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Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse

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Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse

#31

Post by DanI-S »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #23
billpaetzke wrote: post #9

Nice 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…

It's not about gaining perfection. It's about gaining vocabulary which is the single most important factor in language aquisition. If you pair it with a conversation group you should learn very rapidly indeed.

It certainly beats reading flash cards on my iPhone whilst sitting on the toilet, which was the previous cutting edge.

Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse

#32

Post by Margh »

WildUtah wrote: post #10
frcepeda wrote: post #3

Awesome 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…

If it was limited to adjectives or nouns in Japanese it would still be incredibly useful (personally that's all I really wanted out of the extension). As you say, lots of sentences don't even require a verb, a well placed piece of vocabulary is everything (from my experience living here anyway).

Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse

#33

Post by dafunnie »

goblin89 wrote: post #18
FelixP wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this breaks down somewhat for languages that don't use phonetic characters, such as Mandarin and Japanese. It would take a long period of dedicated study before the average person could read media in these languages.

I don't think so. You just may get used to read without repeating each word to yourself. It's actually even useful, skipping the phase when you internally match the word with its pronunciation, and directly understanding meaning from the written form. (AFAIR this technique is also used for speed reading.) Although while this extension is a neat idea, it the word “Immersion” in its title is probably misleading. It onl…

Yeah, the fact that they named it 'immersion' makes it pretty misleading. My idea of immersion has always been using that language and only that language. The official definition of immersion is 'a method of teaching in a foreign language that involves exclusive use of the language'. The plugin's implementation is more like the opposite of immersion.

I'm still skeptical of people without prior knowledge of the language using this plugin because learning via computational translations is unnatural and detrimental to beginners who don't know any better. Beginners don't know when something has been translated wrongly or if that phrase is how a native would express it. This makes the plugin a little redundant, since their market would have to be people who are neither beginners nor completely fluent (since someone that is fluent can engage in actual immersion). The only instance where the plugin would be useful is for people with prior knowledge of the language (can read and write it to a certain extent) but would like to expand their vocabulary bank.

Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse

#34

Post by dafunnie »

FelixP wrote: post #11
billpaetzke wrote: post #9

Nice 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…

I think this breaks down somewhat for languages that don't use phonetic characters, such as Mandarin and Japanese. It would take a long period of dedicated study before the average person could read media in these languages.

For Mandarin (not sure about Japanese), the plugin would definitely benefit from pin yin supplementation at the 'novice' level. Non-latin characters are difficult for people whose primary language is a language of Latin derivatives. But implement this, they would have to take Google's pre-existing translation tools and translate the translated text into pinyin using something like the Ruby on Chinese Pinyin tool (http://www.kawa.net/works/cantonese/canton.html).

But at the moment, the plugin seems to expect people to have prior knowledge of the language and its so-called immersion revolves around reading and literacy uptake. Pin yin is more for speaking/oral purposes so translating articles into phonetic characters is unconventional for languages that are not meant to be read in such a way.

Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse

#37

Post by gingerjoos »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #23
billpaetzke wrote: post #9

Nice 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…

It's not about gaining perfection. It's about gaining vocabulary which is the single most important factor in language aquisition. If you pair it with a conversation group you should learn very rapidly indeed.

I'm learning A1 level French now and thought I would give this one a try. Put it on "novice" mode hoping to improve my vocabulary. The problem with it is that rather than translating nouns it ends up translating verbs. This is not really a good practice. For eg. "we will" gets translated to "nous allons". However, it's more important in this case to understand the verb conjugations of "aller"(to go) and how it is used in the future tense. Knowing that "we will" can be translated as "nous allons" is not useful - without the context.

One thing my French teacher keeps telling us is to not use a dictionary. Why is that? Because then everytime I try to speak/write in French I end up constructing the sentence in English and then translating it. This is a bad way of using a language. If I were to learn a language from scratch and independently, I can use it much better. Even though I'm not a native English speaker I'm able to think, write and speak in English without too much effort because inside my head I don't translate it from my mother tongue.

Putting the level of the extension on "fluent" seems to be useful. This translates entire sentences and thus gives me context. Even for an A1 level guy like me (novice) it's only useful on the "fluent" mode.

Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse

#38

Post by minikomi »

dwc wrote: post #24
FelixP wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this breaks down somewhat for languages that don't use phonetic characters, such as Mandarin and Japanese. It would take a long period of dedicated study before the average person could read media in these languages.

I am just beginning to learn Japanese, and someone passed along a great site that takes a link to a kanji page and it adds kana to it. There's also a Firefox extension (Rikaichan) that provides kana in a tooltip when you mouse over kanji. Needless to say, this makes it easier.

And Rikaikun, its Chrome based brother.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jipdnfibhldikgcjhf...

Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse

#39

Post by ollysb »

I moved to Spain a couple of months ago and currently work for my company in London from a shared office in Granada. I may well be the perfect user of this plugin. I've already studied Michelle Thomas' course so I understand grammar etc. My problem now is purely vocab. I spend my working day on the web, reading page after page of english. This plugin is perfect! It means I can now be learning vocab while I'm working.

Re: Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse

#40

Post by znq »

billpaetzke wrote: post #9

Nice 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…

Would you mind sharing some of your resources?

I'm also looking for Spanish TV shows (on the Internet, since I don't own a TV), that have subtitles in Spanish as well. So far I only found them with English subtitles, but I guess they must exist in Spanish, too, for example for hearing impaired people.

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