sebngwa3 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6116 days ago 200 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Korean*, English
| Message 9 of 18 08 March 2014 at 7:18pm | IP Logged |
Ichiro wrote:
I went the programming route. That allowed me to work in Japan, where I learnt Japanese. |
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How long did it take you to learn programming?
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Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6549 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish
| Message 10 of 18 08 March 2014 at 11:15pm | IP Logged |
If it's been three years and you still haven't learned it, I think it's best to consider what other practical skills you can learn. I'd say programming is a hard field to break into as an adult. Most seem to start learning it as teenagers.
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Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5333 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian
| Message 11 of 18 08 March 2014 at 11:19pm | IP Logged |
Serpent wrote:
If it's been three years and you still haven't learned it, I think it's best to consider what other
practical skills you can learn. I'd say programming is a hard field to break into as an adult. Most seem to start
learning it as teenagers. |
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Same would apply to translation. You don't just start learning a language as an adult hoping to become a translator
anytime soon.
If you want to code or translate one day and you are starting from scratch, it's possible. But you need to stop talking
about it and start learning. And you better be patient and determined because it will take you several years before
you begin to have any marketable value.
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Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6391 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 12 of 18 09 March 2014 at 5:45am | IP Logged |
You can be useful as a coder a lot faster than you can be useful as a translator, but a competent professional level with a reasonable amount of breadth in either does take years. A lot of people need a website or a tool that does some simple calculations, while tasks of similar complexity for internal use can often be done with google translate (that is, if the company needs to understand something; if they put google-translated material out in public, they're severely misguided).
I've met some people who have worked professionally as programmers within 6 months of starting to code, as adults - you can learn a little, but well, in that amount of time. It's not the norm, but it's possible. With translating, I don't think that's possible, unless you already had an extremely high level in two languages, knowledge of a specific subject matter that you'll be translating texts about, strong writing skills, etc, and literally only had to learn how to translate.
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Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5118 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian
| Message 13 of 18 10 March 2014 at 6:03pm | IP Logged |
What about learning programming for Android/iOs in order to develop language-learning
tools? Which path would one take?
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luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7157 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 14 of 18 10 March 2014 at 8:04pm | IP Logged |
Expugnator wrote:
What about learning programming for Android/iOs in order to develop language-
learning tools? Which path would one take? |
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That's a clever idea to put passion to work in a practical way.
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5272 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 15 of 18 10 March 2014 at 9:13pm | IP Logged |
Expugnator wrote:
What about learning programming for Android/iOs in order to develop language-learning tools? Which path would one take? |
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There are a couple of relatively easy to use tools for converting Web apps (HTML+Javascript) into Android, Windows and iOS apps. The best-known of these tools is Phonegap, which is free.
OTOH, there are already a gazillion language learning apps for smartphones out there...
If you're generally looking to combine your interest in programming languages and natural languages, check out the free Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), which assumes almost no programming skills. (You'll need to be able to install Python and the NLTK files, but that's explained in great detail on the NLTK website and in the accompanying NLTK book (Natural Language Processing with Python --- Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit), which is also free.)
Edited by Doitsujin on 10 March 2014 at 9:14pm
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4617 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 16 of 18 10 March 2014 at 11:09pm | IP Logged |
Expugnator wrote:
What about learning programming for Android/iOs in order to develop
language-learning
tools? Which path would one take? |
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1. Learn to program
2. Learn to program for Android (or iOS)
3. Hack something together
4. ???
5. Profit
Or something like that. Learning about existing "language tools" is the easiest part I
would think.
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