A single workflow to make use of online language-learning tools

There are so many language-learning resources out there on the web, it's kind of tough to figure out how to make use of them all. In looking at how I'm using these tools myself, I put together the following little process to incorporate many of the language-learning tools I've been using into a single workflow:

Oh, and this workflow is completely free.

Let's walk through this, after the jump.

Read more... Start with reading and/or (but preferably and) listening to something in the target language. LingQ is all about content with both text and audio, so that's a good place to start looking, but you're hardly limited to LingQ; any recordings you can find with transcripts, unabridged audio books (including children's books), etc., will do the trick.

To the extent there's anything you don't understand in the text or audio, look it up and add it to your spaced-repetition system. Anki is my current SRS of choice, but some other popular choices are Smart.fm and Mnemosyne.

Then write something about what you read or listened to in the target language. Try to make use of whatever you needed to look up and add to your SRS, and to the extent that you need to look up anything else, add that to your SRS as well.

Then get that writing corrected. There are a number of ways to do this, but Lang-8 is my standing favorite, and italki recently implemented this feature. Again, if the corrections include things you need to look up, add them to your SRS system.

Once you've got the corrected text, record yourself speaking it and get that recording corrected by native speakers. I use Cinch and Lang-8 to accomplish this.

You've now written and read that writing. Now it's time for some plain old talking. Making use of everything you've learned thus far, record yourself saying something about the running theme and get that corrected in the same way you got the recording of your text corrected. Once again, if the corrections give you any thing that needs to go into your SRS, add it.

At this point, you should have everything you need to get in your SRS. Now go over to RhinoSpike and get native speakers to record the pronunciation of each of those words. Take those audio recordings and add them to your SRS system. From there, you just need to review your newly added items as part of your regular SRS review.

You've also got two things that you've recorded yourself: your corrected text and some plain old talking. Go to RhinoSpike again and get a recording of both from native speakers. Once you've got those recordings, add them to a playlist on iTunes and listen regularly. I'd recommend just throwing all of these recordings into a random-order playlist and listening to them in the background while doing other things. This will provide a review of all of the above.

This entire workflow can be tailored to your level. At the most basic level, you can even use children books; my kids have plenty of books that come with audio CDs in all three of their languages. But you don't necessarily need to dumb the text down; you can also just keep it short. For example, if you're just starting a language but want to read a news article, you could limit yourself to just the first paragraph. This will likely take a while, but it won't be insurmountable.

If you've got a way to make this workflow, I'd love to hear it!

Get Cramberry (spaced-repetition app) for iPad and iPhone for free (U.S. residents only)

I've mentioned before that my current go-to spaced-repetition system is Anki, but there are a lot of other options out there, including well-known systems such as Smart.fm, Mnemosyne, and SuperMemo.

Another contender in the field is Cramberry. What's kept me from making more use of Cramberry is that you can only study 30 cards per day in the free version of their web app. That said, they're doing a promotion right now that will get U.S. residents their iPad apps for free, and the first 50 people to download the iPad app can also get their iPhone app for free. And I'm guessing that those apps, which currently cost $2.99 (iPad) and $4.99 (iPhone), don't have the any study count limitations, even when you're getting them for free.

Get your free apps, after the jump.

Read more... From an email that went out to Cramberry's mailing list earlier today:

To celebrate the launch of our new Cramberry app for iPad, we're giving away free copies of Cramberry for iPhone and iPad. Here's how it works: Send us an email (contact@cramberry.net) telling us how you use Cramberry, and we'll send you a coupon code for a free copy of Cramberry for iPad. Once you've downloaded the iPad app, send us your iTunes receipt, and we'll send you another coupon code for Cramberry for iPhone. You must download the iPad app to receive the iPhone app. You can download the app from iTunes on your computer; you don't need an iPad to participate in this offer.

Note: this offer is only available to U.S. residents. Sorry!

After I sent them the required email, stating that "I use Cramberry for language learning, of course!", they wrote back to me with further details, including this one that they should have probably had in the first email:

Only the first 50 people to download the iPad app will receive free copies of the iPhone app, so act quickly!

So while the iPad app appears to be available for all, the iPhone app only goes to the first 50 to get in line.

If you're not already signed up for Cramberry, you probably should sign up and give it a whirl before contacting them. With a little luck, I'll be checking out a free copy of their iPhone app shortly (don't have an iPad, nor any plans to get one, so checking that out will have to wait, despite the fact the download is already sitting in iTunes).

This post was updated a few hours after the original post to reflect that only the first 50 downloaders of the iPad app can get the iPhone app for free, which was only revealed by Cramberry in the email in which they sent the promo code for the iPad app.

Get audio recordings of any foreign language text for free

Earlier, I told you about how to get foreign-language text read to you online for free through computer-generated text-to-speech software. Text-to-speech software still doesn't quite pull off completely native language, so wouldn't it be great if you could actually get a native speaker to record some audio for you?

That's the whole concept behind RhinoSpike, a new, completely free website launched on Thursday by Thomas Hjelm and Peter Carroll, the two guys behind the language-learning blog Babelhut.

Read more... Here's how Thomas described RhinoSpike via email:

You submit [the target language] text you want to be read aloud/recorded by a native speaker. It goes into a queue for that language. Native speakers see your request, record their voice and upload the audio file. You download it and add it to your Anki/SRS flashcards or load it onto your MP3 player or do whatever you want to do with it.

You can also record your voice for people learning your native language. Doing so bumps your own requests forward in the queue, so native speakers will see them faster. Help others and you receive help in turn.

Helping others and getting bumped to the front of the line is a nice touch.

Thomas went on to explain how this might be used in conjunction with another of my favorite language-learning sites:

You could think of it like Lang-8 for audio files, except instead of getting corrections you are getting audio for any text you want. In fact, you can use the two sites together. Write a journal entry on Lang-8 and get it corrected by native speakers. Post the corrected journal entry on RhinoSpike and get it read aloud for you by a native speaker. Use the audio file for listening or speaking practice.

This meshes quite nicely with being able to get your own spoken language corrected on Lang-8, but I'd do it a little differently than Thomas suggests. After getting your writing corrected on Lang-8, submit your own audio recording of the text as an entry on Lang-8 with a link to the text on RhinoSpike. Then Lang-8 users can tell you what you're doing wrong on Lang-8 and provide you with a correct recording on RhinoSpike. And I don't think Anki and Lang-8 are the only tools that RhinoSpike will find synergies with. LingQ, for example, is all about having audio paired with text.

For RhinoSpike to be good at what it's trying to do, it'll need to obtain a critical mass of users. Given that it was launched just two days ago, it's nowhere near that point. As of this writing, there aren't more than 80 members on the entire site (4 pages in the profile list, a max of 20 profiles per page).

Given the number of users, it's not surprising that there aren't that many requests for recordings up there yet. Before I added some stuff to the site, there were only 17 audio requests on the audio request page, with Japanese topping off the list with 7 requests. And, of those 17 requests, there were only 6 recordings, and all were in Japanese done by a single user. I recorded four more in English and had my wife do one in Japanese, which made a total of 11 audio recordings in English and Japanese done by two users. Assuming that kind of participation rate is typical, their user numbers need to go way up to make this the kind of tool it has the potential to become.

After putting up my own recordings, I posted a bunch of requests for recordings of texts in six different languages. The same user who did all the other Japanese recordings came almost immediately and fulfilled my Japanese requests as well. The others (Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian) remain unfulfilled. With more users, RhinoSpike could very well become like Lang-8, on which native-speaker input is often immediate but in any case never takes long.

One thing that's probably holding back users on RhinoSpike from adding recordings is that it's a hassle to put the recordings up there. You've gotta record your own audio file and then upload it. They recommend Audacity, but I found it easier to simply record my voice with the Voice Memos app on my iPhone, sync the iPhone with iTunes so that the recording ends up in iTunes' music list, right click on the track in iTunes and convert it from an M4A to an MP3 from the contextual menu, dump the MP3 on my desktop, and then upload the MP3 to RhinoSpike. Recording from directly within the RhinoSpike web app, a feature found on Livemocha, is coming in the next version, but for now anyone who wants to upload audio recordings has to go through the hassle of using some other app to generate the audio file. I don't expect that many users will go through all this work to put up audio recordings.

Another issue that's going to limit users is the number of language localizations. It's currently available in English, Spanish, and Japanese, while it's possible to submit requests in a ton of other languages. I doubt the website will see nearly as many native-speaker members in languages for which it is not localized, so hopefully they'll start the crowdsourcing efforts to localize for various languages, as is common on many language-learning websites.

There are two other things that I noticed that could be improved to make the website easier to use. First, searching for friends is a pain. There's no way to filter the profile list to find native speakers of the language you're learning (and searching for, e.g., "Japanese" or "English" strangely produces no results at all). Second, there's no way to quickly find recordings. I'd love to be able to quickly look at all available recordings in a given language to be able to hear native speech, but there's no easy way to do this. As is, you've gotta click on the request and then, if there's a recording (and that's still a big if), you can listen to it.

Nevertheless, I would pretty much chalk off all of the above to the site still being a just-released web app. The bottom line is that RhinoSpike is a great start for a language-learning tool with a lot of potential, and I hope to do my (self-serving) part in bringing more users to it.

However, there is one thing I still don't get... how the heck did they come up with the name "RhinoSpike"?

Get Chinese pinyin for any text

While I couldn't find the equivalent of Hiragana.jp for Chinese (i.e., letting you convert an entire website and then browse it), there are a few good converters that will take a block of text and convert them from Chinese characters to pinyin for you.

There are lots of them out there that simply do it character by character, but as context can affect the tones (e.g., whether the characters are part of a word or not), the best ones take this into consideration.

Here are a two of the better ones:

• Popup Chinese is a Chinese-learning website with the well-known Adsotrans character-to-pinyin tool. It's also got long lists of HSK vocab that you can easily throw into Anki.


• Chinese Tools has a whole bunch of resources for the Chinese learner, including a character-to-pinyin converter.

Can you help me improve my language-learning routine?

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!

Review of iAnki for iPhone: Not very elegant or convenient, but gets the job done

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.

Links: Anki, AnkiOnline, iAnki

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.

Seeking recommendations for a spaced-repetition system that syncs between your iPhone and your desktop

I recently got an iPhone with one of my main reasons for doing so being to productively fill the time I have on the Tokyo subways when I can't grab a seat and break out my laptop. One of the things I intend to do with that time is using a spaced-repetition system ("SRS") to help expand my Japanese vocabulary. So I'd like to see if anyone out there has any recommendations for such a system.

There are a few features in particular that I'm looking for.

Read more... The most important is the ability to sync between, on the one hand, a desktop SRS app, such as Anki, Mnemosyne, or SuperMemo and, on the other, whatever I use on the iPhone. The idea here is that if I use the desktop app for a minute while on hold on a call at the office and then study on the iPhone on the way home from work, when I get home and sync with my desktop app I'll have my most up-to-date learning data. Accordingly, simply importing from a desktop app is insufficient for my needs.

The second feature I need is that I have to be able to use it on the iPhone while not connected to the internet. Part of my commute to work is underground (and it's also the part of my commute where I'm most likely to not get a seat), so needing an internet connection will not work. Accordingly, I can't simply use one of the SRS websites out there.

Finally, it's gotta be easy to enter the things I want to learn. And that means that I won't have to do it on my iPhone.

So... any recommendations?

I've so far only scratched the surface in my own research (and I'll of course report back when I have more), but I've been considering using Anki's iPhone system, which isn't an App Store app but somehow works nonetheless. I've also been trying out StudyArcade (and considering its $4.99 pro version), but I've yet to fully explore how it syncs up with Anki.