Language Trainers Blog

Recently, I dipped into the Chinese microblogging world, ruled by 微波 (wēi bó). Like Twitter, it can be completely overwhelming to the uninitiated, especially with the millions of users and the Chinese interface. I wasn’t sure how much time or energy I wanted to spend on it, and how much benefit I would end up getting out of it. So here I sit at the edges without throwing myself in.

On one hand, there is a wealth of information out there, and so many people to interact with. I know some non-native speakers who rave about the service, and about how you can say so much more with Chinese characters than with English in the 140 character word limit.

On the other hand, there is a lot of slang and language shortcuts to navigate through, which is very intimidating for the average language learner.

Have you had any luck learning from foreign language blogs or microblogs? Would you recommend one over the other?

In the continuing wake of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami disaster, many people are turning to Japanese channels as different and possibly more current news sources. For those of us who don’t understand Japanese, this can be a bit of a challenge. Luckily, there are a couple of ways that you can get around the language barrier if you are not conversant in Japanese.

NHK, the public broadcasting channel in Japan, offers NHK World, with TV broadcasts in English and radio broadcasts in 17 languages. NHK News offers bilingual, English-only and English subtitled shows.

Yokoso News offers the brilliant service of live translation of live Japanese NHK News broadcasts. You can watch them as a stand alone stream, or if you have access to NHK, you can listen along with watching the live broadcasts.

However you are getting your news, I hope that your thoughts, like mine, are with the people of Japan.

One of the recent trends in China is for people to watch video lecture series from high profile universities in the USA. Students and regular workers alike have started learning through these free open courses, and are benefiting greatly from them. The first series I looked at, The Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food, from Yale University, has already been viewed over 50,000 times on Sohu.

Video learners are using the opportunity to receive free instruction from overseas, and are getting support through online study groups based in China. Many people are getting up earlier or using their lunch breaks and commutes to watch videos online or in downloaded formats.

The videos are being translated and subtitled by groups of volunteers, and are available in English with both English and Chinese subtitles. The huge task of translating, proofing, and adding the subtitles for just one lecture will typically take a group of over 10 people around 70 hours to complete. The benefits to thousands of Chinese learners are huge, though.

One of the things I like best is that Chinese students are getting genuine English to learn from, as well as the contents of the lectures. Sure, people don’t speak like lecturers in real life, but having exposure to this content will help with learning English and learning in English. The fact that the subtitles are bilingual means that people can pause and go over sentences in detail.

Now I just need to find some foreign language lectures that are subtitled in English. Any recommendations?

Full article: Shanghai Daily

This isn’t foreign language related, but might be of interest to people who like typography. Wordmark will show you your chosen text in every font installed on  your computer, in one webpage. You can then change the size, choose white on black or the opposite, and select your favourites and filter them out to compare them next to each other.

For those people, like me, who have changed a font over and over again in a word processor before deciding which one is best, this is brilliant. You can put in a long or short string of text, but the shorter the text is, the more fonts you will be able to compare on one screen.

If you are a designer of any kind, or just want a fancy heading for a document, this tool will save you time and make sure you get the look you want.

I’ve recently found the website Wordnik, which I would struggle just to call an online dictionary. It not only collects definitions from well-known dictionaries, but it provides example phrases and sentences (including online publications, blogs, and tweets), pronunciations, tags, statistics, and a strong user-generated component. It even gives you the potential Scrabble score (if it is a valid Scrabble word). People can create lists of words based around themes, so if you look up a word, you can immediately see what other words and phrases it is commonly found with. There is also a pretty well-used comments feature.

For example, I clicked random word, and got raptured. Raptured, meaning in a state of rapture, has a Scrabble score of 11, was most popular in the early 1800s (and the present, possibly because of religious connotations), and has one related photo on Flickr.

For prescriptivists, Wordnik’s resident pronunciation specialist (or orthoepist) provides his own pronunciations for nearly 1800 words (to date), and for descriptivists, any member of the site can upload their own audio. Edit: if you’d like orthoepist Charles Harrington Elster to pronounce something for you, add your word to The Request Line.

For the average dictionary user, this may be far too much information, but for those of us who are interested in seeing how language is used today (and how it was used in the past), this is a wonderful resource. I’d be interested to see if the concept will be extended to other languages, as well.

Check out the Zeitgeist to see what’s happening on the site. As of today:

Wordnik is billions of words, 828,852,001 example sentences, 6,458,204 unique words, 209,445 comments, 146,866 tags, 76,745 pronunciations, 46,119 favorites and 864,672 words in 27,830 lists created by 60,337 Wordniks.

So, a new Apple patent, which may or may not ever be used, is aiming to censor our texts. With the intention of providing better parental or corporate controls, this app aims to disable sending of messages until certain banned words are removed or changed.  It also provides an alternative use as a language learning tool.

The censoring function is supposed to discourage ‘sexting‘ and inappropriate language, both for kids and for adults. Should a parent (or a corporation, or jealous spouse) want to limit what their child (or employee, or suspect spouse) is sending out, they could turn on the censor, which would disable the send function until the language is changed. Bye bye inappropriate school-aged messages; bye bye sexual harassment suits. I’m not sure how smart the system is, though, and whether or not misspellings and ‘txt spk‘ abbreviations would get through (mmm, sxxxy).

The language learning side is interesting, though. Restrictions can be set for students so they must use their target language in emails or texts (either completely, or, say a certain number or percentage of foreign words) before the messages can be sent. It’s not completely practical (not everyone I send messages to will understand what I’m saying), but an interesting concept. Say I wanted to use a certain percentage of foreign words in my blog posts, it could come in handy.

Nothing’s been confirmed about what happens if you write dirty words in foreign languages, though!

Full article: Oxford University Press Blog.

A research team at Carnegie-Mellon University has created a self-educating computer system called Never-Ending Language Learning (or NELL). It was designed to be able to work out the connections between words based on how they are used together.  The system was given pre-defined relationships between words and categories, and using this information, it can create its own interpretations of other words and phrases.

NELL was designed to learn as humans learn, and using information from websites all over the internet, it can also update its knowledge if it finds conflicting information (unlike humans sometimes!). In the future, researchers hope that NELL will be able to work out context in regular human speech, and provide answers to questions without a real person to moderate.

It is still a new technology, despite already having learned over 440,000 facts with 87% accuracy (at time of writing), so it does have its limitations.

From the New York Times article, Smarter Than You Think - Aiming to Learn as We Do, a Machine Teaches Itself:

Take two similar sentences, he said. “The girl caught the butterfly with the spots.” And, “The girl caught the butterfly with the net.”

A human reader, he noted, inherently understands that girls hold nets, and girls are not usually spotted. So, in the first sentence, “spots” is associated with “butterfly,” and in the second, “net” with “girl.”

“That’s obvious to a person, but it’s not obvious to a computer,” Dr. Mitchell said. “So much of human language is background knowledge, knowledge accumulated over time. That’s where NELL is headed, and the challenge is how to get that knowledge.”

Initially, NELL ran by itself, but researchers decided it would be best to begin correcting significant mistakes as they went. One amusing mistake was quoted again in the article:

When Dr. Mitchell scanned the “baked goods” category recently, he noticed a clear pattern. NELL was at first quite accurate, easily identifying all kinds of pies, breads, cakes and cookies as baked goods. But things went awry after NELL’s noun-phrase classifier decided “Internet cookies” was a baked good. (Its database related to baked goods or the Internet apparently lacked the knowledge to correct the mistake.)

NELL had read the sentence “I deleted my Internet cookies.” So when it read “I deleted my files,” it decided “files” was probably a baked good, too. “It started this whole avalanche of mistakes,” Dr. Mitchell said. He corrected the Internet cookies error and restarted NELL’s bakery education.

So, the technology isn’t perfect yet, but these corrections can be viewed in the same way as a language teacher correcting your usage of a particular word. We all need a helping hand sometimes!

Update: NELL is now on Twitter (@cmunell)! Updates consist of a word or phrase and a category she thinks it belongs to. Followers are asked to send in corrections to improve the process. Sometimes she’s totally correct (I think “John MCain” is a #politician (http://bit.ly/crJr2e)), and sometimes not so much (I think “US President-elect Barack Obama” is a #politicianus(http://bit.ly/bHryqO)). What is a politicianus? Oh, I think she meant US politician. Right.

I’m still not 100% sure where I sit on the e-books vs print books issue, and tend to think there is a time and place for both. With the rising popularity of e-book readers and tablets (most notably the Kindle and the iPad), though, it’s inevitable that people will be doing more of their reading on the screen rather than on the page.

Owning a traditional print dictionary has always made me feel slightly more involved with language, but for logical reasons the print dictionary is becoming very out-of-date. With modern search functions, space saving advantages, and the ability to constantly update material without reprinting, online and electronic dictionaries are becoming obsolete.

The latest version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is not even going to print.  It is going to be re-released online in December, on a subscription basis. Because they won’t be limited by the size of a physical book, they will also be able to make available the historical thesaurus of the OED, containing almost every word in English dating back to Old English times. Unfortunately, the prices for the subscription are pretty steep - £7+VAT for a week’s access, and £205+VAT for a year. You could sponsor a couple of third world families for that much (and probably buy a few print copies of the OED), so I hope they change their minds before they go the way of The Times, who reportedly lost 90% of their readership after they started charging for their website.

If you’re looking for an alternative, The Guardian has done a good comparison of various print and online dictionaries.

I’ve had a bit of a change in my schedule lately which means that I have a much longer commute than before.  I hate getting up early in the morning, but I’ve been trying to look at the upside - I have more time before and after work to listen to music, catch up on news, watch TV, or, most importantly, work on my language study.  I’ve been flicking through some flashcards on the subway, and also listening to some language podcasts (right now I’m listening to Chinese Lessons by Serge Melnyk and lessons from Popup Chinese).

I’ve never really taken advantage of the speed adjustment on my iPod Touch before, but I was listening to a dialogue the other day that was just that little bit too fast.  I slowed it down to half speed and tried again.  It was a little bit jumpy, but generally worked quite well.  After listening to that specific dialogue a couple of times at half speed, I changed it back to normal and it was fairly comprehensible.  I also made use of the little go back button (I don’t know what it’s actually called) which jumps you back 30 seconds instead of having to try to rewind with the slider.  I still haven’t found a use for the 2x speed, but maybe it would be a slightly more accurate way to cue up the part of the podcast you need.

For intermediate and advanced learners, perhaps this function will allow you to subscribe to podcasts completely in your target language.  There are podcasts about pretty much anything these days, so it is another great way to integrate your language and your interests.  If the speakers go too fast, slow it down for the first couple of listens, and then see if you can understand the regular speed.  Try news programs for a slightly slower pace.

Unfortunately this function doesn’t exist for regular audio files or voice memos (just podcasts) on iPod, so it’s not that useful for your own recordings.  If anyone knows of any apps or other players that can get around this, drop me a note in the comments.

I recently stumbled across Digital Dialects, a website providing vocabulary-learning games for not just one, but 60 different languages.  These range from Afrikaans to Zazaki, a few of which I hadn’t even heard of (including the latter, which is spoken in eastern Turkey).   The games are simple and focus on basic word categories like numbers, food, and animals.  Each game has images and many have sound, as well as options such as choosing to read a word or listen to it.  Each language has a different combination of games depending on the vocabulary, and I think they would be suitable for both children and adults at a beginner level.  All of the games are free to use.

Whether you are just starting out in a language, want to pick up some useful vocabulary before a trip abroad, have a child who is studying, or just want to know how to count to 10 in as many languages as possible (I met a kid in Cambodia who could do this in at least 10 languages), check it out.