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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes Post Reply
23 messages over 3 pages: 13  Next >>
Ari
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 6581 days ago

2314 posts - 5695 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese
Studies: Czech, Latin, German

 
 Message 9 of 23
16 September 2012 at 11:06am | IP Logged 
Some people find that writing a word out by hand makes it stick better in your memory. Surely then baking the word into a cake would burn it into your brain forever.
3 persons have voted this message useful



Jeffers
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4908 days ago

2151 posts - 3960 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German

 
 Message 10 of 23
19 September 2012 at 8:42pm | IP Logged 
Baking cookies for language learning is such nonsense!! Surely the item you bake should
be culturally appropriate: pakoras for learning Hindi, croissants for learning French,
etc. If you use the cookie method indiscriminately, you'll obviously end up with a poor
accent.
12 persons have voted this message useful



nakrian keegiat
Diglot
Groupie
Thailand
Joined 4906 days ago

70 posts - 172 votes 
Speaks: English*, Thai
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 11 of 23
27 September 2012 at 8:41am | IP Logged 
I used the bake method for a while and it makes learning the new vocabulary fun but I had to stop because I found reviewing old words to be far too messy.
8 persons have voted this message useful



pfn123
Senior Member
Australia
Joined 5082 days ago

171 posts - 291 votes 
Speaks: English*

 
 Message 12 of 23
28 September 2012 at 4:11am | IP Logged 
montmorency wrote:
"Bake your way to Language Fluency": Take hold of the little biscuit and say the word on each side, repeating as many times as you like, then you pop it in your mouth and eat it, thinking about both words as the cake goes down.


Instead of learning the vocab this way, you could use it as a reward system for self-testing. As follows:

1. Make biscuits for each lessons, and put in biscuit barrel.
2. Whenever you want to revise, open biscuit barrel.
3. Take out biscuit and read aloud one side.
4. Say opposing word (L1 or L2, depending which you looked at first).
5. Flip biscuit and check. If right, eat biscuit, if wrong, put back in the barrel for another day.

This sounds fun, but you're right, bad for the waist. You know your repetitions are spaced too far apart if the biscuit is stale. Better than statistics, lol.

You could extend the method. Biscuits are small, so you can only do words. What about sentences? You could do '10,000 sentences on 10,000 bread sticks'.

But I'm a bad cook. So in my case, this method may not suit me. I would probably go from language study to food poising. A novel progression for me :P
1 person has voted this message useful





Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6702 days ago

9078 posts - 16473 votes 
Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 13 of 23
28 September 2012 at 2:29pm | IP Logged 
I just buy a package with biscuits at the supermarket. Everything is written in several languages on the package (at least here in Denmark, US may be different).

On my desk I have a 1½ l Tetra Pak with orange juice, produced at a certain Stiftung in Neckarsulm in Germany. The know-alls should be able to identify the company from these informations, but that's not the important point here. It is the fact that this carton does its utmost to teach me English, Greek, Finnish, Swedish, Danish and Italian. I'll skip Finnish for now, but maybe later.

And from my hidden reserves I have now also fetched a severely hyperpolyglot 1 l pomegranate juice from a company named Dimes, which is fluent in English, Turkish, Chinese, German, Hungarian, Makedonian, Albanian, Romanian, Polish, Bosnian, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Estonian, Danish, Norwegian,Russian, Bulgarian, Greek and Georgian and some kind of Arabic. Well, now I feel that it would be sacrilege to open it, drink the contents and throw the packing away. I should erect a temple for it instead somewhere in my home.

Edited by Iversen on 28 September 2012 at 2:32pm

2 persons have voted this message useful



montmorency
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4827 days ago

2371 posts - 3676 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Danish, Welsh

 
 Message 14 of 23
28 September 2012 at 6:43pm | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
I just buy a package with biscuits at the supermarket. Everything is
written in several languages on the package (at least here in Denmark, US may be
different).

On my desk I have a 1½ l Tetra Pak with orange juice, produced at a certain Stiftung in
Neckarsulm in Germany. The know-alls should be able to identify the company from these
informations, but that's not the important point here. It is the fact that this carton
does its utmost to teach me English, Greek, Finnish, Swedish, Danish and Italian. I'll
skip Finnish for now, but maybe later.

And from my hidden reserves I have now also fetched a severely hyperpolyglot 1 l
pomegranate juice from a company named Dimes, which is fluent in English, Turkish,
Chinese, German, Hungarian, Makedonian, Albanian, Romanian, Polish, Bosnian, French,
Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Estonian, Danish, Norwegian,Russian, Bulgarian,
Greek and Georgian and some kind of Arabic. Well, now I feel that it would be sacrilege
to open it, drink the contents and throw the packing away. I should erect a temple for
it instead somewhere in my home.



I'm slightly surprised that a translation sceptic such as yourself should accept these
translations so readily.

I'm surprised you don't routinely scan them in and OCR them, feed them into Google
translate, and cross-check them. I believe you are an IT person, so you could probably
knock up an automated system for doing this in no time. Admittedly scanning some of the
packaging might be awkward, but a good digital photograph should also work.

And of course, once scanned (or photographed), they no longer need be kept once empty,
although the idea of a linguistic packaging temple sounds rather fun. With the right
kind of craftwork skills, one could of course make the temple out of the
packing.
1 person has voted this message useful



Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6438 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 15 of 23
30 September 2012 at 4:21pm | IP Logged 
montmorency wrote:
Iversen wrote:
I just buy a package with biscuits at the supermarket. Everything is
written in several languages on the package (at least here in Denmark, US may be
different).

On my desk I have a 1½ l Tetra Pak with orange juice, produced at a certain Stiftung in
Neckarsulm in Germany. The know-alls should be able to identify the company from these
informations, but that's not the important point here. It is the fact that this carton
does its utmost to teach me English, Greek, Finnish, Swedish, Danish and Italian. I'll
skip Finnish for now, but maybe later.

And from my hidden reserves I have now also fetched a severely hyperpolyglot 1 l
pomegranate juice from a company named Dimes, which is fluent in English, Turkish,
Chinese, German, Hungarian, Makedonian, Albanian, Romanian, Polish, Bosnian, French,
Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Estonian, Danish, Norwegian,Russian, Bulgarian,
Greek and Georgian and some kind of Arabic. Well, now I feel that it would be sacrilege
to open it, drink the contents and throw the packing away. I should erect a temple for
it instead somewhere in my home.



I'm slightly surprised that a translation sceptic such as yourself should accept these
translations so readily.

I'm surprised you don't routinely scan them in and OCR them, feed them into Google
translate, and cross-check them. I believe you are an IT person, so you could probably
knock up an automated system for doing this in no time. Admittedly scanning some of the
packaging might be awkward, but a good digital photograph should also work.

And of course, once scanned (or photographed), they no longer need be kept once empty,
although the idea of a linguistic packaging temple sounds rather fun. With the right
kind of craftwork skills, one could of course make the temple out of the
packing.


I use the "packaging method" too. In general, the translations of ingredients are very good. Advertisement on the packaging is another story, and there are surprisingly often differences in contains traces/may contain traces disclosures.

In general, these are very literal translations of physical ingredients, without any literary pretensions, and running them through google translate would make the error rate shoot up, not down.

1 person has voted this message useful



montmorency
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4827 days ago

2371 posts - 3676 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Danish, Welsh

 
 Message 16 of 23
30 September 2012 at 6:39pm | IP Logged 
Well to celebrate the Forum recovering from its near-death experience of a couple of hours ago, and it still being the weekend, I'll indulge in more posting silliness:


I adapted Iversen's wordlist method to use a hardback notebook, as I don't do well with loose bits of paper (even if I later put them in a folder). However, I found I was suffering from an innate over-reverence for hardback books (even cheapish notebooks), such that I didn't like the idea of writing in a lot of mistakes that would have to be crossed out or torn out.

So I went back to using loose sheets of A4, folded into 4 to make the columns (I couldn't write in smaller columns, and not having a black belt in Origami, I couldn't fold it into 5 anyway. So I eventually fill up the paper with my repetitions, or if I'm fed up of repetitions, a new list. And when I'm happy with the words, I write them in that hardback book as a sort of record of learning, although I leave enough space for future repetitions if I can overcome my book reverence one day (perhaps by buying a more expensive notebook, so the old one is expendable).

But what to do with the loose sheets? I could hoard them (my natural instinct), but that would not assist on the Domestic Harmony front. I could put them in the recycling bin. But I felt that was still a bit of a waste.

So being something of an eco-freak, I decided to tear them up into small pieces and mix them into the compost bin.


Symbolically, as the earth outside absorbs and transforms the paper, and becomes fertilized, I see my brain being fertilized with the words.


If I was really keen, I could use edible paper and a pencil (graphite isn't toxic, is it?), and eat the lists, and truly "internalize" this knowledge.


As it is, I will probably just end up with a garden full of Danish- and German-literate worms!




Edited by montmorency on 30 September 2012 at 6:43pm



1 person has voted this message useful



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