A few days ago I blogged about a certain Professor Fish who argues that, for courses like literature, teachers should be free to pick the materials they deem appropriate, rather than needing to teach to some broad standard. He classified language as something with a specific body of knowledge to learn—and, accordingly, being exempt from his "free the teachers" rule—but I argued that languages are no different than literature in this regard. And, indeed, I said I'd take it one step farther: let's free the students, letting learners pick the material they wanted to learn.
Then today up pops this article on the New York Times, which takes my one further step of letting learners pick whatever they want in languages and applies it back to literature (with a blink-and-you'll-miss-it subtitle of "The Future of Reading").
After the jump, let's strike out references to literature and replace them with references to languages, just to see how well these arguments work in both realms.
The approach [Lorrie McNeill, a middle school teacher,] uses, in which students choose their own booksmaterials, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their readinglanguage learning, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature islanguages are taught in America’s schools. While there is no clear consensus among Englishforeign-language teachers, variations on the approach, known as readinglanguage workshop, are catching on.
In New York City many public and private elementary schools and some middle schools already employ versions of readinglanguage workshop. Starting this fall, the school district in Chappaqua, N.Y., is setting aside 40 minutes every other day for all sixth, seventh and eighth graders to read bookslearn from language materials of their own choosing.
I wish I had had this opportunity when I was learning languages back in high school.
[F]ans of the readinglanguage workshop say that assigning booksmaterials leaves many children bored or unable to understand the textsmaterials. Letting students choose their own booksmaterials, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of readinglanguage learning.
“I feel like almost every kid in my classroom is engaged in a novellanguage that they’re actually interacting with,” Ms. McNeill said, several months into her experiment. “Whereas when I do ‘To Kill a Mockingbird''Don Quixote', I know that I have some kids that just don’t get into it.”
. . .
Ms. McNeill … wondered if forcing some students through a booka foreign-language textbook had dampened their interest in readingforeign languages altogether.
. . .
“There is nothing that we are doing here that can’t be done in any public school,” [Nancie Atwell, the author of popular guidebooks that promote giving students widespread choice] said. “The question is, how do you tweak these hidebound traditions of the institutions?”
Ha! That last paragraph didn't need a single edit.
[G]iving children limited choices from a classroom collection of books on a topicmaterials on a langauge helped improve performance on standardized reading comprehensionforeign-language tests.
“The main thing is feeling in charge,” he said. Most experts say that teachers do not have to choose between one approach or the other and that they can incorporate the best of both methods: readingcovering some novelsmaterials as a group while also giving students opportunities to select their own booksmaterials.
But literacylanguage specialists also say that instilling a habit is as important as creating a shared canonlanguage base. “If what we’re trying to get to is, everybody has read ‘Ethan Frome’ and Henry James and Shakespearecan conjugate 500 verbs and knows the declension of 1000 nouns, then the challenge for the teacher is how do you make that stuff accessible and interesting enough that kids will stick with it,” said Catherine E. Snow, a professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. “But if the goal is, how do you make kids lifelong readerslanguage learners, then it seems to me that there’s a lot to be said for the choice approach. As adults, as good readerslanguage learners, we don’t all readget exposed to the same thing, and we revel in our idiosyncrasies as adult readerslanguage learners, so kids should have some of the same freedom.”
Now of course the facts I arbitrarily changed above may or may not be true (I'd bet that they are), but in any case the entire argument stands pretty darn well in the language-learning field as well.
Lang-8 is designed to help you get your writing corrected, but with a little help from a tool called Snapvine, you can also get your speech corrected.
How to do it, after the jump.
Read more...While using Lang-8 lately, I noticed that one of my Japanese-speaking correctors often submits posts in English where he additionally includes both the Japanese text and an audio recording of the Japanese. Now, him providing the Japanese is a boon for Japanese learners, but it quickly dawned on me that this could work in the other direction just as easily; Lang-8 users could critique audio recordings of learners' target language speech.
To provide these audio recordings, he used Snapvine, which allows you to record "audio blogs". Today, I put this idea to the test with the following two audio recordings, the first in Japanese and the second in Chinese:
Sure enough, I got back corrections for the audio recordings on Lang-8 just as I would for any written submission. And it's real easy to do. Here's how:
You'll need accounts on both Lang-8 and Snapvine, so go ahead and sign up for those.
Once you've done that, go to your homepage in Snapvine and click on "create new post".
Now you can record a message. By default, it selects your phone as the way to record, but click on the tab "Microphone" to use your computer's mic. Record away.
Add a title (and any of the other things that you care to add—you'll see what's there on the page) and press "Publish".
Click "Share" and copy the URL that you find under the text "Copy and paste this URL into an email or instant message".
Head on over to Lang-8 and click on "Write a new entry".
Now paste the URL that you copied over on Snapvine into your entry, add in any additional text you want (I've been putting in a little bit of an explanation), and submit it.
Await your corrections. They will arrive shortly!
Besides needing to jump through all the hoops noted above, I've got two major complaints about this set-up. First, unless the correctors on Lang-8 actually correct some text as well, you can't provide Lang-8's "thanks points" to them. Second, there's no quick way for them to provide you with a recording of their own (although the above process works for corrections as well as for submissions).
What would truly be spectacular is if Lang-8 would support this right out of the box. Doing it through a quick trip to Snapvine is OK, but the process could be made much more streamlined.
One more cool thing about Snapvine is the number of ways you can get audio recordings on there. One way is that you can call a number on your cellphone to leave recordings (and then add them to Lang-8 later). That of course is applicable to the iPhone as well, but with the iPhone you also can benefit from another of Snapvine's features: audio file uploading. By using the iPhone Voice Memo app whenever the mood hits you, you can record some foreign-language speech, upload it to Snapvine, and then make Lang-8 entries out of them to get your pronunciation, etc., corrected. Very sweet.
This lady reads Russian to me. There is some major heavenly body action going on in the sky behind her.
When I signed up for CorrectMyText, I must have said I was studying Russian, because here's the message I got from them today:
Вы получили сообщение от Катрина со следующим содержанием:
I studied a year of Russian back in high school, but the only word I could remember was the first one, вы, which means "you". A couple of free onlinedictionaries quickly got me this translation:
You have received a message from Katrina with the following contents:
Knowing what it meant was a good start, but I also wanted to hear what it sounded like; although I can read the letters, I have no idea how close my imagined pronunciation is with the actual pronunciation (ultimate result: not so close). Without a Russian speaker anywhere nearby, and without feeling like spending the time to find one online willing to humor me via Skype, I googled about for a text-to-speech solution online, and quickly found one.
The Russian sounded fine to me, but I really have no idea, so to see how good these voices were I checked out the English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, and I have to say they are pretty darn good. In addition to those langauges, French, German, Italian, and Korean are also available. They even come with computer-animated speakers, one of whom (one of which?) is pictured above. They are a wee bit creepy, especially when they're moving, but that doesn't take away from the pretty impressive text-to-speech.
Another very cool feature is that they change the color of the text next to the animated image as the text is being read—kind of like language-learning karaoke.
All in all, a pretty cool tool for when you need a sentence or two pronounced for you on the fly.
Apparently there's been a number of cases in the U.S. where this has been held, the most recent to get on the radar being in Mississippi. From Time:
[T]he state Department of Human Services (DHS)… ruled that Baltazar Cruz was an unfit mother in part because her lack of English "placed her unborn child in danger and will place the baby in danger in the future."
Wow. That's not too far away from sounding like an article on The Onion, but it is in fact real.
A quote by Mary Bauer, the legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which helps people like Baltazar, points out the ridiculousness of this rather nicely:
Bauer points out that children have been raised safely in the U.S. by non-English-speaking parents for well over a century. Had they not, thousands of Italians and Russians would have had to leave their kids with foster care on Ellis Island.
Indeed, such a rule would have resulted with my own father ending up in foster care.
Luckily these cases seem to alway get overturned and the children reunited with their parents, but to subject anyone to this in the first place is absurd.
Segundo as estatísticas de tráfego deste site, os meus visitantes do Brasil formam o segundo maior grupo—depois dele dos Estatos Unidos. Como um bom afinitrão quem sou (e modesto também, heim?), quero saber duas coisinhas:
Como é que vocês chegam neste site? Não conheço nenhuma ligação a este site dum site brasileiro. É tudo por Google?
O que é que vocês querem de mais neste site? Eu gostaria muito se ainda mais brasileiros viessem, e por isso dou pra vocês o que vocês querem!
The same is actually true of LingQ as well. I do think that if Livemocha and Lang-8 get Wikipedia pages, then there's no reason why LingQ shouldn't have one. However, let's let that one cool off for a little bit and focus on Steve's entry for now.
Here's how I started it:
Steve Kaufmann is a Canadian polyglot linguist, author, award-winning blogger and the founder of the language-learning website LingQ. He currently speaks twelve languages to varying degrees of fluency: Cantonese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
I modeled the text after Michel Thomas' Wikipedia entry. I made lots of citations, but as the article's not so long, I marked it as a stub in the hope that you guys would step in and expand it.
To keep this from getting deleted, remember to cite! cite! cite! Steve's book is up on the web completely for free, and it's full of good, citable information (Wikipedia loves citations to books). And feel free to dig up any information that might be floating around the internets, especially on official sounding stuff (wasn't there an NPR interview a while back?).
Also, Steve, you're not allowed to edit your own entry, so please don't! But if you've got links to media coverage, that'd be helpful. And, of course, if "anonymous" comes along and edits the entry, hey, who's the wiser?
Professor Fish found himself surprised that he was nodding along with many of the conclusions of this right-wing group.
I think they all missed the boat on language learning.
Read more...Here are Professor Fish's highlights from the report as they relate to language learning:
In [ACTA's report], the 100 colleges and universities are ranked on a scale from A to F based on whether students are required to take courses in seven key areas — composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics and natural or physical science.
OK, I'm with you this far on the language-learning bit; let's learn some foreign languages.
But ACTA falls into the water when they get to their scoring method:
Credit for requiring instruction in a foreign language will not be given for fewer than three semesters of study because it takes that long to acquire “competency at the intermediate level.”
Intermediate competency—as measured by U.S. colleges, no less—is utterly worthless. Applying the same standard elsewhere, why shouldn't college students only need intermediate competency in English as well? Because it's bloody damn stupid, that's why.
And here's where Professor Fish make his splash overboard:
The rationale behind these exclusions is compelling: mathematics, the natural sciences, foreign languages and composition are disciplines with a specific content and a repertoire of essential skills. Courses that center on another content and fail to provide concentrated training in those skills are really courses in another subject.
He's just off the wall with this one; in languages, you can focus on whatever content you feel like and it doesn't make a difference—as long as you're getting exposure to the target language.
You can tell when you are being taught a mathematical function or a scientific procedure or a foreign language or the uses of the subjunctive and when you are being taught something else.
He's right, here, but it's something of an unfortunate fact as far as language learning goes; that, in most language-learning programs, you can always tell that you're learning a language is something I'd identify as a problem, rather than merely stating it as a fact.
Here's how Professor Fish sums up ACTA's suggestions in respect of language learning:
With respect to … foreign language instruction …, ACTA is simply saying, Don’t slight the core of the discipline.
Uh, not really. With respect to foreign-language instruction, ACTA is saying "Let's do a half-assed job". In what other subject is it OK to aim at intermediate proficiency and have that scored as an A? I've give it a D, or maybe a C-.
Professor Fish's ultimate argument is that, in a course like literature, professors should be able to pick the material they think is relevant, rather than being forced to teach some set body of material. The same holds true for languages, but how many Spanish teachers feel compelled to throw in some Don Quijote somewhere along the line, and how many students don't care to bother with the Spanish of a few hundred years ago? (My hand is up.) Indeed, I'd take it one farther than Professor Fish; why should the teacher even be picking content for students in a language course at all? Let the students pick whatever content they want in the target language, and let the teacher help them find and comprehend it.
We are very happy to announce that our FREE language learning website www.hello-hello.com is available in Beta!!!!
The bold emphasis on "Beta" is in the original, and rightly so; I kicked the tires today and they are definitely still in beta.
Also, they're completely free for now, but they'll be doing the same freemium model that's on Livemocha or Busuu; a good chunk of the content is free, but to get the very best stuff you'll need to shell out a bit.
So go ahead and kick the tires for yourselves, tell them where the bugs are, and let us know what you think in the comments below!
While I'm on the topic of hidden little gems inside Mac OS X for language learning, did you know that Mac OS X comes with a built-in Japanese-English dictionary, Japanese-Japanese dictionary, and Japanese thesaurus? Yeah, I had no idea either, but it's handy to have around.
Where you can find them, after the jump.
Read more...If you weren't already clued in by the icon above, it's not particularly shocking where you'll find them—in Mac OS X's Dictionary app. But the Japanese dictionaries are not enabled by default, so you've gotta do that first. Here's how:
Open Dictionary.app.
Select Preferences from the Dictionary menu.
In the "Drag sources into the order you prefer" list, make sure Japanese, Japanese-English, and Japanese Synonyms are checked.
Close the preference pane.
Once you've done that, looking up a word is a piece of cake:
In the reference library row, click on the library in which you'd like to search (e.g., Japanese-English, Japanese, or Japanese Synonyms) or, if you'd like to search all of the libraries at the same time, click on "All".
Enter what you're looking for in the search field.
And your results appear below.
As far as how good the Japanese-English dictionary is compared to free online Japanese-English dictionaries, it's most comparable to Excite, Yahoo! Japan, and Infoseek; solid definitions, but example sentences and other features found in better online dictionaries comparatively lack. Still, as I always have my laptop with me, the dictionary comes in handy from time to time when I can't get online, so it's nice to know it's around.
Foreign students are always welcome in English-speaking business schools. Most programs love to accept diverse groups of applicants to simulate real-world scenarios in the classroom. To be considered for acceptance, however, you must be able to speak and write English relatively well. Fortunately, there are quite a few English-learning tools online that can help you brush up on your skills before you apply to your program of choice.
Five free tools that work particularly well for business school applicants, after the jump.
Read more...PhraseBase. Memorizing entire phrases is a good way for business school applicants to build vocabulary and gain an understanding of sentence structure and grammar at the same time. You can buy a phrasebook for this purpose or you can sign up for a free membership to PhraseBase. PhraseBase offers a free electronic phrasebook to its members. The phrasebook is customizable and can be accessed through a computer or mobile device.
VerbaLearn. In addition to learning new words and phrases, business school applicants should also regularly review the English words they already know. This can easily be done on VerbaLearn. VerbaLearn is a free web application that makes it easy for students to customize how and what they learn. The app offers many different tools for this purpose, including video flashcards, print flashcards, mp3 vocabulary lists, word usage reviews, fill-in-the-blank reviews, and crossword puzzles.
OWL. Getting a good score on the GMAT (Graduate Management Admissions Test) is a must—particularly for applicants who want to get accepted to a top business school program. To prepare for the GMAT, students should avoid getting bogged down with grammar study and instead focus on learning the most common grammar topics tested on the GMAT: verb usage, pronoun usage, and modifiers. Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) is the perfect place to learn about all three of these things.
ETS. Although some business schools are willing to waive TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) scores for certain students, most do not. This makes scoring well on the test very important. One of the best places to prep for the TOEFL is the ETS site. ETS develops, administers and scores the TOEFL. Applicants who visit the ETS site can get information on the test and receive official practice tests, sample questions, and sample writing topics.
AddLang. When it comes to English language learning, there is no real substitution for practice. Before applying to a business school, applicants should make an effort to practice their English every chance they get. This isn't always possible at home, which is why it makes sense to join a social language network like AddLang. AddLang allows users to practice English with native speakers and communicate online through Skype, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and AOL Messenger.
If you're running Mac OS X, you've already got a built-in way to look up Chinese and Japanese characters by their component pieces, i.e., their "radicals": it's known as the Character Palette. (It, by the way, also works for the Chinese characters that used to be used in Korean as well, if you're into that.)
How to use the Character Palette to look up characters by their radicals, after the jump.
Read more...The first thing you need to do is make sure you have the Character Palette enabled.
From the Apple menu, open System Preferences.
In the Personal section (the first row of preference panes), click on International.
Select the Input Menu tab.
Make sure Character Palette is checked.
At the bottom of the window, make sure "Show input menu in menu bar" is checked.
Incidentally, this is also where you can select the languages in which you want to be able to type; just check off the appropriate boxes below the horizontal dividing line in the list above.
Once you've set that up, you'll have a menu that you can get to from your menu bar that looks something like this:
And here's how you can then look up a Chinese or Japanese character by its radical:
From the input menu, select "Show Character Palette".
From the View pull-down menu at the top of the Character Palette, select Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, or Japanese, as appropriate.
Immediately below the pulldown menu, select the "by Radical" tab.
Immediately below that, select the appropriate radical in the left-hand pane.
Select the character you're looking for from the right-hand pane.
To see information on the character, such as the reading, click on the triangle icon next to "Character Info" until the triangle is pointing down and the character information is displayed.
To see how the character looks in a variety of fonts, click on the triangle icon next to "Font Variation" until the triangle is pointing down and the font variants are displayed.
Or, if you already happen to have the character on your computer and don't need to go the radical search route, just copy and paste the character into the search field at the bottom of the Character Palette, and all the rest'll pop right up for you.
And that's it. It's a simple, always-handy way to look up Chinese and Japanese characters on your Mac.
P.S. If there's an analog to this on Windows, let me know and I'll add it.
This article (via Aspiring Polyglot) tells us how the Cia-Cia, a minority ethnic group in Indonesia, have adopted Hangul to write their language down for the fist time.
The BBC, amongothers, are reporting that Shanghai is looking to get rid of its Chinglish (crappy English composed by native-Chinese speakers) that can be found on signs all over Shanghai (it incidentally can be found everywhere else in China too, but it seems that no one else in China has done enough lately to get the media in the U.K. to write about them).
The persistence of Chinglish has been a puzzle to me for years (and Japanglish, perhaps better known as Engrish, as well, but let's leave that for a later post). There are all sorts of native-English speakers floating around China (take a look at just about any college, and you'll probably find a bunch). Many of them would probably be happy to correct the English for free. Slap "internship" on this correcting role and they'll come in droves.
And, yet, Chinglish persists.
Now, however, you don't need to bother to seek out an in-situs native speaker because there's an even easier way to get native-level English on all the signs in China: the Chinese speakers tasked with making these signs can make use of websites where you can get your foreign-language writing corrected for free.
So, Shanghai (and the rest of China), if you're listening, save yourself a few bucks—and perhaps some embarrassment—and throw the text into one of these sites the next time you need a sign in English.
If Chinglish truly goes the way of the dodo (I have my doubts), we native-English speakers will of course miss its unintentional hilarity. So, in honor of the Chinglish we have grown to love, I give you even more Chinglish, after the jump, including photos of a masterpiece of a Chinglish sign that I took myself, plus links to much more (warning: involves an obscenity or two).
Read more...Let's kick it off with the Chinglish gems from articles mentioned above:
Please do not spilt everywhere ant litter up. The violators will be amerced with in range of 20 to 50 yuan.
Haven't you always wanted to be amerced?
Keep valuables snugly.
Hold them close to your heart and love them because—before you know it—they'll be gone.
Beware the people press close to you designedly.
Beware indeed... they might be looking to find a mate.
Please leave your values at the front desk.
I'm not so sure that this is a mistranslation at all, given those sketchy calls you can get at some hotels in China for "massage services".
Please bump your head carefully.
That's generally good advice that I wish my one-year-old son would follow.
If you are stolen, call the police at once.
Again, generally good advice. You wouldn't want to wait a week or two after you're stolen, would you?
Now let's move on to one of my favorites, this "Notice to Tourists" that was at Simatai, one of the common Great Wall destinations near Beijing, back in 2002. I took the below photo myself:
Here's the English-challenged text (the all-caps formatting is from the original):
NOTICE TO TOURISTS
PLEASE OBSERVE LANDSCAPE ORDER DON'T BLOCK THE ROAD AND EXIT BUY TICKET8 IN TURN AND ENTER THE LANDSCAPE AFTER THEY BE CHECKED PAY ATTENTION TO KEEP YOUR COUNTERFOLLS SO AS TO BE CHECKED AGAIN BY THE STAFF MEMBERS.
So, in other words, if you don't be holding counterfolls (wha...?), the staff gonna be up on your @$$.
PLEASE OBSERVE DISCIPLINE AND OBEY THE LAW DON'T SCUFFLE CREATE A DISTURBANCE DO SUPERSTITION AND OTHER UNLAWFUL ACTIVITIES.
It would seem that as long as you don't scuffle, create a disturbance, and do superstition and other unlawful activities, you're good to go. No need to check your voodoo doll at the gate.
PLEASE OBSERVE SOCIAL MORALITY RESPECT THE OLDERS TAKE GOOD CARE OF CHILDREN AND BE SELF POSSESSED PLEASE GO SIGHT SEEING AOLOROMA TO THE LANDSCAPE RULES.
I hope all you self-possessed men are ready to do some sight-seeing aoloroma (whatwhat?!)! Just make sure that, if you feel the need to mow the lawn, you follow the landscape rules.
KEEP YOUR OWN THINGS WELL IN ORDER TO AVOID LOSING THE- M DON'T SPIT AND LITTER.
Of course, you may spit or litter; it's the combination they frown upon. This loophole probably explains why China has been struggling with stamping out both of those bad habits.
PLEASE TAKE CARE OF CULTURAL RELICS PLAND WILD ANIMALS.
Because, you know, cultural relics will just fall right into your hands while you're walking around the Great Wall. Make sure you take care of planned wild animals as well, although with unplanned ones you can do as you will. I just don't want to be there when a panda pops up unplanned on tourists at Simatai...
DON'T ENTER NON-LANDSCAPE AREAS CARRY INFLAMMABLES AND O- THER DANGE ROUS ARTICLES THE LANDSCAPE IS FIRE PREVEN TION TO THE SAFE SIGNS AND FOLLOW THE STAFFS ARRANGE O- THER WISE YOU WILL ACCEPT THE CONSEQUENCES YOURSELF.
I'm glad they've got their priorities straight and made the landscape part of the fire prevention for the safe signs. Without those safe signs (which are presumably in Chinglish as well), I'm not sure what would come of Simatai.
SIMATAI GREAT WALL LANDSCAPE ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICE
And at least we know who to blame for this mess: the landscapers.
Sadly, this sign is likely long gone thanks to the 2008 Olympics. We'll miss it dearly.
If you're in for something a little less wordy (but a lot more vulgar), try this one on for size:
In lieu of "Fuck the fruit area", a much better translation of this would simply be "Dried fruit". The character 干 gān has the unfortunate distinction of meaning both "dry" and "to do" and, euphemistically, "to fuck". I didn't take this pic myself, and—given the incredibly convenient placement of "the"—I'm skeptical as to the reliability of this pic (Photoshopped, perhaps?). But, even if this is fake, it certainly could happen.
Finally, below I've added a bunch of Chinglish links for you, and please drop a line with you favorite Chinglish in the comments below!
When you're learning how to write in a language, there's nothing quite like getting your writing corrected. And when you're getting it corrected, there's nothing quite like getting it corrected totally for free. And when you're getting it corrected totally for free, there's nothing quite like getting it corrected for free and quickly.
Sound like something you'd be interested in? A comparison of the websites on which you can do just that, after the jump.
Read more...The first two sites below—Lang-8 and CorrectMyText—are focused primarily on textual corrections. The rest—Livemocha, Busuu, and LingQ—include textual corrections as one among many features.
One note before diving in... the comparisons below are only looking at what these websites do in terms of text corrections. All of these sites can of course do other things, but I'm leaving those features aside for now (although feel free to highlight your favorite features in the comments below).
Content. Lang-8 is set up as a journal or a blog, but you're free to post whatever text you feel like posting. Although many people do post journal-like entries, I typically post all sorts of things in there. In addition to texts to get corrected, this mainly consists of language-related questions. Just as people are happy to correct your text, they're also happy to answer questions about whatever confusing point of the language you've come across.
Making corrections. Lang-8 first breaks the text down into sentences, separating them based on punctuation (this results in the occasional weird break-up when you have something like "12.1" in the sentence; Lang-8 interprets the decimal point in that number as the end of a sentence and breaks it up accordingly). Then correctors can edit sentence by sentence. The system flags uncorrected sentences so subsequent correctors can focus their efforts where most needed.
Correctors edit each sentence in a little window. The one annoying thing about the editing process is that, if you want to add formatting to the text, you've gotta deal with tags tossed into the text in that little window, such as [BLUE][/BLUE] or [BOLD][/BOLD]. It can get pretty jumbled up.
Speed of corrections. Although none of these sites are slow in getting corrections back to you, the corrections come extremely rapidly on Lang-8; I rarely wait an hour, but I think the most I've ever waited is something like a day. In fact, one day I put up a whole bunch of posts on Lang-8 and, by the time I was done adding all the posts, most of them had already been corrected.
Correction presentation. It is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through formatting: bold, strike-thru, red, and blue text. Your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.
Languages. You can post in any language you want, and native speakers of all major languages are well represented on the site. I make most use of Japanese, unsurprisingly, but I've also made use of Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and French thus far. I'd wager that it'd take longer to get corrections for less frequently studied languages, but I've not tested that hypothesis.
Interface. Lang-8's interface is alright; it's nothing to rave about, but it gets the job done. I'd like them to make it even easier to view edits, but it's decent as is.
Bottom line. I find Lang-8 to be the best of the bunch, and I recommend it highly.
Overview. CorrectMyText, based in Russia, is the project of Dmitry Lopatin. It's a new entry to the free online text-correction market; as far as I can tell, it was launched all of seven days ago. As such, it's still got a lot of squeaky wheels that need some grease, but the functionality you need to get text corrected is already there.
Content. You can put any kind of textual content into CorrectMyText.com.
Making corrections. CorrectMyText first breaks the text down into paragraphs, separating them based on line breaks. The corrector can then edit each paragraph's text direcly.
Speed of corrections. Given how new CorrectMyText is, and thus the limited number of users it has compared to the other sites in this list, the corrections don't come quite as quickly. Nevertheless, if my limited experience is representative, you'll still get them within a day or two.
Correction presentation. The corrector cannot apply any formatting. CorrectMyText.com will automatically create side-by-side before-and-after versions of the text. The before version will show the edited text highlighted in red and struck through. The after version will show the edited text highlighted in yellow. The learner then has to compare correction by correction to see the changes.
Interface. This is still a bit rough. It's sometimes hard to figure out what you need to press to move on, and I found myself pressing the wrong thing more than once. It remains very basic, as you'd expect from a newly launched website.
Bottom line. As a new entrant to the market, it still needs some work before it'll be a viable contender against Lang-8, but it's definitely a site to keep an eye on.
Overview. Livemocha's main product is it's Rosetta Stone-like language-learning courses, but the coolest thing it does is connect you with tons of native speakers, including through text corrections (see my complete review of Livemocha here).
Content. The textual submissions on Livemocha are at least nominally supposed to be based on prompts connected to lessons, e.g., "Describe the locations of a set of people and objects". However, there's nothing to stop you from writing about whatever you care to write about, and indeed that's what I've often done. In fact, Livemocha may soon be considering implementing freestyle writing. That'll be more than a nod to reality than an actual change, but I'd be happy to see the addition.
Making corrections. Correctors simply get a comment field in which they can make comments and variously format the comment text.
Speed of corrections. Livemocha has a very large user base, so corrections come back very quickly, certainly comparable with Lang-8.
Correction presentation. Like Lang-8, it is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through the various formatting options that are available. Again, your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.
Interface. As far as text correcting goes, I've got no major complaints. The interface allows you to get the job done.
Bottom line. Not a bad back-up to Lang-8 for text corrections, but as Lang-8 specializes in this feature and it's just another feature at Livemocha—and Livemocha's still not made for freestyle writing—I'm going to stick with the specialist Lang-8 and hope that Livemocha gives this feature some TLC.
Overview. Busuu is a direct competitor of Livemocha, using a similar picture-based learning method, but it also connects you with lots of native speakers, including, again, through text corrections.
Content. Just like Livemocha, the textual submissions are at least nominally supposed to be based on prompts connected to lessons, e.g., "Describe a real person in your life", but, again, there's nothing to stop you from writing about whatever you care to write about.
Making corrections. Correctors simply get a comment field in which they can make comments and variously format the comment text, mirroring Livemocha. It does have one convenient feature that Livemocha lacks: a button to automatically copy and paste the unedited text into the comment field.
Speed of corrections. Although I don't have any numbers to back up my supposition, it seems to me that Busuu has less users than Livemocha, and accordingly will take a little longer. That said, corrections still come back within a day or so.
Correction presentation. Like Lang-8 and Livemocha, it is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through the various formatting options that are available. Again, your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.
Languages. English, French, German, and Spanish. One of the largest differences with Livemocha is that Busuu covers fewer languages.
Interface. Busuu's interface is probably the nicest of the bunch, and it's just fine for getting texts corrected.
Bottom line. Given how similar it is to Livemocha, the bottom line for both is essentially the same; not a bad back-up to Lang-8, but until Busuu puts some more focus into textual corrections, I'll be sticking with Lang-8.
Overview. LingQ's focus is on audio and textual content (especially audio with the accompanying textual content), and, among other things, it has a feature that allows you to get your text submissions corrected. LingQ's text correction feature, however, is not free (it's not terribly expensive though, basically coming down to $0.033 per word, although the pricing is a bit more complex than that). I've broken the free-stuff-only rule and included it here because it has some very interesting features that the completely free ones do not yet match.
Content. You can put any kind of textual content into LingQ.
Making corrections. You highlight the text you want to correct, and click a button. Up pops a window with the text you selected, and you can then edit it. Thus far, that pretty much makes it like all the rest. But then you then get the option to select what kind of error it is—spelling, word order, verb form, etc.—and that data will be used when presenting corrections.
Speed of corrections. Corrections are generally done by a learner's selected tutor, and you might have to wait a little bit before your tutor has a chance to correct your text. That said, tutors seem to reply relatively quickly. I'm a tutor on the site, and I typically try to do my corrections as soon as I'm notified they're there. My slowest response time thus far has been a single day.
Correction presentation. Just like CorrectMyText, LingQ will automatically create side-by-side before-and-after versions of the text. The before version will show the edited text highlighted in yellow, the after version in green. The learner then has to compare correction by correction to see the changes. Alternatively, the same corrections are listed out below the side-by-side versions in a table that also lists correction-specific notes and the type of each correction.
And then here's where LingQ lays down some awesome. Using the type of errors that the corrector marked down, you get an analysis of your mistakes.
Just. Fricking. Awesome. Getting this level of analysis is far better than just seeing your mistakes, because it can help you focus your efforts on where to improve. Although Steve at LingQ is not a big fan offocusingongrammar, this lets you do just that. If you see that you're struggling in a particular place, you can do a read-through of the section in your grammar on that topic, or take other steps to figure out why you keep messing up. Great feature.
Bottom line. They've built in some very clever features into LingQ's textual correction system, but I just can't justify the cost for text corrections when Lang-8 and all the above are available completely free of charge.
So do you know of any other places where we can get our foreign-language writing corrected? If so, drop a line in the comments!
As promised, I've been working on lists of my favorite free online dictionaries, and I'd like to launch the series with Japanese-English dictionaries, as I've been making much use of these since I arrived in Japan.
The dictionaries, after the jump.
Read more...With no further ado, in the order that I use them when looking words up:
ALC: ALC (pronounced アルク aruku in Japanese) is my first stop among Japanese-English dictionaries. They've got great word coverage, which means they're often my last stop as well, and they've got tons of example sentences. They seem to scan the web for translated sentences and then add those to their example sentence corpus (Google their example sentences in quotes and you can often find the source). The big thing they lack is an easy way to get to the pronunciation of words (i.e., they don't include the kana for kanji words), so for that I typically turn to Goo.
Goo: Goo also has very good coverage, but not quite as good as ALC, and they certainly don't have as many example sentences. What they do have, however, is how to pronounce words that contain kanji. Another thing I like about Goo is their incorporation of a Japanese-Japanese dictionary, which can be surprisingly helpful—if you can get through wholly Japanese definitions.
Jim Breen's WWWJDIC: ALC and Goo are both aimed at native-Japanese speakers (although non-native speakers can easily make use of them as well), but the WWDIC is hands down the best Japanese-English dictionary aimed at non-native speakers. (For you polyglots out there, it's got dictionaries to a bunch of other languages as well, such as Spanish, French, Russian, etc.)
It's got audio samples (courtesy of JapanesePod101), the kana is always available, and it gives you easy access to example sentences. It also has a bunch of speciality dictionaries—a rare find in free format (although not totally unheard of).
It's open source, so you'll find that other dictionaries out there make use of it, my favorite of those (which I learned of from Tofugu) is Denshi Jisho (which literally means "electronic dictionary"—like those ones you can carry around). It's got exactly the same content, but the interface is nicer and it's got a nice iPhone version as well.
Glova: Glova is basically a massive database of translated phrases and sentences. Do a query, and you get two columns, one having the hits of your search and the other the translations—and there can be pages and pages of these hits if your search term is relatively common. It lacks the typical numbered definitions and such that you'll find in most of these dictionaries, but it's great for finding multi-word phrases when ALC leaves you empty handed.
WordReference.com: You'll find WordReference in many of my lists of favorite dictionaries, and Japanese is no exception. Although I don't find their coverage is quite as good as those listed above, they do offer plenty of phrases for many words and the forums can be a great place to find hard-to-find phrases.
Tangorin: Tangorin is a relatively recent discovery for me. Although they don't generally have quite as many example sentences as the dictionaries above, they do seem to occasionally have some terms that I can't find elsewhere. Their real power is in all their various speciality dictionaries, but that's a topic for another post.
Excite, Yahoo! Japan, and Infoseek: These guys are all portals that appear to have thrown in a dictionary because the others did—and it shows. Although they have solid definitions, example sentences and other features that those above have are generally lacking. As you might guess, I very rarely need to use these dictionaries and they typically just collect dust in my bookmarks, especially since they are about as good as the Japanese-English dictionary that comes with my Mac.
So what do you think? Any killer features from the above dictionaries that I forgot to mention? Any other dictionaries that you think should be in the list? If so, drop a line in the comments!
This post was updated on October 5, 2009, to include Glova, Tangorin, and a reference to the Japanese-English dictionary that comes with Mac OS X.
And this here marks Street-Smart Language Learning's 100th post.
A few factoids about this blog, and the addition of a co-author to the book, after the jump.
Read more...With 100 posts over nine months, this blog's running at about 11 posts a month. However, if you discount the three months from April to July when I was AWOL thanks to the move to Japan, it's closer to 17 posts a month.
The favorite post month after month has been this review of Livemocha—apparently because, as far as I can tell, all the other reviews of Livemocha lack detail or had a bit too much influence from Livemocha's PR machine.
"Street language" has been a common keyword search that's led people to the site, although I'm not even really sure what that's supposed to mean. (Perhaps I should do a post on that alone sometime.)
Finally, I'd like to announce the inclusion of my wife—Akiko Pace—as a co-author on the book. With enough languages under her own belt to be able to take me to task on just about any language-learning point (when she sees fit to do so), her contributions to the book have gradually become so great that calling her anything but a co-author would be misleading. We're still not sure what the ETA is on the book, but we hope to have it finalized soon, while I continue to hopefully not bore you too much in the meantime with this blog.
While listening to podcasts as I was walking to the train station one day, I noticed the podcasts sounded really slow. Thinking something was wrong, I tinkered around with it until I discovered that I had inadvertently pressed a button that slows down the speed of podcasts to 1/2x.
This feature seems to have been originally designed in mind for going the other way—you can also speed it up to 2x—for people who wanted to get through podcasts or audio books more quickly (it unfortunately does not work with songs).
But they threw in the 1/2x speed as well, and that's good news for us language learners. If there's something in a podcast or that you don't quite get on the first pass, you can back it up a bit and slow it down to half speed, or if you're just getting started in your target language, perhaps you'll want to listen to everything at half speed.
How to do it, after the jump.
Read more...Just start playing your podcast on your iPhone, and it should look like the image below. What you're interested in is that little 1X button in the top right. Press it once, and you'll get double speed, but press it again and you get half speed.
The one thing I find curious about all this is that you don't seem to be able to do the same thing easily in iTunes. If you know of an easy way to do it in iTunes, drop a line in the comments below.
A video entitled Social Media Revolution has been making the rounds via, ahem, social media. The video makes the case that social media is "the biggest shift since the industrial revolution".
The video, which tosses out a couple of interesting things for language learning, after the jump.
Read more...Probably the most interesting fact they toss out in respect of language learning is this (at 1:00 in the video):
2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction... 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
So, if you've run into a language teacher who's skeptical about your use of eduFire, Lang-8, LingQ, Livemocha, or any of the rest, hold your ground because you've got some good statistics on your side.
At 2:00 in the video, it points out a language-learning resource that has certainly not gone unnoticed by language learners:
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles. Studies show it's more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica. 78% of these articles are non-English.
That means there's a pretty darn good chance that you can get materials in your target language on Wikipedia (and, of course, for you English learners, that means that 22% of the articles on there are in your target language).
And wait until you see what chaos emoticons bring us after the jump.
Read more...Japanese emoticons (and Chinese emoticons as well, although the examples here are all from Japanese) are a great deal more complicated than what we've got in the West. Perhaps they're just used to complex characters in the form of kanji (I'd be curious to find out whether Korean emoticons are as inscrutable), or maybe they're somehow connected to anime-like facial expressions, but they certainly do have a lot more complexity to them. For instance, we all know the winking emoticon:
; )
Our two-character wink is totally zen compared to one of the simpler Japanese versions:
(^_~)
At least I can easily tell what that one is. Take a look at this page to see some emoticons for which you'll have no idea what they mean, or take this example from a website profile of a friend of mine:
ヽ(*´∀`)ﾉﾟ.:｡+ﾟฺ♡♡
OK, let's try to analyze that one. The upside-down A is, I presume, the smiling mouth. Those two little dots next to it on either side must be eyes. I'm not sure what that thing next to the eye on the left would be, but the parentheses are the sides of the head. The slashes—ears, or arms? After that, I'm totally lost. I presume the hearts are just tossed in there for the cuteness effect, but I have no idea what the plus sign and everything around that are supposed to be. And this is hardly the worst of them.
Emoticons remain a neglected facet of language learning, and indeed I'm guilty as charged as I've long ignored them myself. The thing is that I run into these enough that I feel like I should at least know the basic ones, although I can probably get by without knowing this:
Autism is a spectrum of medical conditions where people have a lot of difficulty in forming social relationships and in putting themselves in other people's shoes, to imagine other people's thoughts and feelings.
Or, in other words, they struggle with being empathetic.
Tammet’s particular developmental disorder is Asperger’s syndrome, a mild, high-functioning form of autism. … People with Asperger’s often have normal to high IQs and good language and learning ability.
While this certainly doesn't prove anything definitively regarding empathy and language learning, and it doesn't address directly the issue of accents that was at issue previously, it does raise another question mark about just how important empathy really is in language learning.
I thought I'd share with you what's shaping up to be my language-learning routine. I'd love it if you could take home a few good pointers from my routine, but I'd love it even more if you could give me a few good pointers to improve my routine.
My days are, predictably, dominated by Japanese and English. I try to maximize my use of Japanese because of my need to use it at work, but there are two places where I use English as a matter of course. The first is with my kids; I only use English with them, and my wife and I speak English to each other whenever we're in earshot of them, in order to maximize their exposure to English. This is of course a direct trade-off between my Japanese and their English, but one I'll take to prevent them from speaking Engrish. The other place I use English regularly is of course at work when I need to do any of the various things a lawyer might need to do in English.
My language-learning day gets kicked off with my morning alarm; I awake to the sound of Japanese podcasts giving me today's news. Breakfast with the fam is largely in English, although my wife always speaks to the kids in Japanese and the nanny speaks to all of us only in Chinese, so that'll be floating around as well. My mother typically joins us for breakfast via video chat, so once in a while she and I will use some Italian when we don't want anyone else to understand.
Read more...Whenever I'm walking around (such as to, from, and in train stations) or standing around (such as on trains when I can't get a seat), I use my iPhone to listen to podcasts and to review vocabulary with iAnki. My first iAnki/podcast stint every day is from the time I leave my apartment until I sit down on the train to work.
Once seated on the train, the podcasts continue, but I typically break out my computer and try to get stuff done that often doesn't involve a foreign language—doing actual work, responding to emails, working on the book, or preparing these blog posts. When I arrive at the station at which I get off, I return to iAnki/podcasts until I get to my office.
Once in my office, I switch from listening to podcasts on my iPhone to listening to them on my laptop quietly in the background, and I keep them playing in my office the entire time I'm there. I also run a screensaver that shows selected vocab on my laptop screen while I work from the firm-supplied computer. You do end up glancing at it from time to time, and it's especially useful for getting extra exposure to things you've been struggling wtih.
Although I end up doing much of my work in English, I get exposed to plenty of Japanese over the course of the day. Once people figure out that my Japanese is passable, they typically stop using English with me whether via email or in person (and I of course encourage this by using Japanese as much as possible). I also regularly have to deal with Japanese-language documents, websites, etc.
All of these serve as founts for vocab to feed into iAnki and from there into my brain. As I come across words and phrases that I'm unfamiliar with over the course of a day, I quickly note them down in an Excel spreadsheet. Before I leave the office each day, I send the Excel sheet I made over the course of the day—which typically has somewhere between 15 to 30 items in it—to my personal email. When I get home each night, I look up all the words, get example sentences, and add them to iAnki.
Whenever I write Japanese, I get it corrected, review the mistakes, and make any new items for iAnki that might be necessary (by first adding them to that Excel spreadsheet). My secretary helps to correct any Japanese I put together for work, but I've been submitting everything else to Lang-8 for corrections—totally gratis. On Lang-8, native speakers of the language you are learning will correct your writing (and you're expected to reciprocate). Response times are impressive, and I've rarely waited more than a hour for corrections, and certainly never more than a day.
As for other languages I encounter at work, I treat them the same way I treat Japanese. As I'm part of the China Practice Group at my firm, I regularly get exposure to Chinese. I've also had to review documents in other languages, such as Spanish and French, and there have been phone calls to Latin America, so any words I've had to look up have ended up mixed in with my mostly Japanese iAnki reps.
Whenever I get the chance, I'll revert to podcats/iAnki, e.g., on a walk to the bank, which is maybe 5 or 10 minutes away from my office. And whenever I get a little bit of time in which I can't effectively do anything else—such as if I'm on hold on a phone—I'll quickly pull out my iPhone and do a few reviews on iAnki. Even if I only have 30 seconds, I can probably get through at least 10 reviews in that short a time period.
On the way home, it's back to iAnki/podcasts. I typically can't find a seat until maybe halfway through my ride home, so this is typically the period each day in which I spend the most time reviewing vocabulary. Once I do find a seat, I break out my laptop and do the same kinds of things I do on the morning ride, while continuing to listen to the podcasts. And, once again, the walk from the train to home is more iAnki/podcasts.
Once home, I add the new items from the Excel spreadsheet mentioned above to iAnki and see what I've managed to do over the course of the day. Typically, I'll get through somewhere between 300 and 500 reviews in a given day. I'll then make any changes necessary to the items in iAnki (such as adding example sentences to things I'm struggling with), as well as updating the vocab words in my screensaver.
It's also at night when I do thing like read news in other languages, although I don't spend as much time doing that as I'd like to.
And that's pretty much my routine as it currently stands.
I am looking to make a few changes, however. One thing I've been puzzling how to do efficiently is bring in languages other than Japanese in a more systematic manner. I think I'm going to do this by assigning a time percentage to each language and then listening to podcasts in each language accordingly. Ideally, I'll be able to find podcasts with transcripts and then review those as well, and then put the vocab into iAnki.
And, of course, I'm sure you might have some tips for me as to how I can improve this routine, so please drop them in the comments below!
When someone tells Daniel Tammet that he's got a gift for learning languages, there's no way he can deny it. Sure, he speaks eleven languages (or 12 if you count the language that he made up himself), but that's not what impresses me; check out this amazing feat:
Daniel was recently profiled in a British documentary called “Brainman.” The producers posed a challenge that he could not pass up: Learn a foreign language in a week - and not just any foreign language, but Icelandic, considered to be one of the most difficult languages to learn.
In Iceland, he studied and practiced with a tutor. When the moment of truth came and he appeared on TV live with a host, the host said, "I was amazed. He was responding to our questions. He did understand them very well and I thought that his grammar was very good. We are very proud of our language and that someone is able to speak it after only one week, that’s just great."
The actual video referred to is here (starting from 41:15).
Now if you give me a week of complete immersion and a good native-speaker tutor, I could make a great start in any language, but I don't think I could even come close to what Daniel was able to do. So what's the magic sauce and where can I get some? Well, it's unfortunately not quite as simple as all that; Daniel is a high-functioning autistic savant, so his brain works quite a bit differently from yours and mine.
While I'm not putting any money down on anyone coming even close to Daniel's abilities (he's one of perhaps 50 in the entire world with skills like his), Daniel himself thinks that his learning strategy doesn't require his brain. Daniel's magic sauce, after the jump.
The things that I can do are the result of a highly rich and complex associative form of thinking and imagination, an extreme variation of a kind that everyone does. Every time you make a pun or daydream or use a metaphor, you're actually thinking in much the same way as a savant.
My brain seems to be what I would describe as hyperassociative. It makes connections between information very rapidly and connections and relationships between very different things.
This is a well-known technique for learning, and this isn't the first time it's been suggested for language learning.
Indeed, I've recently been noticing the potency of associative techniques myself. As part of my own recent studies, I dumped into iAnki a boatload of Japanese Language Proficiency Test flashcards. That means that the vast majority of my flashcards are not taken from context, but rather are just a set of facts (the word, how that's pronounced if it has any kanji, and the meaning) that I need to connect to each other. This results in some of these words coming up again and again because they're just not getting in my head.
To remedy this, I've taken to making associative connections between the word and the data I'm looking to produce. I have no specific system for this, but whatever comes obviously to mind, I use. For instance, 健やか sukoyaka means healthy—that much was obvious to me from the character—but I couldn't get the reading of the character component of that word—suko—to stick in my head. I finally managed to do so by associating it with 少し sukoshi (a little). Originally, I had a little creole mnemonic—something like sukoshi de healthy ("with just a little bit, healthy"), but that eventually faded away and now I see the 健やか sukoyaka and 少し sukoshi automatically pops into my head. Sooner or later, that association too will fade away, and I'll just be left with the automatic recollection, thanks to associative techniques getting it in my head originally.
This is a lot less than the complex visual and numerical associations Daniel uses, but clearly we can all make use of this technique, even if we won't be able to jack it up to hyperdrive like Daniel can.
The only language-learning tool I can think of that is heavy on such associative devices are the Michel Thomas recordings, which are constantly linking up words in the target language with those that are similar in your own language, using mnemonic devices, and so on. (The Chinese one even tries to get you to link up each tone with a color, taking a page (unintentionally) straight from Daniel's playbook.)
Rosetta Stone's ubiquitous marketing coverage seems to have gotten it caught up in the ongoing controversy over Fox New's Glenn Beck.
The video that started the controversy and how Rosetta's mixed up in it all, after the jump.
Read more...The controversy started when Beck said that President Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" (at 0:33 in the video below) (which presumably would include Obama's own mother), which Beck then followed up with "I'm saying he has a problem. This guy [meaning Obama], I believe, is a racist" (at 2:03 in the video below).
Among the advertisers to pull spots from the popular cable talk show are Geico, owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway …; Procter & Gamble …; Sargento Cheese; and Progressive Insurance…
[W]e do not want to be associated with hateful speech used by either liberal or conservative television hosts.
Supporters of the boycott are sending around lists of Beck's advertisers, and who advertised on Friday's show? None other than Rosetta Stone.
So is Rosetta Stone supporting hateful speech by advertising on Beck's show? I'd hazard a guess that their all-over-the-place advertising was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that they'll duck the controversy by pulling their ads from the show as soon as the bureaucratic gears crank through. They weren't among Saturday's advertisers, so perhaps they've already made the necessary call to Fox.
[A] team of scientists in Switzerland is claiming that a fully functioning replica of a human brain could be built by 2020. … They are using one of the most powerful computers in the world to replicate the actions of the 100 billion neurons in the human brain. It is this approach - essentially copying how a brain works without necessarily understanding all of its actions - that will lead to success, the team hopes.
While this raises all sorts of fun things—like confounding ethical dilemmas and the singularity—let's see what this might do for language learning.
Read more...The article almost takes us directly to language learning:
And there are other questions, too, questions at the centre of the nurture versus nature debate. Would this human mind, for example, automatically feel guilt or would it need to be 'taught' a sense of morality first? And how would it respond to religion? Indeed, are these questions that a human mind asks of its own accord, or must it be taught to ask them first?
To that, I would add, how would this brain learn language? Do you just set it off on the internets and check back in a week? It sounds like they're trying to mimic an adult brain. Would the brain then skip the key developmental stages of infants in language learning?
I'll assume that, if they actually pull off the adult brain, they'll eventually figure out how to get language into that brain. And, if they do, the Turing test should be cake:
It is a simple test in which someone is asked to communicate, using a screen and keyboard, with a computer trying to mimic a human, and another, real human. If the judge cannot tell the machine from the other person, the computer has 'passed' the test. So far, every computer we have built has failed.
If this Swiss team's brain can pass this test, you could effectively have a translator on your computer that would be no different than a real person. Assuming that they could get the tech to fit into a package a bit smaller than "one of the most powerful computers in the world", you could potentially have C-3PO (fluent in over six million forms of communication) on your iPhone.
My guess is that this would decrease the demand for language learning; why bother getting a language in your head when a truly effective digital translator could handle it all for you, most likely matching nuances better than most live translators possibly could? (Aside from C-3PO, there weren't very many polyglots in Star Wars, were there?) While there's a twinge that that'd be a shame (especially given all the time I've spent learning languages), it would also be pretty damn cool.
On the other hand, a digital brain could make a great native-speaker tutor, so I suppose the sword cuts both ways.
It just dawned on me today that there's a good handful of language-learning tools out there where clicking on pictures is an important part of the learning method. For example:
(And if you know of any others, drop a line in the comments below.)
This seems to be a pretty common method. Is everyone just playing follow-the-leader (i.e., following Rosetta Stone), or is there actually some science to back up all this fervent picture clicking?
My initial reaction is that, no, there aren't, because going slower helps you absorb better, but I suppose there could be some argument to covering quantity.
If you're learning English (as some of us native speakers still are), thatwhichmatter on Twitter (via Lifehacker via Daring Fireball) is full of bite-sized nuggets of English wisdom. While aimed at native speakers, I'm guessing if native speakers are screwing things up, so are the non-native learners, so get your advanced-English cap on and dive in.
An article in today's New York Times seems to have some anecdotal evidence that you can get proficient in Chinese—despite working full time and using some degree of English at work—in about two years.
“I didn’t know anything about China,” said [Joshua Arjuna Stephens, who graduated from Wesleyan University in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in American studies]. “People thought I was nuts to go not speaking the language, but I wanted to do something off the beaten track.”
Two years later, after stints in the nonprofit sector and at a large public relations firm in Beijing, he is highly proficient in Mandarin . . .
After two years of living and working in China, [Sarabeth Berman, a 2006 graduate of Barnard College with a major in urban studies,] is proficient in Mandarin.
In searching the internets for an explanation of the word ～かねる -kaneru in Japanese, I found the explanation I was looking for on a website called jeKai (pronounced jay-kai). Curious as to what I had just stumbled upon, I dug around a bit.
The site appears to have been actively largely in the early 2000s, but is still kept up by the person who was behind it, Tim Gally. Here's how jeKai describes what it's there for:
In May 2000, a group of volunteers throughout the world began creating an open, free, online Japanese-English dictionary. The form and content of the dictionary are decided by the participants in the project. Among its features are the following:
Definitions that explain the meaning of words as completely as possible
As many examples as possible of each word in real contexts
Photographs and other illustrations, especially for entries about uniquely Japanese things
No restrictions on the type or range of vocabulary
No restrictions on the length of entries
My guess is this little Web 1.0 project fell into disuse as Web 2.0 wiki-based sites made this kind of effort a lot easier, but the fact that it's still coming up in Google hits demonstrates its ongoing relevance.
It seems to have a lot of things that aren't adequately explained elsewhere, one of course being ～かねる -kaneru, but another you might find of interest is their list of Japanese baseball terms. There's a whole bunch of other stuff up there as well, so I'd recommend you Japanese learners to have a looksee.
According to this article, it looks like some of the brick-and-mortar educators out there are finally starting to get the picture on where education is going:
“I don’t believe that charters and vouchers are the threat to schools in Orange County,” ... said [William M. Habermehl, superintendent of the 500,000-student Orange County schools]. “What’s a threat is the digital world — that someone’s going to put together brilliant $200 courses in French, in geometry by the best teachers in the world.”
I'll bet we can come up with a few "brilliant" online courses in French—and probably for a lot less than $200.
Ramses of Spanish-Only.com is a man who likes his sentences. While I tend to butt heads with him on grammar-learning methods, I do agree with him wholly on the value of sentences in language learning. I use them (although not solely, as he does) to learn vocab, and finding good sentences can be something of a challenge.
There's nothing quite like context to help you learn a language, whether for vocab or catching grammatical rules in practice, and sentences give you bite-size chunks of context good for just that. They won't be quite as useful for you as they were for Ramses (who got them from their original context), but the database can save you some work if you're looking for a ton of sentences that already have translations conveniently located nearby.
My one request at this point is a way to easily incorporate these into a spaced-repetition system. Currently, as far as I can tell, you'd have to pluck out the sentences one by one, but hopefully that is something that will change over time as it continues to be a work in progress.
Over on The Linguist on Language, Steve's discussingthis study that concludes that "[t]he more empathy one has for another, the lighter the accent will be when speaking in a second language" and that "the 'language ego' is also influenced by the sociopolitical position of the speaker towards the majority group".
However, I'd say a lot of follow-up is needed before this can be considered a "conclusion".
Read more...First of all, the study was conducted with a grand total of 60 participants, all of whom were college students in Israel of the same socioeconomic characteristics: 20 native-Hebrew speakers, 20 native-Arabic speakers who started learning Hebrew around age 7, and 20 native-Russian speakers who started learning Hebrew around age 13. Enough for a hypothesis for further testing, perhaps, but conclusion? I don't think so.
In any case, here's what they had to do:
All were asked to read out a section from a report in Hebrew, and then to describe – in Hebrew - an image that was shown to them. The pieces were recorded and divided into two-minute sections. Additionally, the participants filled out a questionnaire that measures empathetic abilities in 29 statements.
Once that was done, 20 separate native speakers rated how heavy the accents were.
Both Russian and Arabic speakers were shown to have similarly heavy accents. However, the more empathetic the Russian speakers were, the weaker their accents. For the Arabic speakers, however, their level of empathy didn't affect the heaviness of their accents.
From this, the professors of the Israeli university conclude of the Arab students that:
[T]he pattern among Arabic speakers demonstrates their sentiment toward the Hebrew-speaking majority group, and the former consider their accent as something that distinguishes them from the majority.
Color me skeptical.
I'd be more accepting of these results if, instead of Russian speakers, they had used Arabic speakers that didn't carry the same sociopolitical baggage—Moroccan Jews, or something like that. As is, this could perhaps show nothing more than the fact that there's some connection between empathy and accent in Russian speakers.
I'd love to see this test repeated where they could get larger, more diverse samples, like in the U.S. or Canada. Would people from locales with widely varying cultures—e.g., Latin America, Japan, India, Croatia, etc.—show the same connection between empathy in their English accents? A study like that would be much more interesting; first establish the connection between empathy and accent, then move on to dissenting other things that might affect it.
Steve focuses on some of the findings' applications to language learners:
To learn a language is to imitate some of the behaviour of another group. You have to act as if you are one of them. . . . It is not enough to practice making certain sounds. You have to dive into the role of being someone else. You have to feel comfortable doing it. That means not translating comfortable sayings, and turns of phrase from your own language. It means forgetting who you are, linguistically and culturally.
If this position is right (and my inclination is that it is), it would seem to make sense that actors would be great language learners. I've never heard of any studies looking into that, but Brad Pitt's language-learning abilities don't bode well for the hypothesis.
While I do think their hypothesis is probably onto something, I think it's likely a lot more complicated that "the more the empathy, the better the accent". Mitch, in the comments on Steve's blog, points out a big hole in the hypothesis:
There were prisoners of war and camp inmates who learned German well enough to pass as natives after escape. They probably had zero empathy for their hated guards, but their motivation was incredible--survival.
So clearly there are cases of zero empathy, but great accents.
LingQ is maintaining a great list of foreign-language content sources here (it's so good I also added it to the links in the right-hand column of this blog). What makes it so great?
This list is for users of LingQ.com to identify sources of language content consisting of both audio and text.
Listening to audio is great, but it's even better when you can refer to a text to find that word you didn't quite get.
I'm currently working on setting up a bunch of podcasts that I can regularly listen to so that I can keep languages I'm not using so much moving forward, and this list has some good leads for me. I've been able to dredge up some thing that aren't on this list, so I'll be dropping LingQ a line to add them in. If you know of any similar content sources that are not yet on the list, I encourage you to do the same.
Thanks to an anonymous tipster in the comments to this post, I just got wind of a new website that appears to be in the mold of Livemocha and Busuu.
Here's how the site sells itself:
LEARN a new language anytime, anywhere with online, interactive lessons that will develop all the skills you need.
TEACH other members your language and learn from native speakers.
COMMUNICATE with native speakers and make friends all over the world.
That sounds a lot like Livemocha to me.
Strangely, the simple site is designed primarily as an image (that image above is a screen grab), as if to avoid Google bot detection and stay off the radar for the time being. On the other hand, they do have a perfectly searchable Facebook page.
One thing I'm curious about is the Men's Health article they got some coverage in. Keep in mind that this is an unreleased product:
[R]einforce your lessons by signing onto social-networking sites that let you interact with native speakers. "They use functional language that you'd hear in conversation," says Marty Abbott, director of education for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Her favorite is hello-hello.com.
So how exactly does an unreleased site become someone's favorite tool? I smell something fishy! (Or perhaps a rational explanation that's just escaping detection, but I digress...). [Update: Yup, there was a rational explanation that was escaping detection. See the comment below.]
So... what do you know about Hello-hello.com? Drop a line in the comments below or send an email to tips at this domain name. (And I welcome comments from you, Hello-hello.com, because I know you're keeping an eye on those Google Alerts!)
As I mentioned before, I've been looking for a spaced-repetition system to use on my iPhone that I can (1) sync with a desktop app and (2) use when there's no internet connection (because I spend time on a subway line every weekday from which I can't get online).
So far, it looks like Anki's solution for an unbroken iPhone, iAnki, is the best option available, although it's far from ideal. The software is testy, something of a challenge to get working, and syncing with Anki on the desktop can be a headache, but its core study functions by and large work fine and, in the end, you do get two-way syncs with Anki's desktop application.
Let's get into the nitty-gritty, after the jump.
Read more...Installation. With iAnki, you're quite likely to get off on the wrong foot because installation is a pain. As if needing to deal with some quirky work-around to a true iPhone app isn't enough (iAnki is not an iPhone app—more on that below), the instructions on the iAnki page are less than clear. I've got a few nerd credentials, and it took me some time to get things working, so I feel for the even less nerdily inclined. Nevertheless, after somehow bumbling through the instructions, I eventually managed to get everything up and running, so hopefully you will be able to as well.
Syncing. But I couldn't jump into using iAnki without first having a syncing headache; the syncs were just stalling out and clearly nothing was happening. I put this question up in iAnki's forum, but before I could get a reply I simply deleted everything and started from scratch. I must've done something different, because the second time around I got the sync to work.
In terms of syncing, Anki and iAnki work together in a bit of a strange way. First of all, iAnki is not an iPhone app at all, but rather a bookmarked web page that you use Safari to run. To sync with Anki (and to set up iAnki on your iPhone in the first place), you need to download a plug-in called iAnki Server. iAnki Server runs over your local network to sync Anki and iAnki. iAnki unfortunately does not make use of AnkiOnline, so both your computer and your iPhone need to be connected to the same local network to use iAnki Server.
If you're having trouble keeping Anki, iAnki, iAnki Server, and AnkiOnline straight, you're not alone. Here's an image of how the set-up works for me that'll hopefully clear things up a bit:
So my laptop syncs to AnkiOnline and then to the iPhone via iAnki Server on the local network hosted over our Time Capsule. There's no way to sync directly between the computer and the iPhone, as far as I can tell (I suppose there might be a way to set up your laptop as a server, and if you can explain how to do that, I'd love to hear from you in the comments).
At the same time—and somewhat inexplicably—iAnki can't sync up directly with AnkiOnline. As I mentioned above, iAnki is just a bookmarked page in Safari, so I don't see why it can't sync with AnkiOnline instead of needing to deal with the hassle of using iAnki Server on a local network. (As an aside, AnkiOnline works reasonably well on an iPhone—especially in full-screen mode (it's in the left-hand column of AnkiOnline)—but as I need to be able to study when I can't be online, it's not a solution that will work for me.)
Since iAnki doesn't sync online, it means that if I study on my iPhone on the way to work and then use AnkiOnline during the day, I'll be reviewing the exact same things, since one won't know that I've already done it on the other. However, I can live with that; I just do all my reps during the day on my iPhone rather than making any use of Anki or AnkiOnline.
Basically you've got to remember to sync iAnki with iAnki Server regularly. You can lessen this burden by syncing lots of cards so that, even if you forget to sync for a few days, you'll still have plenty to work with. However, as happened to me a few days ago, you'll probably eventually forget to sync for enough consecutive days that you run out of due cards and end up playing Labyrinth 3D instead of being productive.
And today I discovered another fun headache. When I got home, it wouldn't sync and iAnki Server was giving me some kind of unintelligible gobbledygook error message. I eventually discovered that because my Time Capsule had assigned my laptop a new IP address (ending with a .6 instead of the .7 it had before), this was causing big problems. I first fixed it on iAnki Server's end, and that got rid of the weird error message, but I needed to create a new bookmark on the iPhone following iAnki's installation instructions before I could sync.
One additional annoying aspect of the sync process is that, when syncing multiple decks, you need to click "OK" on the iPhone after each deck or else it won't begin syncing the next deck. This means that you've got to babysit the iPhone during the sync process if you want to make sure that it gets through all your decks. I can handle clicking OK once at the end after all decks are synced, but needing to repeatedly click OK is just a nuisance.
All this leaves me looking forward to seeing what the next sync headache will be.
So, bottom line on syncing, let's cross our fingers for automatic AnkiOnline or even direct Anki syncing. The latter probably requires an actual iPhone app, but the former should be much easier to accomplish.
Studying. And last, but definitely not least, is the core studying function. It is, unsurprisingly, iAnki's strong point and is stripped down but is much like Anki's. You're shown the question and a button to reveal the answer. Once you reveal the answer, you have buttons from 1 to 4, paralleling Anki's buttons, with 1 meaning you didn't get it, 2 meaning you got it but it was tough, 3 meaning you got it, and 4 meaning you got it easily. Press your button of choice, and it will move onto the next card and tell you when the card you just scored will be shown again.
I do have two complaints about the studying features, however. The first is that there is no undo button. On occasion I'll accidentally hit the wrong button and want to go back and press the right one. There's just no way to do this. To take the extreme example, if you accidentally hit 4 on a word you've gotten correct a bunch of times but have just recently forgotten, you might not see that card again for months. A simple undo button in the top left corner of the screen would be ideal.
The second is the lack of any way to flag cards. For example, if a card is just plain wrong, or is confusingly similar to another card, a way to flag it and then fix it in Anki would be a great help. This could correspond to Anki's "mark" feature, and could be implemented with the addition of a button in the top right corner of the study interface.
* * * *
So what's the final call on iAnki? I'm going to keep using it. It may have its quirks and difficulties, but it's doing what I need it to do. It syncs with the desktop app and I can use it when offline. The most important part—the study functions—are solid, and the other issues are manageable.
And, on top of that, I'm not sure that I have much choice, as I don't think there's anything else that does what I'm looking for, so if you know of any other options, please drop a line in the comments.
This post was updated twice on August 6, 2009. The first time was to delete a complaint that the font sizes are too big in iAnki. As it turns out, the font size on iAnki is completely under the user's control (via Anki). Victor, the author of iAnki, pointed this out to me in a comment below, and sure enough it turns out the issue I was complaining about was my own fault. In Anki, I went to Settings > Fonts and Colors... and lo and behold I could change the font size (in fact, I'm indeed the one who set Japanese so large in the first place). It took me a few tries to get that to sync over to iAnki, but sure enough it did and it looks much better than before. I may need to tinker with the sizes a bit until I figure out what works best, but the bottom line is that I can do just that. The second time was to note that the author of iAnki is Victor, not Damien Elmes, the author of Anki.
This post was updated again on October 10, 2009, to note the need to click OK on the iPhone after each deck when syncing and the need for undo and flagging features when studying and to clean up the previous changes.
Pretty much every day at work I make use of Japanese Law Translation, which is pretty much what it sounds like it is, but it's got a few neat tricks up its sleeve.
The website is maintained by the Japanese Ministry of Justice, with contributions from various lawyers (including those at my firm), legal academics, and others (more about its genesis is available here). It is in effect the official translation of legal terms in Japanese.
However, not all terms that have been translated can be found in the dictionary, so another very useful tool is the ability to search translations of the law for the word you're looking for. That will get you both the English and the Japanese text and you can figure out how the word was translated.
As the website is a work in progress (and will need regular updating as laws change), not all laws and regulations are included yet, and as mentioned above not all terms have been added to the dictionary, but it is a very useful tool if you ever have a need for legalese in Japanese.
If you are studying for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (I'm not, really, but I find the lists of vocab for the test that can be found floating about the internet are useful because they approximate frequency lists) and you happen to speak Chinese, check out this vocab list. There's no English, but you can learn your Japanese from Chinese (or learn both at the same time). It's all in traditional characters, but I'm sure you tricky netizens can finda method or two that could convert it to simplified for you.
It's got separate lists for all four levels of the test (1, 2, 3, and 4, with 1 being the hardest), or you can view the vocab all together. The list was made in 2005, so it may be a little out of date, and it was made in Taiwan, so you'll probably get that variety of Chinese.
One thing I like about this list (and that I'd like to see in other such lists) is that it notes on which syllable the stress falls in the Japanese word. My wife often says I use stress in Japanese words where there isn't any. This chart seems to back up her criticisms, given how many words are marked as having "0" (i.e., no) stress and thus should just be read flatly.
This is the first in a new series on this blog called "how do you say", in which I take a word in English that has multiple translations in a given target language and try to figure out which ones are used for what. As I'm doing this to answer my own questions (or maybe yours—leave them in the comments!), drop a line in the comments if you think I've gotten someone wrong and I'll revise as necessary.
When you look up the Japanese for the English noun "pattern" on ALC, you get (deep breath, now) 傾向 keikou, 模様 moyou, 型 kata, 原型 genkei, 型紙 katagami, 柄 gara, 形態 keitai, 構図 kouzu, 模範 mohan, and パターン pata-n (as if they didn't have enough ways to say it with Chinese characters, they had to bring in a loanword from English as well). Let's see if we can figure out what to use when.
Read more...Thanks to that loanword, I've got good news for you for you lazy native-English speakers. The basic rule appears to be that, when in doubt, use パターン pata-n in good old katakana, taken straight from English. パターン pata-n has 18 pages of examples where the English equivalent is "pattern" on ALC. Of all the other ways to say "pattern" in Japanese listed above, the only ones with more than one page of such examples are 型 kata (with two) and 模様 moyou (with three). What's more, looking through the numerous examples of パターン pata-n on ALC, there appear to be relatively few cases where some construction of パターン pata-n can't replace the other words below.
Turning to the the one with the second-largest number of such examples on ALC, 模様 moyou means "pattern" in the sense of a print or weave design (e.g., 市松模様 ichimatsu moyou, "checkered pattern").
Also in the two-dimensional realm, 柄 gara is used to mean patterns on cloth and certain similar things (wallpaper, etc.). The difference between this and 模様 moyou seems to be that, for 柄 gara, the pattern is generally part of the material rather than just printed on it (e.g., アーガイル柄靴下 a-gairu kutushita, "argyle socks"). However, this appears to be a rule of thumb rather than a hard-and-fast rule (e.g., ヒョウ柄 hyou gara, "leopard print pattern").
型 kata seems to be the Japanese translation of "pattern" with the broadest use. For those language learners among us (can I see some hands?), this is the term to use for a linguistic pattern (e.g., 動詞型 doushigata, "verb patterns"). And there appears to be a wide variety of other uses. I'll refer you to ALC and if you can clarify this for me any better, drop a line in the comments below.
The related 型紙 katagami means a pattern made on paper, such as a cut-paper stencil or a sewing pattern.
模範 mohan means "pattern" in the sense of an example that is to be emulated. The word has a good connotation, e.g.: ～を模範とする ~ wo mohan to suru, "to pattern oneself after"; and 親は、子の模範 oya ha, ko no mohan, "Parents are patterns for their children".
傾向 keikou means "pattern" in the sense of "trend" or "tendency". So if you're talking about patterns of behavior over time (e.g., 消費傾向 shouhi keikou, "spending pattern"), you can use this one.
形態 keitai seems to be used for patterns of human activity that can be characterized at a given point in time or based on data collected, in contrast to 傾向 keikou, which considers ongoing activity and the future. Examples include: 人口形態 jinkou keitai, "population pattern"; 労働形態 roudou keitai, "working patterns"; 暴力形態 bouryoku keitai, "pattern of violence"; etc.
Although 原型 genkei comes up under pattern (e.g., 原型製作 genkei seisaku, "pattern manufacture"), it means the original upon which subsequent things are patterned after, so "prototype", "original", "model", etc., tend to be better translations (e.g., 原型製作 genkei seisaku can also be translated as "prototype production").
構図 kouzu appears to mean "pattern" in the sense of structured relationships (e.g., 政・官の癒着の構図 sei ˙ kan no yuchaku no kouzu, "pattern of collusion between politicians and bureaucrats"). It does not appear to be a very common way to translate "pattern".
So... anything wrong here? Anything to add? Drop a line in the comments below (especially you native Japanese speakers out there!).
I've got some opinions on this one (ALC, holla!), so I'm putting together a series of posts for the best free online dictionaries between English and each of Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and German (which is probably the rough order I'll do them in). I'm also considering adding Korean and Russian to that list (two languages I've been known to dabble in), but since I don't use those as heavily my opinions are less-well formed.
Before I do, however, I'd like to put a call out for any of the free, online dictionaries that you might like. I've found before that sometimes the best dictionaries don't turn up easily in searches, so I thought I'd see if a little crowdsourcing might be able to find me some new and interesting hits.
Although some people correct children explicitly (we do), the usual route is that they're corrected indirectly when the adult repeats the phrase in some way back to them. Think something like a child saying, "Eat apple!", and the adult saying back to them, "Oh, do you want to eat the apple?" It's more subtle than directly correcting, but it's correcting nonetheless.
And that sort of thing is absolutely helpful when learning a language. When I'm not quite getting my point across, then finally I manage to grudgingly do so and the person says the equivalent of, "Oh! So you mean that you want to eat the apple!", I've got the correct way of saying it right there for the taking.
After I posted this comment, I went back and read Steve's earlier comment where he wrote "[kids] hear it and they imitate it", and began to wonder if this was a to-MAY-to / to-MAH-to thing where I'm calling it "being corrected" and he's calling it "imitating".
In any case, Steve continues:
I simply do not buy it. You cannot possibly correct enough errors to make a difference. Children and most good learners correct most of their mistakes on their own. The brain gradually corrects itself as the patterns of the language become clearer.
OK, I'll draw a line in the sand in response to that. My position, after the jump.
Read more...While I generally agree with Steve on most things language learning, the utility of being corrected is one place where we definitely disagree. When Steve touched upon this issue earlier, he wrote:
The idea of perfect strangers correcting my use of language . . . strikes me as just rude, and certainly not helpful.
In contrast, perfect strangers correcting my use of language is always extremely welcome but sadly doesn't happen enough. I definitely find it helpful and I think the difference comes down to how the learner takes the corrections. I've got a post on just this issue in the oven, but for now I'll just flag this disagreement as I think it may add some color to our views on correcting children's language use.
Turning to Steve's comment, I would say that the brain will gradually correct itself as the patterns of the language become clearer, but why wait? My first-hand experience with my daughter has shown me that waiting doesn't pay off. A recent example of a mistake of my daughter's that I corrected was "buyed". I don't recall the exact phrase, but if she had said, "I buyed it", I'd've probably said, "No, you gotta say, 'I bought it'" and, used to the routine, she'd just repeat, "I bought it", without missing a beat and the conversation would continue. Typically she'll use the word again soon in the conversation, e.g.: "What'd you buy?" "I bought..." So, while the brain will gradually figure out the rule from passive exposure (listening), she just had two repetitions of active exposure (speaking), which I always find to be even better for getting something in your head; once you can use it correctly yourself, you've burned some pretty good paths in your brain to that piece of knowledge.
Sometimes I'll even explain the rule to her. When she was having trouble with "geese" being the plural of "goose", I told her that that word is "weird" because, instead of adding an "s", it changes to "geese". After telling her that, the next few times she encountered the word she paused to tell me the rule and then said it correctly. Now she just knows it. In fact, she now actively asks why something doesn't fit into the rules as she understands them (just today I was asked why "fish" doesn't become "fishes" in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish).
I think in any of the examples above it would have taken her a lot more time to get enough exposure to "bought", "geese", etc., to have figured the rules out on her own, although I don't doubt at all that she eventually would have.
The end result of all this is that instead of spending more time trying to learn these passively, she'll get them more quickly and move on to something else. And, although far short of a scientific control, there's actually some basis for comparison with my daughter. My wife, who speaks Japanese with my daughter, corrects her about as much as I do in English. However, we've had Chinese nannies and babysitters teaching her Chinese for most of the time she's been speaking, and they are the generally less stringent about corrections. While living in the States when her exposure to Japanese and Chinese was roughly equal, her Chinese mistakes would linger much longer than her Japanese mistakes. So, while she was moving ahead in terms of grammar and vocab in Japanese, she was progressing more slowly in Chinese. I think the amount and efficacy of the corrections she was receiving was one factor in this.
Based on the above, I obviously don't think that we can't "possibly correct enough errors to make a difference". Beyond the results we've seen, this is really no different than any other spaced-repetition system. If she makes the same mistakes over time, she gets a repetition of that piece of information. If the typical spaced-repetition system requires five or six repetitions to generally learn something, why would kids be any different?
In sum, I feel like I'd be doing her a huge disservice by not correcting her and just letting her "brain gradually correct itself as the patterns of the language become clearer". That'd happen, for sure, but I can't see how it'd be the most efficient way to go about it.
When I was studying abroad at Waseda University in college during the 2000-2001 academic year, a famous alumni of ours, Yoshiro Mori, was causing us a great deal of embarrassment by generally bungling his way about the prime ministership of Japan—with an abundance of verbal gaffes.
I was interning that year in Japan's legislature, and he wasn't exactly strongly supported there either. So it came as no surprise when the legislative-office rumor mill brought wind of an alleged interaction between Prime Minister Mori and U.S. President Bill Clinton at the G-8 summit that was held in Okinawa in July 2000, several months before my internship began.
Basically it went something like this. Mori, not very good at English, got some coaching from translators to help him at least get a basic greeting down for when he was to meet with Bill Clinton. But, instead of starting with, "How are you?", Mori forgot how it was supposed to go and blurted out...
Clinton: [surprised, but not missing a beat...] Haha, I'm Hillary's husband...
Mori: [apparently not realizing Clinton hadn't just said "I'm fine. And you?"] Me too.
So... a case of last-minute language learning gone horribly wrong, or a complete fabrication? Snopes calls shenanigans on this one, blaming the Japanese media, which hardly sounds unreasonable, given the climate at the time. On the other hand, here's a Japanese professor, asserting the truth of the story (or perhaps just parroting a media untruth).
I recall seeing a video of Mori going up and shaking hands with Clinton that was running in the Japanese media all those years back (a quick search on YouTube didn't get the video for me) which claimed to be a film of when the above was said, although it was taken from far enough away that nothing could be heard (convenient, right?).
I doubt Mori'd fess up if it's true, so someone give Bill a call and let's get the final word on this.
Today there was a going away party for some departing summer associates at my firm. One of the Japanese attorneys sitting nearby commented that it's difficult to understand drinking-party English (飲み会英語 nomikai eigo). And I can see what he means.
One particular utterance that came directly from my own mouth demonstrates the point neatly. Some of my more-or-less inebriated non-Japanese colleagues were chugging ramen. Slurping vigorously would be a more accurate description, but we settled on "chugging" to describe the action. When a bowl of ramen was passed my way, I declined, saying, "I ain't chuggin' no noodles!"
The linguistic dissection, after the jump.
Read more...Oh how "wrong" is that sentence, let me count the ways. First there's the sort-of-not-quite-right use of the word "chugging", described above. Then I swallowed the "g" at the end of "chugging", so that's one step farther from linguistic purity. Then there's the contraction "am not" to "ain't", which grammatical sticklers the world over frown upon (and which doesn't seemed to be covered in many English classes in Japan). And I bring it all together with the dreaded double negative, an even bigger grammatical faux pas in English.
Rather than being ungrammatical, what we really have here is an example of something that's only grammatically correct in a given kind of language (more on that here); in this case, very informal language. That, together with the somewhat creative word usage (more on that here) make it pretty tough to parse out the meaning for many English learners, even though native speakers would have no trouble (and even though some of those English learners can breeze through contracts and legalese in English that some native speakers might have trouble with).
The attorney in particular that made the comment is actually bolstering his English by watching U.S. television shows, among other things, and with enough of that I expect he'll sooner or later be able to tackle drinking-party English with ease. Now if we can just figure out how to get all English learners in Japan to get the same kind of exposure, we'll be making real headway.
I haven't logged into Livemocha for a few weeks. When I did so today using Safari, I was greeted with this (click on the image to see a bigger version):
So I've got to use either Internet Explorer or Firefox. Despite Safari working fine up until now, it looks like something won't be working quite right if I continue using it.
Update: Snapvine closed shop on March 31, 2010, but 
This lady reads Russian to me. There is some major heavenly body action going on in the sky behind her.
You might remember that 
While I'm on the topic of 
The following is a guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer, whose name you may recognize from 
[Amazon]
[Amazon]
When you're learning how to write in a language, there's nothing quite like getting your writing corrected. And when you're getting it corrected, there's nothing quite like getting it corrected totally for free. And when you're getting it corrected totally for free, there's nothing quite like getting it corrected for free and quickly.
You are probably wondering right now what the heck a picture of 
is doing accompanying this post.
that's a savant. Savant syndrome is a developmental disorder "
and 
Both shed more light on his method and how he thinks it can apply to those of us with less impressive mental abilities, so I've added these both to my to-read list and I'd love to hear from any of you who've already read them in the comments below or via email.
So far, it looks like Anki's solution for an unbroken iPhone, iAnki, is the best option available, although it's far from ideal. The software is testy, something of a challenge to get working, and syncing with Anki on the desktop can be a headache, but its core study functions by and large work fine and, in the end, you do get two-way syncs with Anki's desktop application. 
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