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

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

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

Get your free apps, after the jump.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use Lang-8 and Cinch to get your foreign-language speech corrected

I previously explained how to use Lang-8 and Snapvine to get recordings of your foreign-language speech corrected. Unfortunately, Snapvine is going out of business tomorrow, but Cinch comes through to let you do pretty much the exact same thing.

How to do it, after the jump.

Read more... I've so far tried this out only once in Italian, with the following recording:


It worked just as expected; Lang-8 users quickly came back and told me where I was screwing up.

Here's the step-by-step process:

1. You'll need accounts on both Lang-8 and Cinch, so go ahead and sign up for those.
2. Once you've done that, go to your Cinch and click on "Record a Cinch".
3. Press the button to record a message.
4. Add up to 140 characters of text as a title or the like and press "Submit".
5. Click "Link" under your profile pic next to the recording. (If you can't do this right away because the recording is "Pending", try reloading the page; that resolved the issue for me.)
6. Copy the URL from your browser window.
7. Head on over to Lang-8 and click on "Write a new entry".
8. Now paste the URL that you copied over on Snapvine into your entry, add in any additional text you want (an explanation of what you're hoping they'll do is probably helpful), and submit it.
9. Await your corrections. They will arrive shortly!

Besides needing to jump through all the hoops noted above, I've got two complaints about this set-up on Lang-8. First, unless the correctors on Lang-8 actually correct some text as well, you can't provide Lang-8's "thanks points" to them. Second, there's no quick way for them to provide you with a recording of their own (although the above process works for corrections as well as for submissions). That said, you could always just get a native speaker's recording from RhinoSpike.

There are also two other issues with Cinch that weren't issues with Snapvine. First, Cinch puts an annoying "Cinch!" at the beginning of each audio recording, so you have to hear that stupid piece of branding repeated every single time you listen to a Cinch recording. Second, as far as I can tell, Lang-8 does not support direct embedding of CinchCast audio as it did for Snapvine, so you've just gotta provide the URL so that your Lang-8 friends can click through to Cinch's site to provide you with feedback.

What would truly be spectacular is if Lang-8 would support this right out of the box. Doing it through Cinch is OK, but the process could be made much more streamlined.

One more cool thing about Cinch is the number of ways you can get audio recordings on there. One way is that you can call a U.S. number on your cellphone to leave recordings (and then add them to Lang-8 later). They've also got an iPhone app that you can use to record and upload audio files whenever the mood hits you, so you can record some foreign-language speech, upload it to Cinch, and then make Lang-8 entries out of them to get your pronunciation, etc., corrected.

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"?

Kudos to Transparent Language for what they're doing for Haiti

This is one time when I'm happy to recycle a quote from a press release:

Transparent Language Inc. announced today the release of free versions of their Haitian Creole language software based on the British Red Cross Emergency phrase list. The language learning company has added the 62 common medical questions and statements from the British Red Cross to its Haitian Creole Byki software. In the hope that these software programs will enable thousands of people to better mobilize and respond to the emergency, Transparent Language has made them all available for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Web Browser, all at no charge.

I commend you, Transparent Language!

Links:
Emergency Drives Thousands to Learn Haitian Creole [Transparent Language]
Free Haitian Creole Language Learning App for iPhone and iPod touch! [Transparent Language]
Free Resources for Haitian Creole Language Learning [Transparent Language]

NY Times' "The Web Way to Learn a Language" is misleading and incomplete

The New York Times last week ran an article by Eric Taub entitled "The Web Way to Learn a Language". For the most part, the article is an uncontroversial list of some of the better known language-learning resources on the web, followed by a grab bag of a few lesser-known, language-specific resources plus a few iPhone apps.

That the article is an incomplete list of the numerous resources available on the internet is probably the nature of the medium, but it also to some extent reveals Eric's prejudices about language learning: that some kind of structured "class" is needed, along the lines of those found in the offerings of Rosetta Stone, TellMeMore, Livemocha (see my review of it here), Babbel, and BBC Language. Some things that are not really part of a course fall into his grab bag at the end, but he completely misses out on great resources like iTalki, Lang-8, or LingQ, which respectively can be used, among other things, to let language learners freely tackle whatever content they like in speaking, writing, and reading and listening.

However, the article is shockingly misleading in how it characterizes the results of one language learner's experience.

Read more... Here's what the article says:

The young woman … was born in Iran and spoke only Farsi until her arrival [in the U.S.] two years ago. What classes, we wondered, had she attended to learn the language so well?

There's that assumption that a "class" is needed, plain as day.

"I didn't," she said. "I used RosettaStone."

And that's where the article leaves it. And what are you left thinking after that? Naturally you end up thinking that Rosetta Stone is the only thing you need to sound just like a native speaker. But let's rewind and repeat for a second…

…spoke only Farsi until her arrival [in the U.S.] two years ago.

Uh… say again? She's been living in a place where she's getting tons of exposure to her target language for TWO YEARS?

For those of you who are wondering, living in the place where your target language is spoken will generally do wonders for your language abilities. Let's assume she speaks Farsi at home. I would still wager that she's been going to a U.S. school, has native-speaker friends, watches U.S. television, reads U.S. websites, has an English-language Facebook account, etc. To slavishly suggest what the marketers are hoping would be suggested—glory be to the software!—without checking to see what other exposure she might have been getting to her target language is practically negligent.

Indeed, the sole fact that she's been living in the U.S. for two years could be more than enough to explain her native-sounding English. A friend of mine from Belarus moved to the U.S. when she was 15. I met her when she was 18, by which time she was completely indistinguishable from a native-English speaker. After spending about two years in the U.S., my wife began getting asked if she was a native-English speaker. After just a year in Japan, even I was able to briefly fool people on the phone into thinking I was a native-Japanese speaker. And none of us had used any software, while all of us had spent has spent significant time in places where our target language was spoken.

If the article's young woman had just arrived in the airport from Iran speaking native English and said the only exposure she had to English was Rosetta Stone, then I would be very impressed indeed. But to uncritically suggest that exposure to English via Rosetta Stone's software somehow played a more prominent role in her language learning than other avenues of exposure—especially for someone who in all likelihood was getting a lot of exposure to her target language—is doing readers a disservice.

Link: The Web Way to Learn a Language [New York Times]

Use Lang-8 and Snapvine to get your foreign-language speech corrected

Update: Snapvine closed shop on March 31, 2010, but you can still get your foreign-language speech corrected on Lang-8 using a similar service called Cinch.

Lang-8 is designed to help you get your writing corrected, but with a little help from a tool called Snapvine, you can also get your speech corrected.

How to do it, after the jump.

Read more... While using Lang-8 lately, I noticed that one of my Japanese-speaking correctors often submits posts in English where he additionally includes both the Japanese text and an audio recording of the Japanese. Now, him providing the Japanese is a boon for Japanese learners, but it quickly dawned on me that this could work in the other direction just as easily; Lang-8 users could critique audio recordings of learners' target language speech.

To provide these audio recordings, he used Snapvine, which allows you to record "audio blogs". Today, I put this idea to the test with the following two audio recordings, the first in Japanese and the second in Chinese:

Comment | Copy This

Comment | Copy This

Sure enough, I got back corrections for the audio recordings on Lang-8 just as I would for any written submission. And it's real easy to do. Here's how:

1. You'll need accounts on both Lang-8 and Snapvine, so go ahead and sign up for those.
2. Once you've done that, go to your homepage in Snapvine and click on "create new post".
3. Now you can record a message. By default, it selects your phone as the way to record, but click on the tab "Microphone" to use your computer's mic. Record away.
4. Add a title (and any of the other things that you care to add—you'll see what's there on the page) and press "Publish".
5. Click "Share" and copy the URL that you find under the text "Copy and paste this URL into an email or instant message".
6. Head on over to Lang-8 and click on "Write a new entry".
7. Now paste the URL that you copied over on Snapvine into your entry, add in any additional text you want (I've been putting in a little bit of an explanation), and submit it.
8. Await your corrections. They will arrive shortly!

Besides needing to jump through all the hoops noted above, I've got two major complaints about this set-up. First, unless the correctors on Lang-8 actually correct some text as well, you can't provide Lang-8's "thanks points" to them. Second, there's no quick way for them to provide you with a recording of their own (although the above process works for corrections as well as for submissions).

What would truly be spectacular is if Lang-8 would support this right out of the box. Doing it through a quick trip to Snapvine is OK, but the process could be made much more streamlined.

One more cool thing about Snapvine is the number of ways you can get audio recordings on there. One way is that you can call a number on your cellphone to leave recordings (and then add them to Lang-8 later). That of course is applicable to the iPhone as well, but with the iPhone you also can benefit from another of Snapvine's features: audio file uploading. By using the iPhone Voice Memo app whenever the mood hits you, you can record some foreign-language speech, upload it to Snapvine, and then make Lang-8 entries out of them to get your pronunciation, etc., corrected. Very sweet.

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.