One of the points of contention in the ongoing back-and-forth between Steve Kaufmann and Benny the Irish Polyglot is whether Benny can truly pull off fluency in three months. Specifically, Benny is in Berlin studying German right now and will deem himself fluent if he can pass a really hard German test and if he can fool native speakers for 30 seconds that he is a Berliner.
Sounding like a native and amassing enough vocab to pass a difficult exam is impossible IMHO. Senseless hype.
I can confidently state that this is not impossible; I myself did with Portuguese exactly what Benny is trying to do with German. (And that's not even getting into wunderkinds like Daniel Tammet.) That said, I'm doubtful that Benny can pull this off in Berlin because there are some very important differences between his situation in Germany and mine in Brazil that will make it a harder task for him to accomplish than it was for me.
Read more...The tourist visa I got to go to Brazil was for exactly 90 days, and I stayed for the entire 90 days. I had never formally studied any Portuguese before arriving in Brazil, and in fact the only thing close to studying I had done at that point was reading some parts of a Portuguese grammar book more than a year before arriving in Brazil. And that book was for the Portuguese of Portugal, so it had a number of things that were useless for me in Brazil.
On the other hand, my Spanish was pretty good. I had studied Spanish throughout middle school and high school, and had previously spent a month in Mexico studying it more. Spanish is of course not Portuguese, but they are so close that the benefit of knowing one when studying the other shouldn't be downplayed; knowing Spanish was without a doubt a massive help in learning Portuguese.
On top of that, I had a great learning environment. I was living with a large Brazilian host family and there was almost always someone around to talk with. I also had a Brazilian girlfriend with whom I was constantly speaking. I didn't need to do anything but study Portuguese, so except for the occasional emails in other languages to my friends abroad (which was further limited by the hassle of a dial-up connection I had to use), it was all Portuguese all the time for me.
In terms of what I was doing to learn Portuguese, the first two weeks or so I focused on getting an understanding of the grammar. Then I moved onto exposure: music, comics (Spawn, in particular), books (a history of the Roman Empire was one I spent a lot of time on, but there were a number of others as well), television (which was always on when I was doing anything else), etc.
Naturally, I spent a lot of time getting the vocab down. I still have my digital Portuguese flashcards as they were when I left Brazil. The flashcards contained some 4,000 vocabulary words and phrases. Add to those a few thousand words that never made it to flashcards (because they were so much like English or Spanish that there was no need to do anything to memorize them, or that I just managed to pick up elsewhere) or that got deleted from the set once I knew them, and I'd estimate that I had at least 6,000 to 7,000 words in my head to some degree when I left Brazil.
Using Benny' standard for fluency—fooling native speakers for at least 30 seconds that you are a native speaker yourself and passing a really hard test—I seemed to have been fluent in Portuguese after my three months there.
When I was leaving Brazil, I managed to fool the lady at the airport check-in that I was Brazilian. I can't recall if it was precisely 30 seconds, but I'd venture that it was. I remember that I had said a few things to her, including something about having already weighed my bags and that they shouldn't be overweight, before giving her my passport. Once I gave it to her, she said, "You're not Brazilian?" When I told her I was there studying Portuguese, she was shocked to find out I had only been there for three months. I'm guessing somewhere in the course of our conversation I eventually said something non-Brazilian sounding, but, based on her reaction to my passport, I do think I had her fooled at the beginning.
Regarding the test, I came back from Brazil and took my university's Portuguese placement exam. I got placed out of all the language-learning classes and straight into the literature classes (i.e., the ones where you might be sitting next to a native Brazilian). I think that my experience shows that three months can prepare you quite well for difficult tests.
However, I'm doubtful that Benny will be able to pull it off. If you compare my situation in Brazil to Benny's situation in Germany, there are a number of things that gave me a big advantage. First, my Spanish abilities made Portuguese so (so, so, so) much easier. Benny doesn't have anything comparable with respect to German. Second, the only thing I was doing was learning or using Portuguese, whereas Benny is working (presumably not in German) and blogging in English, and that is likely eating up a big chunk of his time. Third, my guess is that the test that Benny wants to take is a heckuva lot harder than the test I took, so I'm not so sure that he'll be able to pass it as easily as I was able to pass the one I took.
Indeed, the only advantage that Benny has over me is that he's studied some German previously, but, based on what Benny himself as said, that recollection is faint at best, although it will nevertheless provide some familiarity.
So while I'd love to see Benny do exactly what he's going for, if I were a gambling man, I'd definitely be betting against him pulling it off.
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.
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!
I've recently been giving the totally free language-learning website Livemocha a spin. Livemocha is absolutely excellent for putting you in touch with native speakers and having them correct your written and spoken submissions, but its teaching method leaves a lot to be desired, and they still have some kinks to work out of the system.
Livemocha divides a language into courses, then units, and then lessons. For most languages, there are four courses that aim to get you to an intermediate level, and each course is divided into three units of about five lessons each. Lessons, in turn, are divided into four types of activities: learn, review, write, and speak.
Let me start with the last two and what I love about the site: how it links you up with native speaker tutors, and plenty of them at that. The "write" section asks you to write a short text, generally based on the lesson but you're free to meander off topic (and I frequently do), and the "speak" section asks you to read and record a passage of target language text. You then submit these to up to ten other users to correct for you.
Read more...Ideally, you'll want to submit your work to be corrected by native speakers, but even among native speakers your feedback will vary greatly. I initially began by just randomly selecting German speakers from among my friends and the website-suggested users, but I was able to quickly discover and prefer those who were giving me the highest-quality feedback. I now have a core group of tutors to whom I consistently submit such assignments to, and their feedback is phenomenal. They drill into my work to find even subtle mistakes and offer excellent explanations of what I'm doing wrong. So, while initially you may find that the feedback you get is not all that great, as you separate the wheat from the chaff you'll eventually end up with excellent tutors.
The other way in which Livemocha connects you to native speakers is via chat. You can do text chat, audio chat, and video chat. Livemocha encourages you to chat via their system by providing you with points for using it (more on that below), but given the rough feel of their chat capabilities I often find that we end up taking it out of Livemocha to MSN for text chat and Skype for audio or video chat. Despite the issues with Livemocha's own chat features, it stands as an excellent tool for putting you in touch with native speakers of your target language.
And you might be wondering how it is these people will correct your work for free. Like certainother other language websites, they use a deviously clever all-carrot, no-stick point system. You get points for studying, but also for teaching, i.e., doing things like correct others' written work. After you submit in the writing or speaking sections, you're presented with another learner's work to be corrected in your own language. This is ingenious social engineering; right after you've asked a bunch of people to correct your work, you're presented another's work to correct. How can you not? You actually can skip it, but I'd bet the skipping rate is pretty low.
You'll also find that, once you have your established tutors in your target language, you'll be eager to correct any work they send you in a quid pro quo; they're doing a great job for you, so you feel the need to do a great job for them. My only gripe, and I suppose it's more of a request for improvement than a gripe, is that I'd like to be able to sort my requests for corrections by the number of times the sender has corrected my work. For now, I do it manually by just trying to remember who has been helping me out.
Now let's turn to the parts that don't impress me so much. The "learn" section of a unit consists of a picture being shown with the text describing that picture below and a native speaker speaking the text. It's not always clear what the text is describing, so you're provided with a translation button that lets you see what the text is supposed to say in your native language.
The "review" section consists of exercises, of which there are three types.
Read: You select the picture that matches target language text.
Listen: You select the picture that matches target language audio.
Magnet: You put together a sentence magnet puzzle to match target language text or audio, which looks like this in the case of text:
Additionally, there are extra optional exercises, which include the above three plus "quiz" exercises, in which you are presented with a word, phrase, or sentence in the target language and must select the corresponding translation.
You can also make flashcards from the content in the lessons, or you can make your own flashcards from scratch. It's something of a hassle to make flashcards, and the testing method is the same as the "quiz" exercises, with incorrect answers selected from within the same flashcard set. These basic flashcards seem like something of an afterthought, and it's quite a hassle of pointing and clicking to make your own flashcards.
The core method is much like Rosetta Stone's; they provide you with the language, and you're supposed to figure out the rules.
As is always the case with such inductive systems, the problem is that that does not work very well for anything above a certain degree of complexity. I've been trying out Livemocha as a way to review German, and one of the issues I knew that I definitely need to review was the cases. The one-line explanation of German cases for the uninitiated is that certain German words, including nouns, adjectives, "the", "a", etc., change their form depending on how and after what they are used in the sentence. I had cases down pat before, but as I've not been using German a lot over the past few years the exact rules have slowly leaked from my head, and I thought I'd be able to pick them up using Livemocha.
But that was not the case. I frustratingly found myself making the same mistakes over and over again, and wishing I just had the rules presented to me so I could quickly refresh my memory. Ultimately, I turned to other websites and some grammar books I have to get a refresher. If this is the case for me, a person who is reviewing the rules, it would only be that much harder for someone taking their first crack at German to actually figure out what is going on in the grammar just by going through Livemocha's courses.
And I'm certainly unimpressed with the exercises' ability to actually test your knowledge. For one, you can often figure out the answer from words you learned earlier without needing to test the words in the most recent lesson. For instance, if you're studying adjectives, they might have "a fat man", "a skinny girl", "a tall boy", etc. But because they use a different noun for each, you can easily figure out what the answer is without knowing a thing about the adjective. Similarly, you can often use process of elimination to figure out answers, without really needing to understand what's being presented to you. For instance, pictures are often tested in groups of four. Once you've done the first three, you know the next answer will be the fourth. The same sort of process of elimination can be used in the magnet exercises. What's more, in the magnet activities, there is no tolerance for incorrect punctuation or the like. For instance, you might find "gut" and "gut." (i.e., one with a period and one without) as two separate magnets among the options. If you accidentally put the one without a period at the end of a sentence, it'll mark it wrong. While strictness has its place, this is most likely just a stupid mistake that doesn't reflect on your comprehension and hence should be ignored, but isn't.
Another practice I find suboptimal is their use of a single learning course for multiple languages. There is a core course that is simply translated to other languages to expand the system. While this makes it easier to incorporate more and more languages, it is not optimal for learning as the course will undoubtedly work better with some languages than others.
The last big group of issues with the site that I'll touch on are what appear to be growing pains: kinks that I would hope are temporary and will be worked out over time. These are the little things that take away from the experience.
Certain assignments ask you for things that haven't been taught yet. For instance, in German 101, Unit 2, Lesson 2, the writing assignment is "Describe the locations of a set of people and objects. Describe each. EX. The woman is on the yellow couch. She is not in the brown chair." However, up to this point the course has not covered how adjectives change in front of nouns. This means that your poor reviewers will have to correct all of your guesswork and it greatly increases the burden on them.
And the system still has mistakes outright in it. For instance, in one exercise, I came across this picture:
The text for this was "Wo ist er? Es ist im Karton." ("Where is he? It is in the box."). This is, of course, as wrong in German as it is in English, but it was that way in both the text and in the native speaker's recording. You would think that the native speaker would have at least flagged this for them so they could fix it instead of just reading it rote (if that was in fact a computer's voice, color me impressed). Another mistake I came across was "Der Junge hat keine roten Haaren" ("The boy doesn't have red hair"). The mistake is that there's no -n on the end of the word for "hair"; it should be Haare.
In addition to outright mistakes, there are also times when two or more pictures are the right answer, leaving you guessing blindly as to which one is actually the "right" answer. In the exercise below, the text says, "Where are they? They are in the box," and you've got to pick the correct picture. Well, are they referring to the candies in the box or the flowers in the box? It's totally unclear and you're left guessing which is supposed to be the right answer.
And here's another one. The text says "She doesn't have red hair." We can eliminate the guy and the lady with red hair, but which of the two non-redheads is this referring to? Only haphazard guessing will tell.
There is also generally bugginess in the responsiveness and behavior of the interface. There were a few times when I went through one "review" section and only got one or two wrong (out of 40) and ended up with a score like 70%. I can only attribute that to some sort of technical screw-up. There were at times time lags that resulted in incorrect clicking, and sometimes a click wouldn't register at all. This is particularly true when you have a Livemocha chat window open and are getting a new chat message.
Despite what now looks like a post full of griping and moaning, I would recommend Livemocha as a tool for language learners. Their teaching method is not all that great, but it's not terribly painful to click through a bunch of cards, and it's certainly helpful to hear the target language spoken by a native speaker. And, of course, you can skip it, if you want to. But the real gold lies in the site's ability to put you in touch with native speakers, and you should definitely arm yourself with that as one tool in your language-learning kit.
This page has lists of the top 10,000 words in each of Dutch, English, French, and German. As the page is in German, I've put together a little table to take you directly to the lists. The lists unfortunately do not have translations.
After the jump, the table and a another word frequency list for French. Read more...
As you may know, this blog is the companion site to a book I'm currently working called—you guessed it—Street-Smart Language Learning. The following is an except from the current draft of the manuscript. As I've yet to properly introduce myself on this blog, I've selected this excerpt from the book's introduction, which seeks to dispel with my story quickly so as to get readers to what they're really there for: how to learn languages.
When you tell someone that you speak eight languages, they are quick to label you as some kind of linguistic genius. And when you disagree with them, they assume you are just being modest. But as just such a person, I can tell you that I am no linguistic genius and I am not being modest when I disagree. Learning multiple languages hardly requires genius; our brains are all hard-wired to suck up languages, if only we approach language learning in the right way. Yes, that includes even you doubters out there who right now are saying, “Not me, I’m just not good a languages.” Yes, even you. With the right approach and a little bit of time, anyone can learn a foreign language. This book will help you formulate that approach and learn the foreign language(s) of your choice.
The rules that I’ve laid out for you in the subsequent parts of this book aren’t the result of any “survey of the literature” or the like. I’ve got no degree to make me an official linguist. In fact, I would say that my relationship to a linguist is the same as that of a criminal to a criminologist; they’ve got the data, the literature, and so on, while I’ve got the gritty experiences and the street smarts. These rules were developed over years, and to my own detriment even I didn’t always follow them, but to extent you can put these rules into practice you’ll be able to learn languages better and more quickly.
Before I arm you with all the tools you need to learn a language, let me first tell you a bit about myself and how I came to speak so many languages.
Read more...I was raised in an English-speaking Italian-American family just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I lived with my mother, father, grandmother, and sister. My parents and grandmother could speak Italian and initially tried to teach it to my sister and me. Unfortunately, after a few initial “I don’t wanna speak Italian!” tantrums from us, they gave up on it (and how I regret that now). They did, however, use it on occasion when they didn’t want us to understand, resulting in us picking up only certain choice exclamations (in addition to the stereotypical “Mamma mia!”, the not-so-vanilla “Vaffanculo!” comes to mind). This, and various relatives speaking in heavily accented English (including one who to this day swears that Italy under Mussolini was great), did result in me having a pretty good Italian accent when I ultimately did get back to studying it, but I definitely did not know enough to be considered anything other than monolingual.
My linguistic knowledge remained limited to English and handful of Italian phrases until middle school. Our school district kicked off language learning with a pretty worthless French/German/Spanish sampler in seventh grade. Based on your experience in that, you were supposed to pick which language you wanted to learn in eighth grade, and I went with Spanish. My choice was based less on what happened in that sampler than the fact that it was the closest of the three to Italian, so if I were ever to get to studying Italian I’d have an easier time, and that it was the de facto second language in the States. In class, I didn’t do poorly but there was nothing in particular that set me apart from any of the other students. However, Spanish was one of the subjects I liked and, knowing that languages are actually something that could be useful beyond primary school, I became eager to learn more.
I would finally get this chance as an upperclassman in high school after clearing out some of my other core graduation requirements. In eleventh grade, I added French. Thanks to its similarities with Spanish and a cooperative teacher, I was permitted to basically go at my own pace and managed to cover three years of our high school’s curriculum in one year. I followed up the summer after eleventh grade by taking a French course at nearby Chestnut Hill College, and in twelfth grade I found myself in the fifth – and highest – year of both Spanish and French.
That same year, I really wanted to take it up a notch. In addition to Spanish and French, I enrolled in a German class at high school, did an independent study in Italian with an Italian-speaking Spanish teacher, took a Japanese class at Beaver College (now Arcadia University), and started studying Russian for free under the tutelage of my kind French teacher from Chestnut Hill College, Sister Kashuba.
The results from that year were mixed. Spanish continued along well and by the end of high school I could hold rudimentary conversations with a friend of mine who, although born in Mexico and having spent the first few years of his life there, had previously lost all his Spanish and at that point was at basically the same level as me. Although I abortively tried to read Camus’ The Stranger on my own in French and continued to do other things on my own as well, my French teacher preferred to spend time talking about his designer shoes (in English, no less) than give us a period of French a day. My French only improved to the extent I could push it forward alone with my nose buried in a book.
My German teacher begrudgingly let me knock off the first year of German with a placement test, but, unlike my French teacher the previous year, she decided that I had to stay with the class, which was excruciatingly slow and seriously limited the progress I made. On the other hand, going at my own pace in Italian, its similarities with Spanish and French, and the fun of finally learning that when my relatives described things like putting ketchup on pasta condescendingly as “midigan” they were actually saying americano in dialect, or that pastafazul meant (duh!) pasta and beans (again in a dialect), resulted in decent progress in Italian. I had assumed that a college-level language course would be challenging, but my Japanese teacher was frustratingly of the opinion that Japanese is difficult for us poor Westerners and that we should go slow—real slow. We were supposed to cover two textbooks over two semesters, but we got through the first only after skipping a bunch of stuff and only managed to do a chapter or two in the second. Needless to say, I didn’t learn much Japanese. In Russian I made good progress, but with all the other things going on that year, and since I wasn’t getting graded, I didn’t have the incentive or ability to put the time into it that I would have liked to. Unfortunately, I have yet to return to Russian and that remains as far as I’ve gotten in the language.
Besides two off-the-cuff road trips to Quebec from my home outside of Philadelphia, where I did put some French to use in a very limited way, my first venture out of English-speaking domains was a three-week senior trip to Germany. A German exchange student I met while he was in the States offered to host a friend and me for three weeks. While in Germany, we naturally studied German but also took numerous day trips around Germany. While it was a good initial outing (and certainly a better use of the money than renting a beach house at the Jersey shore, as most of my high-school classmates did), it was limited in utility for language learning by its short duration and the fact that I was with another native-English speaker most of the time.
A month or two later would lead to a trip that would result in the first language I would become proficient at: Japanese. Sometime during my senior year of high school, a friend of mine had told me about an announcement for a scholarship to study abroad with Rotary that I had somehow missed, but, as soon as I heard about it, I knew it was right up my alley. I ended up getting the scholarship (which, as I understand it, is quite a bit easier for Americans than non-Americans to get due to a big demand to come here; some other popular destinations seem to be France and Spain). I put Japan down as my first choice simply because, among the languages I had studied, it was the most different from English and would require more time on the ground to get the language down. As I was the only one in my group to choose a non-Western destination as my first choice, I got it. I left for Japan in August 1997.
Unlike some of the other exchange students in Japan, I had already graduated high school so my year in Japan didn’t really count towards any diploma or degree, leaving me free to focus solely on learning Japanese. While there, I began to crystallize a lot of the language-learning methods I had begun working on back in the States. I’ll get into the details of those in the rules below, but suffice to say that I was able to learn a great deal in what would turn out to be some ideal language-learning environments. Returning to the States to start college in the fall semester of 1998, I began studying intensive Chinese at George Washington University. But the broader picture was a language-learning plan that I had begun working on while in Japan and finalized during my freshman and sophomore years at college. The basic plan was that I would spend every single college break (i.e., based on the typical U.S. college schedule, about a month in winter and three months in summer) studying languages abroad, plus another year in Japan (to get my Japanese beyond high-school level), a year in China, and a semester in Spain (due to university requirements, I needed to be back on campus; as we had a campus in Spain that counted as “on campus”, I opted for that rather than heading back to DC). Since I was able to stay at the homes of various friends I had made among other exchange students, all I typically ended up paying for was plane tickets, and tuition abroad was usually cheaper than tuition on campus, so all of this was a surprisingly affordable thing to do.
The plan worked well. Winter 1998 was in Mexico, summer 1999 in Brazil, winter 1999 in Costa Rica, summer 2000 in Germany, academic year 2000-2001 in Japan, academic year 2001-2002 in China, summer 2002 in Taiwan and Italy, fall semester 2002 in Spain, winter 2002 in Italy, and summer 2003 in France. In 2003, I started law school at the University of Pennsylvania with a similar plan in law school, except that it was focused on Chinese alone, so winter 2003, summer 2004, winter 2004, and part of summer 2005 were all spent in China. After a month-long stop-off in Japan in January 2006, I spent the rest of calendar year 2006 in China to obtain a master’s degree in Chinese law from Tsinghua University. The program was primarily in English—a big downer for language-learning purposes—but I was able to take a couple courses in Chinese (and somehow struggle through them).
I met my Japanese wife while in Japan in 2000. We initially spoke English (at the time, I was trying to get her to break up with her then-boyfriend, and I compromised on my language-learning rules in order to claim the linguistic home turf while trying to woo her away from him), but then went to Japanese for a while. We are now back speaking English (as we live in the States, her English proficiency is more important than my Japanese proficiency), but she speaks Japanese to our children and we also typically have a Chinese nanny or Chinese babysitters in order to teach our kids Chinese. English, Japanese, and Chinese are in constant use around the house, and, from time to time, I use Italian with my mom and French with my wife when we don’t want the kids and/or my mom to understand what we’re saying.
And that’s basically where I am. In sum, I can speak English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German, and that’s roughly in order from strongest to weakest. I wouldn’t go so far as to describe myself as native-level or fluent in any of these languages, although I might be able to fool native speakers over the phone for a few minutes. For at least Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, I would describe myself as proficient, meaning that I can function reasonably effectively in a business setting in fields that I am familiar with. In all of these, however, I can easily do the basic “get around” stuff and hold social conversations, and I think if needed I could get them all up to proficiency in short order. Moreover, in my work as a lawyer, I have so far had to review contracts or conduct other business in all of those languages, and, with the help of an online dictionary or two, it hasn’t been a problem at all. (As an odd little aside, I’ve even had to do a preliminary review of a document in Dutch (i.e., just to determine who should be reviewing it), and I was able to do that thanks to an online dictionary and its similarities with German.)
After the jump,Below you'll find a list of my favorite free online dictionaries for each of the languages I speak. There are numerous other dictionaries out there that you need to pay for, but I'm interested in doing this without shelling out a dime because, well, because you can, so why shell out that dime? Moreover, some of these websites have a lot more than just language-learning dictionaries, but here I'm just looking at their dictionaries.
If you'd like to just cut to the chase and get to a list of dictionaries by language, click here. Otherwise, read on for a brief description of each dictionary. Read more...
WordReference.com: This is one of my favorite online dictionaries and my start-off point for Italian and Spanish. It has generally great word coverage. For Chinese and Japanese, my big complaint is that they don't tell you how the characters are pronounced.
Languages: English to and from French, Italian, German, Russian, and Spanish. In beta, English to and from Chinese, Czech, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Turkish.
Reverso: This is my start-off point for Portuguese and a great back-up for the others. I generally prefer WordReference to this because I've found their coverage to be a bit better, especially for phrases, but it's a close call. The specialized dictionaries are also a welcome addition.
Languages: English to and from Chinese, French, French business terms, French computer terms, French medical terms, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Spanish computer terms.
ALC: This is my start-off point for Japanese and my favorite dictionary of them all. From what I gather, in addition to having a standard dictionary, this dictionary trolls the net for examples on the net where the phrase in question is in both Japanese and English and then adds that to their database. Even if there's no specific dictionary entry, you'll be able to get the third-party translation. I've been able to find difficult legal terms here that I was unable to find anywhere else. My only complaint is that, as it's made for Japanese users, it doesn't tell you how kanji words are pronounced. Which is why I still make frequent use of the next one...
Languages: English to and from Japanese.
Goo: Goo's dictionary is a more standard dictionary than ALC that has good coverage and provides the pronunciation for kanji words.
Languages: English to and from Japanese.
Jeffrey's: While pretty rough in appearance, this serves as a valuable back-up Japanese dictionary and is the only one I use that is aimed at Japanese learners rather than Japanese speakers.
Languages: English to and from Japanese.
MDGB: My first stop in Chinese. Geared toward English speakers, they have great word and phrase coverage and also provide the pronunciation and audio recordings of pronunciations.
Languages: English to and from Chinese.
Dict.cn: This is an excellent dictionary that takes a page from ALC and gets samples from the net. It is another of my favorites, although it doesn't provide you with the pronunciation of characters as MDGB does.
Languages: English to and from Chinese.
Iciba: Another solid Chinese dictionary, similar to Dict.cn.
Languages: English to and from Chinese.
Lexilogos: This site is great because it lets you look up your word into all the other major dictionaries, including my mainstays of WordReference and Reverso, all from a single page. It makes for a one-stop-shop in French.
French to and from English and many, many other languages.
LEO: This dictionary beats WordReference in terms of the number of phrases it generates for each word, and hence has become my first stop when looking up German words. It is one of several very good English-German dictionaries.
Languages: English to and from German.
BEOLINGUS: Another solid entry in the German category, with results similar to LEO.
Languages: English to and from German. German to and from Portuguese and Spanish.
English Grammar Online: Yet another solid entry in the German category, again with results similar to LEO.
Languages: English to and from German.
SpanishDict: This is another very solid Spanish dictionary that I turn to from time to time. They claim to be the largest Spanish-English dictionary on the net.
Woxicon: This one gives very short, typically one-word translations between multiple languages at the same time. While it does not have lot of depth, I've found it particularly useful for figuring out, say, whether the way something is expressed in one Romance language is the same in another.
Languages: To and from Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
LookWAYup: This one limits what you get in the free version to entice you to purchase an upgrade version. I use it primarily as a back-up when one of my mainstays turns up blank.
Languages: English to and from Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Ultralingua: Ultralingua makes high-quality dictionaries for download or for subscribers. The free dictionaries they host on their website allow unlimited access to their dictionaries but a limited number of searches per day. While this means they cannot be your mainstay dictionary, they are a great back-up dictionary to try out when other ones aren't given you the word you're looking for.
Languages: English to and from Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish. French to and from German, Italian, and Spanish. Portuguese to and from Spanish.
Beyond the above dictionaries, if you can't find the word you're looking for try plain old Google. The trick is to write the phrase in the target language and then write another phrase in English that you think would be in a translation of it. Doing this, you can typically find a text that contains the word and is translated into English (which is exactly what ALC does and is why I love it so much), and then all you need to do is figure out how they match up. You may need a native-speaker tutor for a bit of help in that regard (if they can't just tell you what it means to begin with).
Here are my favorite dictionaries for each of my languages in the order I typically turn to them.
Wiktionary has frequency lists of words in various language. There are a variety of languages covered, including English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and others. These are great for focusing your vocabulary efforts in the most efficient way possible.
The Times Online is reporting that Spanish is set to take German's position as the second most studied language in the U.K., right after French.
This change is in line with those languages' respective rankings by GDP. However, you might expect French to fall a bit, but being next-door neighbors likely keeps it up there.
I'd imagine that the popularity of a given foreign language in a given country is based on three things: the economic opportunities in the language (of which the global GDP represented by such speakers is probably a pretty good proxy), the country's proximity to speakers of that language, and the history of that language in the country.
With France, Spain, and Germany all among the wealthiest countries in the world and all nearby, plus a long history of strong relationships with all three countries, it's no surprise that these make the U.K.'s top three.
According to the National Centre for Languages' report, Chinese is also on the upswing in a major way. Whereas Spanish is in 50% more schools than in 2005, and Italian in about 150% more, Chinese is in 600% more. This would suggest that the perceived opportunities that Chinese has to offer are growing, and that's in line with their GDP ranking.
What I'm left wondering is where is Japanese in all this?
There are many reasons to pick a particular language to learn. If there is a de facto second language of importance in your country (Spanish in the States, French in Canada, etc.), it probably makes a lot of sense to choose that language, particularly if you don't see any globe trotting in your future. If your relatives or spouse speak another language, it's not a bad idea to learn that language. And many still choose a language because they like the way it sounds (français, anyone?).
My preferred method of choosing which language to learn is based on its economic utility. As I do tend to be a bit of the globe-trotting type, I've never really limited myself to any region or the like. Without such limitations, it makes a lot of sense to choose the languages you learn based on the percentage of world GDP represented by speakers of those languages.
Read more...And that was roughly how I chose the languages I've studied: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, and Italian. I knew which countries had the largest economies and I put their languages on a checklist, so it's hardly a coincidence that the languages I speak coincide with those at the top of the top-20 list below.
Rank
Language
Percentage of world GDP
1
English
29.3%
2
Chinese
12.5%
3
Japanese
7%
4
Spanish
6.5%
5
German
5.5%
6
French
4.6%
7
Portuguese
3.3%
8
Italian
3.2%
9
Russian
2.6%
10
Arabic
2.5%
11
Hindi
2.3%
12
Korean
1.7%
13
Indonesian
1.4%
14
Dutch
1.3%
15
Bengali
1%
16
Turkish
0.9%
17
Thai
0.9%
18
Polish
0.9%
N/A
Other
12.5%
This list was put together by Unicode.org and the data covered by the list runs from 1975-2002, although projections through 2010 for the most part retain the same order. One interesting thing to note about the projections is that the "other" group declines to only 10%, meaning the relative importance of the top 18 languages increases. It's also worth noting, if unsurprisingly, that internet use by language largely corresponds with this list, according to data collected on Wikipedia.
There are two things that this data leaves me wanting. First is the obvious update of the data to cover through 2008, as well as longer projections going forward. Second, I'd love to see a chart based on the actual number of speakers of a all languages, rather than on the number of native speakers. For example, estimates for the number of English speakers vary from around half a billion to a billion, depending on the skill level at which you count someone as a "speaker". This would result in counting multilingual people multiple times, which might make it trickier to slice and dice the data to get a GDP figure, but I'm sure some enterprising statistician somewhere could get something we could work with.
Given the large percentage of GDP controlled by English speakers, it seems to be quite a rational choice that, if you don't already speak English, you learn it. I imagine that English's role as a global lingua franca would push it even higher if that enterprising statistician I mentioned above came along to give us the data.
I came across one memorable instance of seeing English function as the global lingua franca while interning during college in the Japanese Diet (Japan's legislature) in the office of Yuriko Koike, whose background includes a degree from Egypt and having literally written the book on speaking Arabic in Japanese. During one visit with some Arab dignitaries of some sort, they lamented that neither side was learning the other's language, but rather using English as a medium for communication. They suggested increasing learning on both sides, but somehow I doubt much ever came of it.
This lady reads Russian to me. There is some major heavenly body action going on in the sky behind her.
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.
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