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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

#41

Post by snowcandy »

dafunnie wrote: post #34
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.

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 ( ht…

Try Zhongwen Chinese-English Popup dictionary chrome extension. Simliar to Raikaikun for Japanese (above post). I've always found it really helpful :)

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

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

#42

Post by wtracy »

znq wrote: post #40
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.

If you haven't seen it already, check out Destinos. It's a soap opera written for Spanish language immersion for English speakers--the difficulty level goes up as the series goes along. (The first few episodes actually explain key plot points in English.)

As icing on the cake, the story is so engaging that I've seen native speakers watch it. :-)

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

#43

Post by Natsu »

ghoul2 wrote: post #27
dwc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

links please?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rikaichan/

I use it too.

I will mention that a long time ago, I had trouble with the dictionary file extensions being "incompatible" with new Firefox releases. They're just dictionaries, though, so I hacked them to make them stop. They might have fixed that by now.

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

#44

Post by simias »

gingerjoos wrote: post #37
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use…

I'm a native french speaker and I tried the "intermediate" setting on a couple of english websites and was pleasantly surprised. I agree that most of the mistakes come from verbs, the times or person/gender are often wrong and sometimes the translation just doesn't make sense.

For instance I saw "tomber en amour" for "to fall in love", which is a literal translation but somewhat awkward. Even worse was "était due à arriver" for "was due to arrive"; once a gain a literal translation but this time the french version doesn't make any kind of sense.

So, definitely something to take with a grain of salt but still pretty useful IMO.

Maybe a more fool-proof approach would be to do it the other way around: have an extension that would translate most of a foreign website except for some words/expressions. This way the foreign language would always be correct (given the source is reliable enough, of course) and having mistakes in the automatically translated native language wouldn't be a problem.

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

#47

Post by Avshalom »

znq wrote: post #40
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.

If you live in the US, Hulu has added a crap ton of programs from Gala/Uni-vision and most of them seem to have spanish closed captioning. I don't know whats good but there's a lot to choose from.

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

#49

Post by njs12345 »

DanI-S wrote: post #31
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm liking http://memrise.com/ for vocab acquisition --- I've got the first 200 or so words of French in my long term memory and it seems to be working well. I've always found vocab learning to be the hardest part of learning a language, so we'll see I guess..

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

#50

Post by dwc »

ghoul2 wrote: post #27
dwc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

links please?

The web site that adds hiragana to the kanji of a link you give: http://www.hiragana.jp/
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