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!

This is your brain on languages.

The image you see here is a visualization (which is obviously not comprehensive) of how a given piece of information in a language might get lodged into your brain. The piece of information could be anything: a vocabulary word, a grammar rule, pronunciation, a character, etc.

Every one of those lines emanating from the piece of information connects with one kind of exposure. The more exposures you get, the more connections your brain draws to that piece of information. The more repetitions of a given kind of exposure, the stronger that exposure becomes (imagine the lines getting thicker with each exposure). The stronger and more plentiful your exposures are, the more likely you are to remember the piece of information.

Exposure to a language can be largely divided into reading, listening, writing, and speaking. It doesn't matter if an exposure is via reading/listening (i.e., input from an external source) or writing/speaking (i.e, output to an external target). These traditional ideas of "output" and "input" are both input as far as your brain is concerned.

Output is input.

Get ebooks with audio for free on LibriVox

LibriVox bills itself as "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain". Translated from that cute catch phrase back to English, that means they have audio book versions of books that are in the public domain, with links to the textual versions as well.

Read more... The vast majority of books with recordings are in English (nearly 10,000 of them), but there are a few thousand books in other languages as well, with Chinese, French, and Italian particularly well represented. (You can search for books by language on their advanced search page.) Because these books are all in the public domain, they tend to be old, so you probably won't be getting the most recent lingo in any of these languages.

They also give you the ability to contribute to their collection of audio recordings. I wonder if anyone's going to try to use RhinoSpike to add content to LibriVox.

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"?

Japan's foreign-language teaching industry valued at a cool $8.7 billion

There's an interesting article in The New York Times saying how Japan is gaga over learning English from Obama's speeches. They apparently even go gaga when they can't really get what he's saying; he's just that moving.

While that's fun and all, the most interesting part of the article was this little tidbit:

The publishers [of learning resources using Obama's speeches] are trying to tap into a foreign-language teaching industry [in Japan] that the Yano Search Institute said was valued at ¥767 billion, or $8.7 billion, in 2008. The figure includes the cost of books, CDs, dictionaries, e-learning programs, standardized English tests, and the cost of private language lessons. The institute, in Tokyo, says the majority of the spending is aimed at learning English.

Just to see it with all the zeroes, that's $8,700,000,000. To put that number into perspective, that's more than the GDP of 46 countries as listed in the CIA World Factbook. And that's in 2008—hardly a stellar year for the world economy.

So if you're in the language-learning industry and Japan's not a major focus for you, it's probably time to make a Japan plan.

The best free online Portuguese-English dictionaries

Continuing my series on free online dictionaries (previously covering Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish), after the jump you'll find my favorite, free, online Portuguese-English dictionaries.

Read more...

1. WordReference.com: Like with Spanish, WordReference.com comes in first on my list of Portuguese-English dictionaries. However, its Portuguese dictionary is not as good as its Spanish dictionary primarily because there seems to be a big gap between the two in terms of word count. For Portuguese too there are forums available in which you can get answers to specific questions, but the forums are much less developed than in Spanish. You should still be able to post any question about how to say something in Portuguese that you might care to, but the body of already-answered questions is much smaller than in Spanish. What's more, the Portuguese dictionary seems to be very Portugal-centric, so for those of us that consider Brazil our home in the Portuguese-speaking world, that's a big minus.


2. Reverso: Reverso's another solid choice for a dictionary, but Wordreference.com seems to have it beat in terms of breadth, and certainly in terms of the forums. The one thing I do like about Reverso is that, when there are multiple Portuguese definitions of the English term, it gives you a parenthetical that helps you figure out which is the appropriate term (take the entry for "stock", for instance). It's sometimes clearer than Wordreference.com because of this.


3. LookWAYup: Look way up doesn't have the word coverage that the above two do, and its definitions are pretty basic, but on occasion I've found it has filled a blank the other two couldn't.

Just as with Spanish, I'll also note Ultralingua here. It's a pretty solid dictionary, comparable to Reverso, but they limit you in the number of searches you can do per day, hoping you'll pay to have no such limit, so it's not really free. That said, it's worth checking when you're struggling to find a definition in one of the dictionaries above.

All in all, the currently available dictionaries for Portuguese aren't quite as good as those for Japanese, Chinese, or Spanish. The most fundamental problem is their limited word coverage, but Portuguese dictionaries also don't have as many example sentences or options to hear the pronunciation of the words online. However, with Brazil on its way up as one of the BRIC countries, I'm hopeful that this situation will improve over time.

As always, let's hear what you've got to say in the comments below—especially if you can point me to an even better dictionary that I missed!

The best free online Spanish-English dictionaries

My series on free online dictionaries (previously covering Japanese and Chinese) continues. Today I've got my favorite, free, online Spanish-English dictionaries for you, after the jump.

Read more...

1. WordReference.com: WordReference is my first choice in Spanish, and it's often the only choice I ever need. Not only does it provide you free access to a few different traditional (read: dead-tree) dictionaries whenever you look up a word, but it also has its own content.
   
   If none of those get you the definition, then it's time to turn to WordReference.com's forums. With hundreds of thousands of entries in the forums, I've almost always found that whatever I'm looking for that's not already in the dictionary is already in the forums. And, when that fails, posting something in the forum will get you a quick response. For example, I put up this post when I was trying to figure out how to say "I'll spare you the details" in Spanish (f.y.i., it's "Te ahorraré los detalles"). I got the answers I needed in a minute. That's right; one, single minute.


2. Reverso: Reverso doesn't have quite the depth of WordReference.com's content, but it is a solid dictionary and once in a while I manage to find a phrase there that I couldn't find in WordReference.com. Given the breadth of WordReference.com and its powerful forums, I rarely use this, but it does provide a good back-up.


3. SpanishDict.com: SpanishDict.com takes third place here because it doesn't seem to have quite the breadth of the first two. It does have concise definitions, so it might be a good thing to use if you're just starting out and don't need the level of detail found in WordReference.com. Like WordReference.com, it also has forums used in a similar manner, but they're no where near as developed as WordReference.com's.

There are also two other online dictionaries that bear mentioning but not inclusion in the above list: Diccionarios.com and Ultralingua. Because you can only perform a handful of searches in these dictionaries per day (they limit you in the hope that you'll buy an unlimited version), they're not really completely free, but they can serve as a good fall-back when none of the other dictionaries are getting what you need. If you use them only in that way, you're pretty unlikely to ever hit their daily-use limit.

You might note that I didn't mention example sentences or the ability to listen to words being pronounced at all above. That's because, unlike the selections in Japanese and Chinese, there are no dictionaries that I'm aware of that implement these features in Spanish. Although you can find pretty much any word you like in the above dictionaries, you're often on your own to find a way to hear the pronunciations (here's one way to do that) and to find example sentences. There are of course some example sentences in the dictionaries above, but there's definitely no systematic sentence collection from net sources like that found in the Japanese-English dictionary ALC.

As always, let's hear what you've got to say in the comments below—especially if you can point me to an even better dictionary that I missed!

The best free online Chinese-English dictionaries

Continuing my series on free online dictionaries (for Japanese, see here), today I present you with my favorite, free, online Chinese-English dictionaries, after the jump.

Read more...

1. nciku: Nciku is my first stop when looking up a Chinese word. I've found that they simply cover more of the words I need than the other dictionaries on this list. They often supply numerous example sentences, which also puts them ahead of most of the other dictionaries here.
   
   They supply the pinyin for the words you look up, and pinyin is supplied for example sentences via a pop-up when you hold your mouse over them. The latter is kind of a pain because you can't copy and paste it and you can't see it without doing something, but you can always copy and paste the Chinese word itself into the search field to get copyable pinyin.
   
   Example sentences can be pronounced via a pretty natural text-to-speeh program which goes beyond the simple character-by-character pronunciation of MDBG, but there's no pronunciation button available for the definitions.
   
   Another very convenient feature is that you can write characters by hand to look them up—a great feature when you can't recall the reading.
   
   If you're curious about what "nciku" means, see here and here.


2. Dict.cn: My second stop is usually Dict.cn. More aimed at the Chinese learner of English, Dict.cn's strong point is their example sentences sourced from the net, similar to ALC for Japanese. There is no pinyin and no pronunciation of Chinese words.


3. MDBG: If you dig around the internet for Chinese-English dictionaries, you'll surely run across some of the numerous online dictionaries based on the CEDICT project. But the site serving as the caretaker of the CEDICT project and one of my favorites Chinese-English dictionaries is MDBG.
   
   MDBG has a large breadth of vocabulary and always provides the pinyin. MDBG can even color code characters and pinyin syllables by tone. Audio pronunciations are provided, but they pronounce each character as if it were alone, i.e., they don't take into account systematic tone changes based on the previous tone. Like nciku, you can also write characters in with your mouse to look them up.


4. iCIBA: A lot like Dict.cn: aimed at Chinese learners of English, strong point is example sentences (which also seem to be sourced from around the net), no pinyin, and no pronunciation of Chinese words. They tend to have more, but simpler, example sentences than Dict.cn, and also will serve up related encyclopedia entries.


5. Reverso: Reverso has pinyin but no pronunciations. The word coverage generally seems to be less than the others above, but they are an additional option that I turn to occasionally.

Know of a dictionary that belongs in this list? Drop a line in the comments below!

This post was updated on October 6, 2009, to clarify the name of nciku and to note that nciku does in fact have pinyin (thanks to doviende of Language Fixation for the clarifications).

Get the text of Japanese podcasts with Podcastle.jp

The Japanese government seems to be doing a few things that are pretty useful for language learners. I noted a few while back that they've made the official Japanese-English dictionary of legal terms. That unfortunately is probably only of use to lawyers and the like, but last week I discovered another gem, again courtesy of Japanese tax dollars^*, that is of more general use for Japanese learners: Podcastle.

I've been trying to find some Japanese podcasts for which the text is also available, without much success. LingQ's list of resources surprisingly has nothing suitable, and googling was turning up little. For whatever reason, there seem to be few Japanese podcasts that also provide transcripts.

But then I stumbled upon Podcastle.

Read more... Here's how Podcastle.jp describes itself:

Podcastle is a service that lets you search the audio of podcasts in Japanese. Voice recognition technology converts the audio into text. Users can then freely edit any recognition errors.

So, basically, they use a less-than-perfect voice recognition technology (because, after all, I don't think one exists yet that gets close to 100% accuracy) and then users edit the computer-generated transcripts to fix errors.

As I've noted before, one of the Japanese-language podcasts I've been listening to regularly is Yoichi Ito's Business Trends. And, sure enough, it's on Podcastle.jp. I went through a few of the transcripts, and overall their accuracy is pretty good. Indeed, many of them have hundreds of corrections. That tells me that the crowdsourcing is working well, but also that the voice recognition technology must leave quite a bit to be desired.

However, even with the crowdsourcing, the transcripts are not completely accurate. I was listening to one podcast and I noticed that a term appears to have been outright skipped. The term in question was スローダウン suro-daun, which means "slowdown" in the sense of the economy slowing down and is taken directly from the English term. The term was said quickly and somewhat quietly, and I could see why the voice recognition technology might have missed it, but I had no trouble understanding it so I'm sure native-Japanese speakers are able to hear it just as easily—but it remained completely omitted from the text. (I became a crowdsourcee by making the addition myself.)

Another cool feature of Podcast.jp is the ability to follow along with the podcast. You can play the podcast and Podcast.jp will indicate what text you are currently listening to. It's not completely accurate, but it's usually within a few words of where the audio is.

Until something more accurate pops up, this is a pretty good way for Japanese learners to get audio combined with text. The biggest problem is, of course, that the text doesn't always match up with the audio, so it's helpful if you know enough Japanese to figure out when the text might be screwed up. But by and large, it's accurate and good enough to help you get many of those terms you didn't quite catch in the audio.

Despite it's limitations, I'd love to know about any similar things that are available in other languages, so if you've got the info, please drop a line in the comments below.

P.S. If you're wondering how I figured out that this is a government-run project, take a look at their "Credits" page (in Japanese):

Podcastle is released as the research results of the Podcastle Project of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, an independent administrative agency.

So if this was made with taxpayer dollars, I wonder if there's a way to get the research results—and the code—for free. If there is, someone with skills in working the Japanese bureaucracy please do so, and make this available for all languages ASAP.

Get foreign-language text read to you online for free

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 online dictionaries 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.

Read more... What I found was Smartlink's text-to-speech website.

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.

5 Free English-Learning Tools to Help You Get Into Business School

The following is a guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer, whose name you may recognize from her guest post on Aspiring Polyglot earlier this week. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about accredited online colleges for OnlineColleges.net and guest blogs regularly on language-related topics.

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.

Links:
15 Free Language Learning Podcasts [Aspiring Polyglot]
15 Free English Language Learning Sites [Al Jamiat]
15 Free Hi-Tech Language Learning Tools [English Virtual Community]
20 Free Online College and University Lectures [Debt-free Scholar]

The best free online Japanese-English dictionaries

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:

1. 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.


2. 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.


3. 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.


4. 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.


5. 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.


6. 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.


7. 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.

Slow down foreign-language podcasts on your iPhone to hear that word you missed

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.

P.S. The Japanese-language podcast seen in the image above is Yoichi Ito's Business Trends.

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!

List of content with both audio and text, courtesy of LingQ

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.

Links: LingQ