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New learning methods in the near future | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| akprocks Senior Member United States Joined 5289 days ago 178 posts - 258 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 9 of 42 24 June 2011 at 4:46am | IP Logged | ||
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You know what would be cool? A virtual reality language program, complete immersion in your living room. If you wanted to brush up on your Spanish then crank on the TV and visit Mexico City. It would eliminate the trouble with people selling you stuff or refusing to speak their language.
6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4912 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 10 of 42 24 June 2011 at 7:56am | IP Logged | ||
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If we're talking science fiction, in one of the Stainless Steel Rat series he time-travels to earth in the 1980s and has to learn English (everybody speaks Esperanto in the future... apparently). To do this he pops some memory boosting pills and spends a few days learning from a native.
I would love to have memory pills. You still get the enjoyable process of discovery of a new language, but you actually remember things the first time through. But until that happens, I wish the language package buying public would rebel against anything which promises the blue of the sky. Then developers would be encouraged to produce rigourous and useful software. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5049 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 11 of 42 24 June 2011 at 8:07am | IP Logged | ||
I've heard there's free language classes in Second Life with complete immersion, never tried any myself though but I'm pretty sure it's the best at the moment. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 12 of 42 24 June 2011 at 8:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Recent technology has made some amazing improvements to language learning already. The podcast, popup dictionaries, handwriting recognition, automatic translation, spellcheckers, SRS, dictionary lookup through OCR in your cellphone camera etc. If all I had was textbooks and recordings, I wouldn't be in this game. It's very hard to speculate about future technology, but one thing I'm hoping for is the expansion of the popup dictionary to where highlighting a word will bring me information on what case/tense/mood it's in and why, which other words in the sentence it's agreeing with as well as which of several meanings of the word is used in this particular sentence.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4912 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 13 of 42 24 June 2011 at 10:07am | IP Logged | ||
Ari, Transparent Language did that years ago. Only for their own texts, but they had a good range of texts for all of their languages. Unfortunately, in trying to make it more exciting, they seem to have eliminated all texts which don't have videos. Edit: And for the same reason, as I wrote above, they overburdened the program with "features" making it difficult to use. Still useful in my opinion, but pricey. Edited by Jeffers on 24 June 2011 at 10:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6014 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 14 of 42 24 June 2011 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | ||
Not really. I have never seen any major paper-based product that has taken "templates" (cookie cutters) to heart as much as is standard in the software world. You open a course on Arabic and they won't talk about milk and apples, but falafels and humus. Colloquial Hindi even has a chapter on shopping for a sari. And when they want to teach numbers, they pick appropriate words (template courses are always flummoxed by numbers -- there is no universal small set of nouns that will guarantee complete coverage of case and gender effects in every language, so numbers tend to be given incomplete coverage in languages such as Polish). Wifried Decoo said "the medium makes the method". By this he meant that one of the biggest problems in language teaching is that we mould our pedagogy to fit technology, rather than the other way round. They invented the phonograph -- suddenly listening to recordings was the way forward. They invented radio -- suddenly listening in real-time was magical. They invented tapes -- suddenly recordings had the pixie dust, and recording yourself was the way forward. They invented TV -- suddenly the real-time was important again, and the pictures would help. They invented video -- once again recordings were sold as giving you choice of time. They invented the computer -- "interactivity" is now the buzzword. However, the problem with computer-based language learning isn't that people want interactivity, but that they expect multimedia. While we can still sell a book of basic drills for $15, try to make a digital application covering the same material at the same price and everyone will complain about the lack of audio. And this is why the book has survived through all these iterations of fashion -- not because it's a better technology, but because the style of teaching it promotes (written text) is cheap, so we can produce lots of it. Computers could produce more cheaper (even though generative grammar isn't perfect, you could set up restricted patterns that would generate much more variety than in a book), but the obsession with multimedia means that they end up having less variety of material, and at a higher cost. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5769 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 15 of 42 24 June 2011 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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This just made me imagine a language course that tries to read my mind in order to figure out the reason for my mistakes. The thought alone made me as irate as autocomplete functions usually do.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5012 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 16 of 42 24 June 2011 at 2:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sofist's ideas about brain-computer connection scare me. Yes, it might be the future but I don't think the advantages would outweight the inconveniences including large dependence on computer (we are already addicted enough :-) )
However the immersion in your living room might be a great thing. Perhaps I am naive but I hope that people will get less lazy at some point and will require less of the miraculously easy methods. Only then the computer based programs will be of better quality. I'd personally love to see a "perfect course", more probably computer based, which would take you from zero to C2 thanks to huge amount of resources prepared to suit you at any level or sublevel you might find yourself at. It wouldn't need any new technologies, just lots of work and thoughts to put it all together. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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