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My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

chatterbug.com

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Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#41

Post by pmoriarty »

schacon wrote: post #32
pmoriarty wrote: post #25

I'm a fan of a method of language learning called TPR (Total Physical Response).[1][2][3] It is by far the fastest and easiest way I know of learning vocabulary and grammar. In a nutshell, with TPR the teacher gives the student a command in the target language, demonstrates the action the command is asking for, repeats the command and finally the student copies the action. For example, if English was the target langu…

I've read a lot of TPR(S) and also Krashen, whose research I believe the system is based on. It is somewhat difficult to use some of this theory over video, but we often discuss what we can take from ideas like this to help beginning speakers when they don't have a wide vocabulary they can access. I'm curious if using TPR(S) helped you learn a language? I own a few books on it, but I haven't seen it actually widely i…

Yeah, it definitely helped. I taught this method to a language tutor when we first started working together, and he later told me that I learned vocabulary far faster than any of his other students, and he wound up switching to using TPR with all of his other students because of it.

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#42

Post by funkaster »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #17
djb_hackernews wrote: post #2

Language learning apps are step 5 in the ten step process of achieving programmer hubris nirvana. 1) I'm in college and I'm going to build an app to easily buy and sell books 2) Off campus housing is hard, I'm going to build an app to find roommates 3) Splitting bills with roommates is hard, I'm going to build an app for cost splitting 4) All my previous apps sucked because they weren't social, I'm going to build a s…

You say this snarkily, but I don’t see what is wrong with someone growing up and wanting to try to use coding to solve problems relevant to their stage of life. It turns out some problems are complex, but so what? I’ve been working on “programming interfaces for beginners” for 12 years and still haven’t succeeded. That’s not because I’m dumb, nor is everyone who thought it would be easy and failed. It’s because there…

The problem is the attitude "this problem is unsolved and no-one seems to be working on it. I'll fix it, even though I'm not an expert in the domain... because coding fix everything".

Don't get me wrong, this is a very common problem for engineers (I'm an engineer and I fall into that trap every now and then). But from the post, what's lacking is actually talking and working head-head with teachers and linguists and people doing language learning research, because, you know... these people have actually spent their whole life trying to teach other people languages. So they might know a thing or two, that an engineer trying to teach himself a language might be missing.

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#43

Post by schacon »

IgorPartola wrote: post #35

I learned English when I was 12-14. I got to the point where I could converse in it in roughly 9 months between 13 and 14, after doing a 2x a week class with roughly 12 people. Yes, age is a huge factor, but the class was a part of a school that had multiple concurrent tracks, and ours was doing better than others. Age groups were all mixed and I was the youngest there. The keys to success for me were: 1. Teacher who…

This is a great rundown!

One interesting thing that comes to mind is that most of the recent research I've read says somewhat counterintuitively that the age factor is not as big of a deal as you might think[1]. I was taught at University that there is a critical period age after which it becomes much more difficult to acquire a language, but there is actually little evidence for this.

Aside from accent acquisition, which does seem to be linked pretty tightly with age of exposure, the biggest difference generally between adults and children in language acquisition is the amount of time they have to learn it. Some studies even suggest that children are worse at some aspects of acquisition[2]. As you said, adults are busier, which is the biggest difference.

[1] Hakuta, Bialystok 2003 [2] Ferman, Karni 2010

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#44

Post by da02 »

newsbinator wrote: post #20
bpicolo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget static blog engines

Here's a new JS framework that's exactly like Vue, but with much less functionality, making it faster to learn.

I'm guilty of this. Hopefully, the experience will teach me a few things. Like how some actors have to get their bad acting years out of their system to move to the next level.

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#45

Post by nicpottier »

I've been going through the process of learning Spanish for the past year or two (with various levels of dedication) and I have also thought about starting yet another language learning app. I used RosettaStone and DuoLingo for a while and they both provided a lot of value, but for sure the greatest benefit came from doing 1 on 1 lessons with native speakers. Lots of progress then.

One thing I've noticed with all the language learning apps though is that they are generalized methodologies that are then applied to lots of languages. IE, duolingo in French and Spanish and German are basically the same track, just in different langauges. Same with Rosetta Stone (even more consistent there).

That seems to really be leaving a lot on the table. Every language has its quirks and most importantly every language has a few shortcuts you can learn to really give yourself a ton of utility with little work. But because the software is built to be generalized you get the lowest common denominator instead of the fastest possible path to fluency and speaking.

Not sure which approach chatterbug is taking, but at first blush and by the way they talk about it I'm guessing it is yet another generalized approach, but I suppose we'll see.

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#46

Post by schacon »

funkaster wrote: post #42
erikpukinskis wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this snarkily, but I don’t see what is wrong with someone growing up and wanting to try to use coding to solve problems relevant to their stage of life. It turns out some problems are complex, but so what? I’ve been working on “programming interfaces for beginners” for 12 years and still haven’t succeeded. That’s not because I’m dumb, nor is everyone who thought it would be easy and failed. It’s because there…

The problem is the attitude "this problem is unsolved and no-one seems to be working on it. I'll fix it, even though I'm not an expert in the domain... because coding fix everything". Don't get me wrong, this is a very common problem for engineers (I'm an engineer and I fall into that trap every now and then). But from the post, what's lacking is actually talking and working head-head with teachers and linguists and…

I'm not sure where you get this.

I studied linguistics in college and one of my cofounders got her degree in linguistics from Harvard. Another of our employees is a computational linguist from Cambridge.

Additionally, all of the curriculum and much of the course methodology itself was designed by teachers who have been teaching languages both online and in the classroom for years.

We have additionally consulted active linguists and educational psychology researchers to see if there is anything else we should be looking at in their fields that we can apply.

This post was about how my understanding of the product I felt I wanted as a customer was formed. Linguists and teachers built the curriculum and work with the engineers here to see how we can apply the ways they want to teach.

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#47

Post by foobaw »

I speak three languages fluently and I can attest to Chatterbug's methodology. However, there's still much research to be done in the field. I participate in a lot of linguistic research since my case is a slightly more unique than others.

Also, I'm curious if they're hiring and/or have plan to scale. There are so many features they could add.

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#48

Post by coffee91 »

I used to use Anki Flashcards but I actually found that online tutoring is a lot better now. I use Verbling which solves a lot of the issues mentioned in the OP blog. The video system is all in the browser, no Skype as others have mentioned with iTalki and my teacher shares PDFs directly on the site. It also tells me what page she is on so I can be in sync, and we draw notes etc on top of the whiteboard.

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#49

Post by shard »

GEBBL wrote: post #7
nileshtrivedi wrote: post #3

Personally, I would love to learn a language by watching movies/videos with 3 subtitle tracks: (1) What they are speaking - IN their script (this is called SLS: Same-Language-Subtitling and has been quite successful for literacy programs for one's own language) (2) What they are speaking - IN my script (3) What they MEAN - IN my language (i.e. translation) Data for (1) is easy to find. (2) could theoretically be gene…

Are there video players like VLC that allow the displaying of more than one sub/srt file at a time?

I use KM Player, which allows up to 3 subtitles at a time, although the 3rd subtitle is placed right in the middle of the video (the first is on the bottom and the second is on the top, which works very well).

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#50

Post by schacon »

nicpottier wrote: post #45

I've been going through the process of learning Spanish for the past year or two (with various levels of dedication) and I have also thought about starting yet another language learning app. I used RosettaStone and DuoLingo for a while and they both provided a lot of value, but for sure the greatest benefit came from doing 1 on 1 lessons with native speakers. Lots of progress then. One thing I've noticed with all the…

Our curriculum is all designed from scratch by our linguistics team in house, so it will certainly be specific to each language.

However, I'm sure that as we do several languages, we will reuse patterns and exercises that transfer well. A situation to practice shopping or numbers can work the same in Japanese or German without having to reinvent it. Certainly all of our grammar drills and exercises will be customized to each language, though.

I think it's pretty important to remember as well that one of the main things here is the a lot of your time in the system is spent talking to a real human. You can get the exact same live exercise several times and still have it be pretty different if you have different tutors. It's not really possible for that large part of our system to be really "generalized" in this way. Our system is very human, not just technological.

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