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 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.