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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5858 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 1 of 9 24 March 2011 at 2:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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Here is a technique that might be of interest to someone starting to learn a new language, or for someone who just wants to learn to read several languages at a basic level.
Start with the Voice of America News in Special English. http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/ Click on any interesting article that has audio. Most or all do. The text will appear along with the play buttons for the audio in English. Open Google Translate in a new tab or window in your browser. http://translate.google.com Select From: English To: Your target language. Copy the URL from the VOA page into the left box on the Google Translate page, and click Translate. Start the Special English on the VOA page. Read the GT page in your target language. At the end of that article, change GT to your second target language and click Translate. Play the VOA Special English again and read the article in your second target language. Repeat with your TL3, TL4, etc. The GT translation will not be perfect, or perfectly aligned with the English audio, but it is a great exercise in learning vocabulary in several languages, and it should get you to a basic reading level in several languages without too much effort. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5978 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 2 of 9 24 March 2011 at 3:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You can do this at project-syndicate.org with English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and a few other languages occasionally. Their articles are human-translated, and some of them do have corresponding English audio. A nice benefit is that if you copy and paste several parallel articles side by side into excel (unicode format) it'll retain the spacing, and the paragraphs will match up correctly.
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| jazzboy.bebop Senior Member Norway norwegianthroughnove Joined 5410 days ago 439 posts - 800 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian | Message 3 of 9 24 March 2011 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm not sure I would ever trust GT in translating to the target language. You might end up wasting time filtering out things which are wrong with the translation and learning incorrect things.
That project-syndicate site is incredible. I am making some parallel articles for French-English now, very useful site. Using parallel texts from that site with a dictionary seems a good way of helping reading comprehension in the long run. Edit: Spelling. Edited by jazzboy.bebop on 24 March 2011 at 6:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5858 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 4 of 9 24 March 2011 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
Whenever my vocabulary in all my target languages gets better than GT's vocabulary, then I'll stop using GT. However, it seems like GT is improving at a faster rate than I am. I take your point. GT can lead you astray occasionally. But for the purpose that I suggested, of building up your vocabulary in new languages, I believe the advantages of GT greatly outweigh the possible disadvantages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jazzboy.bebop Senior Member Norway norwegianthroughnove Joined 5410 days ago 439 posts - 800 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian | Message 5 of 9 24 March 2011 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
Fair enough, I'd like to see how someone got on with it in practice in the long-term. Personally I'd prefer learning vocabulary in context from interesting articles in the target language knowing the language is correct, and using a dictionary rather than doing it the other way round and risk learning stuff that's wrong. Thankfully I have some dictionary apps on my iPod so I can look stuff up very quickly. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 9 24 March 2011 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
GT is constantly wrong. It teaches incorrect grammar, wrong forms of words, ways of expressing things which aren't used and are sometimes incomprehensible.... Use it *to* your native language, by all means. But for language learning, using it to translate to your target language is a huge mistake. Luckily, there are vast amounts of texts (with audio in English and/or your target language), which you can machine-translate to English... pop-up dictionaries may also help you. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5199 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 9 30 March 2011 at 1:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for that info, I had no idea that pasting paragraphs into Excel would cause them to be split into rows - that's EXTREMELY useful and I think you've just solved my problem of how to quickly make paragraph-matched bilingual texts; I'd never have thought of using a spreadsheet (I have OpenOffice and it works in that too.). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5978 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 8 of 9 31 March 2011 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Another excel formatting trick is to increase the width of the columns you're using, highlight the columns, right click and go to "format cells" -> "alignment". Click "general" for horizontal and "top" for vertical, and click "wrap text". This will automatically adjust the cells to the size of the sentences and make everything nice and readable. I'm sure OpenOffice has the same options if you poke around a bit.
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