Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse
1–10 of 53 posts
Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse
#2This is very cool. Definitely giving it a shot.
Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse
#3Awesome idea, but it doesn't have Japanese. Got me excited for nothing. :/
Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse
#4I love the idea - I've been looking for ways to try and "immerse" people in a new language without actually travelling for a while now.
I do have two worries about it, though. The first is that they seem to be using translations which aren't particularly accurate, which means its possible that if it works, you'll still end up sounding like a beginner.
The other worry is that the language you are learning is still embedded in your native language. I'm pretty sure this will not help with learning the grammar of words, and when you are constantly switching between your language and another language, it won't be very conducive to memorisation of the new language (from my own experience learning Japanese).
Its still a really neat idea though, and I wish the best to the creators.
Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse
#5This is amazing. Perfect way to practice a language and pick one up. Only problem I can see with it is that it wont have pronunciation. This is a problem for character languages like Mandarin. I'll be using it regardless though.
edit: Never mind, you can hear pronunciation as described by the post replying to me.
I wonder how they will manage to increase the reliability of the translations. It would also be interesting to be able to practice multiple languages at the same time.
Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse
#6This is amazing. Perfect way to practice a language and pick one up. Only problem I can see with it is that it wont have pronunciation. This is a problem for character languages like Mandarin. I'll be using it regardless though. edit: Never mind, you can hear pronunciation as described by the post replying to me. I wonder how they will manage to increase the reliability of the translations. It would also be interesti…
- Roll-over a translated word to hear it pronounced.
I put it on intermediate spanish, it's interesting but it feels like it's doing literal, disjointed word translations which gets messed up with the different sentence structure.
The giant translating box is really annoying, it needs to be something much more discrete I think.
Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse
#7This is amazing. Perfect way to practice a language and pick one up. Only problem I can see with it is that it wont have pronunciation. This is a problem for character languages like Mandarin. I'll be using it regardless though. edit: Never mind, you can hear pronunciation as described by the post replying to me. I wonder how they will manage to increase the reliability of the translations. It would also be interesti…
- Roll-over a translated word to hear it pronounced. I put it on intermediate spanish, it's interesting but it feels like it's doing literal, disjointed word translations which gets messed up with the different sentence structure. The giant translating box is really annoying, it needs to be something much more discrete I think.
Thanks. Just found that feature. It was off by default for me.
Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse
#8This is beyond awesome for a few reasons. Historically, learning a new language was hard because it generally wasn't interesting.
This extensions allows you to browse the internet and specifically your interests while immersing you to a language...uh whoa. Half the reason I didn't like my language courses was the content and classroom was hardly stimulating or relevant to my interests; this changes that entirely.
A great model if we could apply it to education more broadly.
Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse
#9Nice idea, but I don't like that's it's not written by a native speaker. You're bound to learn bad habits. Just spend less time on English sites and more time on sites in your target language wherever possible.
Two easy ways to immerse yourself with content created by native speakers in your target language:
1) Listen in your target language whenever possible (via audio books, movies, tv shows, and podcasts). I like podcasts best.
2) Read in your target language. Major news sites and blogs will most likely exist in your target language for free. And you maybe be able to buy books (fiction or non) written by native speakers as well.
You can supplement those two with working through exercises in a grammar book of your target language.
Obviously, if you have a native speaker to practice speaking with, do so, but the listening and reading suggestions alone will get you very far. I'm immersing in Spanish right now, and this is working well for me.
Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse
#10Awesome idea, but it doesn't have Japanese. Got me excited for nothing. :/
English-Japanese machine translation is still very bad. I think a lot of people have worked on it, but the problem is inherently tough. Also, there is nothing like the hundreds of millions of words of corpora of example translations for machine learning that exist for European languages
I think the main problem is that Japanese requires a lot more context to make meaning clear than most languages. A translation of an English sentence can be pretty good just based on the context of the sentence itself. Japanese doesn't even indicate in any way who the subject of a sentence is. Lots of sentences don't even require a verb.
And it doesn't help that Japanese has a quirky preposition system that doesn't line up with other languages.