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Ultimate Language Learning Software? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4706 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes  Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 1 of 3 06 April 2012 at 7:58pm | IP Logged |
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Hi all,
Thinking of how Anki / SRS changed my language learning life, and because I'm particularly interested in using technology as a mean to help learning better and/or faster, I was wondering: What do you think is missing today in the landscape of computer tools and that would really help you? Or if you don't know, which areas of language learning do you think could benefit the most from the use of computer? For instance, it could be a tool that helps you learn vocabulary: as opposed to SRS which helps you remember it, some tool could favour your acquisition daily by introducing new words in context, perhaps taking into account your current level in the language? It could also be a tool that suggests appropriate reading (online news, for instance) that fit your centres of interest as well as your goals: intensive reading or extensive reading. Or pehaps something that would help you find the root of a word if you can't guess it from its inflected form? For instance, in Korean I'm often confused as the agglutination can modify the stem and blur the distinction between different verbs, and only context can help me recover it. I have quite a lot of ideas that I have been developing in my head for a few months, but now that I want to start implementing them, the task seems quite huge, and I would like to focus my effort on things that other language learners could find interesting as well. Therefore, if there is something you've always missed in your language learning process, or if you like some of the ideas proposed above, please take a moment to think of it, and I'd gladly examine them. The goal for me is to explore new language processing techniques and build tools that can easily (as much as possible, sometimes it can't be "easy") used by people to help them in their study. Suggestions can be language specific, but anything language independent would obviously benefit more people. I'm mentioning this because, as any of you learning some "lesser studied languages", all the nice tools are there for the big languages, and the smaller ones get almost zero attention. Language independent tools can help correct this trend! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Majka Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic kofoholici.wordpress Joined 4685 days ago 307 posts - 755 votes Speaks: Czech*, German, English Studies: French Studies: Russian | Message 2 of 3 07 April 2012 at 5:14pm | IP Logged |
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Here are few of my geek tools for language learning, all used for learning French. It is used for intensive reading and grammar study from texts:
1. Anki 2. Audio Lesson Studio 3. Treetagger 4. few scripts with Autohotkey 5. TTS (6. subs2srs + minilyrics) All of this works together and I use it mostly for listening/reading. It works like this: - get audio (Librivox or similar) with etext, ideally with translation in your native language or one of the stronger languages, aligned if possible. Bible is outstanding source because of the built-in alignment. - with help of Autohotkey script and Treetagger, I can get from the target language text: * interlinear text (original with marked verb forms in superscript - lemmatized form - translation) * word list - both complete list of words in text, in order they appear in text, and "new" words only - compared to general vocabulary where I compile words from all these sources - I take the word list first, make a real vocabulary list from it through translating it. Step by step, I prepare audiolessons through Audio Lesson Studio. It does nothing else than runs the vocabulary through a TTS and generate a vocabulary lesson for me. One can choose how many words will make one lesson. - I learn first part of the vocabulary. Only then, I start listening to the audio, or listening/reading. Usually, I need only to read the original sentence. If needed, I have the "lemmatized" sentence below, meaning the basic word forms. If there was aligned translation available, this is the third sentence in my text. But I find that it isn't necessary. It helps in the step before (making vocabulary list, because you can check the dictionary translation). When listening, there aren't really any new words - I learn them before I start with this part. As soon as I find an unknown word, I know it is time to stop and learn more words in the vocabulary list (go through next audio lesson). - sub2srs + minilyrics: First, I create timed lyrics with etext as source. Then, I can cut the audio with subs2srs in sentences and throw it in Anki. I take only parts I find interesting. Here is an example of my reading text, prepared as described above (Bible/John): Au commencement était^Im^ la Parole, et la Parole était^Im^ avec Dieu, et la Parole était^Im^ Dieu. au commencement être la parole, et la parole être avec Dieu, et la parole être Dieu. Na počátku bylo Slovo, to Slovo bylo u Boha, to Slovo byl Bůh. and corresponding wordlist: commencement NOM être v parole NOM et KON avec PRP Dieu NOM ; When I am listening only, I concentrate on understanding. At this moment, I am sure that I should know all the words - so, I should understand it all. When I am listening/reading, my focus is on grammar. This is the reason I have marked all the verb forms. But I concentrate on one specific point at time - this could be one verb tense, looking how the different past tenses are used, sequence of tenses, use of prepositions, certain formulations... 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| juman Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5246 days ago 101 posts - 129 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: French | Message 3 of 3 07 April 2012 at 8:46pm | IP Logged |
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I have one little technical utility I use quite a lot now when listening on my L2 audio. As I am a beginner I'm still
working with being able to separate words in the audio I am listening too as well as catching all the small things that are so important.... For example in French words sometimes ends with the beginning of the next word when speaking and an S sometimes is pronounced as a Z. So to make this more clear there is a utility called Sox which can slow audio down like this : sox infile.mp3 outfile.mp3 tempo -s 0.5 # Would slow down the audio 50% and put it in outfile.mp3 play infile tempo -s 0.5 # Play the file directly slowed down I know that other software like Audacity can also slow down audio but sox does a much better job when using the -s switch for spoken word. Edited by juman on 07 April 2012 at 9:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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