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An Aberrational Way to Learn a Language

kumar.vc

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Re: An Aberrational Way to Learn a Language

#11

Post by superails »

Thanks for sharing, but if I don't know a language, how is having a tool translate it going to help me learn the language? Are you suggesting this only for those with a moderate knowledge of the language already? And what about those of us that don't have friends to grade us in a language? Without it, the automated translation may be wrong, and I'd be learning incorrect information.

I'd like to learn other languages quickly, but in past experience, conversational/immersion is the only way to go to get anything useful, and I don't have that ability or the time to persue it. Really the only time I have is the 1-1.5 hours in the car everyday- that is not enough and I have no one to converse with, and I'm an introvert anyway, so I don't want to talk to people typically.

Re: An Aberrational Way to Learn a Language

#13

Post by sirgawain33 »

I learned French in a way with many similarities: I took a semester of engineering courses at a French uni.

Like the author notes, the trick seemed to be (1) you are interested in the exact meaning of the words and phrases (2) finding many `hooks` for memorizing. In my case, it was specific problem sets, personalities of profs, ... (3) rhythm and structure. For him it was the structure of web sites. For me, it was class schedule.

I did about zero language specific training that semester. Got good grades, even by French standards. I did have a scare half way into the semester by doing poorly on half my midterms, but pulled it through by the end.

I did have a foundation of high school language courses, but I was about as poor of a language student as you can imagine.

Re: An Aberrational Way to Learn a Language

#14

Post by kumarski »

sashaeslami wrote: post #10

We are actually implementing Dakwak in our website. It's by far the fastest & easiest web translation I've ever seen. Trust me, you are not going to understand unless you try a demo. It literally took me 60 seconds to translate the website into 50+ languages.

yeah and then I had to correct them all. / the reason I bumped into this learning methodology.

Re: An Aberrational Way to Learn a Language

#15

Post by na85 »

kumarski wrote: post #3
na85 wrote: post #2

Maybe it's just been too long since my last coffee, but I don't understand what's happening here. Dakwak appears to be a tool wherein people can pay for i18n services on web properties they own, and yet from Kumar's description it's like he's using duolingo.

Duolingo is one thing, but DakWak let's you see the words on the page. This allows for a spatial sense of the words. Remember in school when you used to remember where something was on the page? This is the same thing. It means I can see the actual words on the page and have a higher recall of the instance of the word.

So, your process is to take some websites that you own, have them automatically translated, and then use the results to learn the new vocab?

Re: An Aberrational Way to Learn a Language

#16

Post by b0z0 »

kumarski wrote: post #3
na85 wrote: post #2

Maybe it's just been too long since my last coffee, but I don't understand what's happening here. Dakwak appears to be a tool wherein people can pay for i18n services on web properties they own, and yet from Kumar's description it's like he's using duolingo.

Duolingo is one thing, but DakWak let's you see the words on the page. This allows for a spatial sense of the words. Remember in school when you used to remember where something was on the page? This is the same thing. It means I can see the actual words on the page and have a higher recall of the instance of the word.

I totally get what you're saying!! :) Thought it was just me who abnormally remembered where stuff is on pages.

Re: An Aberrational Way to Learn a Language

#17

Post by nekopa »

nikoftime wrote: post #5

@kumarski - I just left this comment on your blog, but it might not have posted, so I'll leave it here too: Hi there -- My name is David and I'm the co-founder and CTO of a company called Nulu. We teach foreign languages in about 5 minutes a day using news content (so it's inherently interesting and engaging). Would love to hear your thoughts on our platform, which is in use today by tens of thousands of people throu…

Hey David, I'm the head teacher of a language school in the Czech Republic (US ex-pat) and I'm currently evaluating digital language learning products to bundle with our face to face courses. Yours sounds interesting, shoot me an email (in profile), see if we can work on something like co-branding.

Lee

Re: An Aberrational Way to Learn a Language

#19

Post by Ecio78 »

sirgawain33 wrote: post #13

I learned French in a way with many similarities: I took a semester of engineering courses at a French uni. Like the author notes, the trick seemed to be (1) you are interested in the exact meaning of the words and phrases (2) finding many `hooks` for memorizing. In my case, it was specific problem sets, personalities of profs, ... (3) rhythm and structure. For him it was the structure of web sites. For me, it was cl…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't French Universities require you to have a knowledge of the French language at least at level B2 of the Common European Framework[1] in order to attend their university courses?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Re...

Re: An Aberrational Way to Learn a Language

#20

Post by dpapathanasiou »

I'm doing something similar for Japanese and English, though there's no machine translation involved.

Instead, it's a pure wikipedia-style site[1], where anyone can post their best attempts. Multiple translations are allowed per sentence, and the best (as voted by expert editors) are shown first.

Even if you don't speak Japanese at all, you can take advantage of the parallel texts in both languages[2], both online and as pdf files you can download.

[1] http://www.macaronics.com/

[2] http://macaronics.com/translated_articles

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