language, multi-subtitle feature is a godsend for language learning). What you might not realize is that a lot of understanding a foreign language is based on context. If you know it, it's much easier to guess what is being said. In a conversation, if you miss something, you can ask the other person to repeat. Watching TV or movies requires you to pay closer attention. You can rewind, but you can never get the speaker to express the same thing using other words, so you really have to understand whats being said.
Finally, thanks to the internet, I was able to find about speed dating events in my area where I met my wife. My wife speaks English (she's an English teacher) but her family doesn't, so that got me into social situations that required me to practice speaking.
Now, I had the benefit of immersion, but I think it's important to realize that the internet is not a magic bullet for learning a foreign language, no matter what companies that sell internet based language services say. That being said, however, if the internet makes learning materiels more readily available, as well as practice opportunities, I'm all for it..
"Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, you can now sit in your underwear in Omaha and learn French from a tutor in Paris."
this is disgusting. i'm not sure what "learn french" is slang for, but i have a clue since its done in your underwear "in omaha": obviously some variation on shibari japanese rope bondage. how puerile. and i don't think slashdot needs to be the place for yet more attention for that whore paris hilton, no matter that there is a tutor in her, or whatever is in her, has anything or anyone not been in her?
and i don't know who this Tim Berners-Lee fellow is but he's obviously some sort of pornography-addicted pervert. yet more proof the internet has been warped form the noble intentions of whoever started the internet. probably some nice science fellow working trying to better mankind with some sort of high minded science research, not this Tim Berners-Lee degenerate mentioned here
how can we stop this madness?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
> It requires some sort of introduction, at
> least a transliteration of the characters
> from the Greek to Latin alphabet.
For language learning, transliteration is usually a bad idea.
You may think, "I need this crutch", but what you actually need is to learn the native writing system of the language, and transliteration is a way of putting that off, which actually costs you time and effort. Transliteration almost invariably distorts the language in ways that make it harder to learn.
There are exceptions, but they mostly revolve around languages that have a shared heritage and are so phonetically similar that the fact that they have different writing systems in the first place is the result of some historical external, non-linguistic force (typically, politics). For example, transliterating Urdu into the Devanagari script doesn't distort the language very much. But this is the exception rather than the rule.
For instance, transliterating Greek into the Latin alphabet obscures the distinction between short and long vowels (particularly epsilon versus eta and omicron versus omega), which would make Greek morphology *really* confusing. Transliterating between writing systems that differ to a greater extent (such as attempting to represent freeform-syllable stress-timed English in one-consonant-per-syllable katakana) is worse.
Or did you mean, an explanation of what the different characters mean? That *is* quite helpful, perhaps essential. Definitely essential if you don't have direct access to native speakers.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.