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Dream Language Learning App | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 1 of 19 18 September 2012 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you use the iPad or another similar tablet, what would you envision as the ideal language course?
Unlike a book which is limited in functionality, use and space, an app format course could potentially contain all a learner could want, taking them from zero to advanced, using audio, video, games, SRS, links, forum functions, even the ability to add reading modules that perfectly match the course (or a peer-driven database of material), etc. For instance, you could click on any word, any time, hear it, see a definition, examples, have it imported to SRS or to a game, even increase the frequency of the words you query, etc. What functions would you like to see in an ideal app? What would it do for you? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| BaronBill Triglot Senior Member United States HowToLanguages.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4689 days ago 335 posts - 594 votes Speaks: English*, French, German Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Persian | Message 2 of 19 18 September 2012 at 6:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Honestly, I think the most helpful app I could think of would be something like a "Conversation" app. Basically, an AI app written and maintained by native speakers that, in essence, is a "chatbot" in the target language. Something that could be programmed to respond to keywords, colloquialisms, and basic conversation phrases. It could help "correct" people by recognizing standard "beginner-level" grammar and spelling mistakes and pointing them out. For a monthly fee users could record their chats and have them corrected by a native speaker OR it could be similar to Lnag-8 in that people could submit their chats to the community to have corrected by natives.
I think this would be super helpful because it would alleviate a lot of the anxiety that learners have early on about actually engaging native speakers. If there was a way to "practice" on a chat bot, I think people would be encouraged to practice earlier and more often. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 3 of 19 18 September 2012 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
I entirely second this -- a course that talks to you, records mistakes, suggests correct alternatives, gives explanations, etc. But let's be realistic, we are several years away from anything close to that. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| BaronBill Triglot Senior Member United States HowToLanguages.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4689 days ago 335 posts - 594 votes Speaks: English*, French, German Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Persian | Message 4 of 19 18 September 2012 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
True, but an open-source type project that could be setup to "learn" from a select group of authorized speakers could progress quite a bit more quickly than I think we give it credit for. Even starting small with say a couple thousand key phrases setup with logic to direct responses and a spell-check/simple grammar check feature could get something like this up and running. Obviously complex conversations would be out, but with a basic vocabulary (8-9k words) and some keyword-based logic, I think one could come up with something functional for a beginner in a matter of weeks (or Months perhaps)... 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 5 of 19 18 September 2012 at 7:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Somewhat simpler than the above, but still in the "dream" category, a "perfect" multi-
lingual text-to-speech synthesiser, and something that could be so human-like (with a variety of voices) that you wouldn't mind listening to it all day. If something like this existed, you could turn any e-book into an audiobook. Some of the existing synthesisers aren't too bad for some languages, I'm sure they could be improved. Whether they could ever be made human-like is a bigger question. Edited by montmorency on 18 September 2012 at 7:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 19 18 September 2012 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I want a much better version of the lang-8 listening/reading app for Android.
It should easily allow me capture things I want to read, including URLs, short text snippets and DRM-free ebooks. This would mean using Android intents so I could hit the sharing icon and select the reader application. (In other words, no badly-ported, low- quality iOS apps that don't know how to play with Android.) Imported web pages should be stripped down to simple HTML, as with the Readability script. Once text is imported, I want to be able to read it conveniently and use a high-quality pop-up dictionary (preferably Wiktionnaire for French, at least as an option). I want the app to record the words that I look up and where I read them. I want to be able to mark interesting sentences. And then, when I've read a bunch of articles, I want the app to export new sentence cards to Anki web, with any unknown words highlighted and with definitions on the back of the cards. Obviously, it would be nice to prioritize the sentences exported—start with the sentences I marked, and then sentences containing common words. And it would nice to create multi-word clozes from within the app. Additionally, it might be nice to automatically mark gender and verb tenses using color. This might aid passive acquisition of word gender and the rules for correctly using the various verb tenses. Obviously, you could only mark a few different features at a time, so it might be necessary to select which features to highlight at any given time. Obviously, this application would need to include language-specific code. It would be better to handle one or two languages really well than to handle every language badly. Edited by emk on 18 September 2012 at 7:51pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 7 of 19 18 September 2012 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
I like this! A "Show Gender" toggle function that highlights words in blue or pink (or even customizable colours)! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 8 of 19 18 September 2012 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Can detect what I'm doing and if I'm not doing anything language-related, asks me to justify myself. And collects those justifications to display them to me every night before bedtime.
4 persons have voted this message useful |
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