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Google Translate to learn a language? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5661 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 9 of 30 25 February 2010 at 10:36am | IP Logged | |||||
[EDIT: Sorry, when I reread my post, it comes across as both preachy and negative. It isn't meant to. The main thrust is that going through 10000 sentences is a process rather than an aim.] I worry that you may end becoming a slave to ANKI, rather than following the greater spirit of AJATT. An important part of AJATT is going through the process of mining useful things, not just grabbing loads of sentences almost at random. It is the process that gets your mind pinging, not so much the time spent with ANKI (although that is still an important part of the overall method). There are two qualities of the sentences that your current approach may be missing: 1: They should be just a bit more difficult than you can currently manage. So, when you start out they should be very simple sentences, and as you progress you add gradually more complex sentences. Think of them as puzzles that are there to stretch you slightly beyond your current comfort level rather than completely drown you. If you don't take time to think about these puzzles when you first come across them (i.e. try to work out the translation yourself, by thinking it through) then your curiosity will probably not be stimulated. Bypassing the puzzle-solving process and simply copying the accompanying translations directly takes the initial challenge away so that you will not "connect" with the sentences, and studying them in ANKI becomes grunt work. At the very least, you need to look at a sentence and try to work it out, and think "That was trivial or too hard, so I will ignore it. But I almost worked that one out, so I will include it". Once you have gone through that, you can, of course, copy any trusted translation into ANKI. 2: Sentences do not live in isolation. AJATT relies on them being interesting and relevant to grab your attention and tie you back to some context. If you had just watched an enjoyable TV show, and picked out 10 interesting sentences (ignoring those that were too hard or too easy based on your current level), then when you review them your mind will flash back to the TV show and therefore you will associate those sentences with enjoyment and be able to see their value (in the context of the TV show). You mentioned that you are too lazy to mine sentences with these two qualities. But to be honest, I can't thing of anything more painful and unproductive than continually studying sentences grabbed at random from dictionaries and other dull sources. That path sounds like the hard and unpleasant one, not the lazy one. If you only have 30 minutes a day, how about spending 20 minutes of that immersing yourself in something you enjoy, and just 10 minutes with ANKI. This may mean, of course, that you can only add a couple of sentences a day, but at least you will have gone through the process of thinking though the sentences and building in your mind a context that makes them relevant. Overall, it seems that some people are taking the term "10,000 sentences" as if it were a method in isolation. It is not. Sure, AJATT and Antimoon both advocate using an SRS (and I agree this is very beneficial) but only as a small part of your overall study. Remember, the Antimoon folks took three years to learn English, and 10,000 sentences was only a fraction of their approach. Likewise, the most significant part of AJATT is that it is an immersive method requiring many hours of exposure per day (in fact, All The Time - i.e. every moment of every day!). Primarily focusing on grabbing 10000 sentences and cramming them with ANKI risks making you a slave to the tool, and my worry is that you risk missing out on the rest of AJATT (primarily immersion in things you enjoy) that make it so highly effective. Edited by Splog on 25 February 2010 at 1:57pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5527 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 10 of 30 25 February 2010 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
With that paragraph, I think you just completely changed my plans for what to feed into Anki. Thank you!
I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. The words and phrases I've learned from interesting contexts (whether they be from music, TV shows, etc.) have stuck vastly better than items I've learned from other methods. Seeing a word written (or hearing it spoken) and having your mind flash back to the original interesting context (the line from that great song, the scene from that funny show, etc.) works wonders for memory. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| CaitO'Ceallaigh Triglot Senior Member United States katiekelly.wordpress Joined 6849 days ago 795 posts - 829 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian Studies: Czech, German | Message 11 of 30 14 March 2010 at 1:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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I use Google Translate! I swear by it.
If the definition is clearly crazy, I use wordreference.com. Often, I get my vocabulary, phrases, and sentences from novels. Edited by CaitO'Ceallaigh on 14 March 2010 at 1:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| liyulianyanyu Newbie China Joined 5362 days ago 10 posts - 11 votes Studies: English | Message 12 of 30 16 March 2010 at 4:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think we can't relay on the so-called English tools.We must know of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary.And you must learn the grammmar well.
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6134 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 13 of 30 16 March 2010 at 5:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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I actually used Google Translate a little bit before I had a real course for French just to pick up basic sentence patterns and grammar. It seemed to work, but I agree that it should only be used for very simple stuff and even then it can have many errors. I still use it often to look up specific words when I don't have a paper dictionary handy, or when I am trying to find the plural form for a Swedish or German noun for which I cannot find anywhere else.
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| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5548 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 14 of 30 27 March 2010 at 3:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I just typed "that is a table" into Google Translate. A very simple sentence. This is how it translated it from English to German:
"dass eine Tabelle" Nice (lol)! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5527 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 15 of 30 27 March 2010 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've found it's really easy to confuse Google Translate using Korean (it seems a bit better at Spanish). Sometimes even just changing speech levels (like tacking a ~요 (~yo) onto the end of a base level verb) will get you a very different answer. Because of this, I've gotten in the habit of always trying a few variations as well (trying different speech levels, trying both the dictionary and conjugated form of the verb, trying with and without a subject or object particle for nouns, etc.), just to make sure it gives consistent answers for that word and hasn't just come up with something that is completely wrong (which does happen). Edited by Warp3 on 27 March 2010 at 10:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5978 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 16 of 30 28 March 2010 at 1:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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I use Google Translate often, but only to translate L2 sentences to English. It's really not that great for translating between two non-English languages usually, because it actually uses English as a middle step, so it gets a lot of "telephone game" errors because of the multiple steps.
When I translate to English (my native language), I can always pick out the mistakes pretty easily. It usually works well enough that I can figure out what it should really say. The advantage is that it's quick. I can type in a troublesome sentence and translate it without interrupting my reading flow too much. Going back to the "10000 sentences" questions, I actually add a lot of sentences to Anki without doing a dictionary translation. If you read a lot, you will figure out a lot of sentences without having to explicitly translate them. Once you've figured them out once, then Anki can help firm up that knowledge, but the true work of the system is done through massive amounts of immersion, with your SRS as a minor way to assist you with some increased exposure to items that may not come up as often on their own. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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