Every Monday I send out an e-mail to the Language Hacking League (you can sign up on the right of the site) with a language hack or interesting website, as well as more precise updates regarding my own language missions.

This particular tip got a great response from people last week, so I’ll share it on the blog too. It’s very easy, and yet overlooked by many people when looking for content in the target language.

iTunes – not just for people with iPods, but don’t search for the language name

iTunes is a free installation and you can sign up for a free account to download podcasts about a range of topics. I am definitely not an Apple fanboy, but iTunes is an excellent distribution means of finding free content to listen to. Since the download is simply an MP3 file, you do not need to have an Apple device to listen to them; any MP3 player will do. On my Windows (Virtual box) installation all podcasts are downloaded to the My Music/iTunes folder and I simply drag them onto my Nexus One’s SD card.

When in iTunes, go to iTunes store and you will see a podcasts option. Many people feel that the most logical thing to do is to search for the language name, say “Spanish”, and see what comes up. If you are an absolute beginner then perhaps you’ll find this content useful, but it’s all about learning Spanish (i.e. it’s not natural native material) and most likely packaged by non-natives. There may be some exceptions, but I generally don’t like listening to these as they speak way too slowly and basically and this won’t give you the pressure to improve as quickly. Natives do not speak like that.

My suggestion is quite different. Back in the iTunes store home page, scroll to the very bottom and you will see “My store” with your country’s name and a flag. Change this to your target language’s country. So if you were learning French, change it to France, Italy for Italian, Japan for Japanese etc.

The iTunes store interface is suddenly translated to your target language, so going any further is much easier if your level is intermediate or above. Click ” Top Podcasts” (handily enough, many languages don’t translate podcasts and may not even translate Top). This is on the left in my interface. Next you will see that country’s most popular podcasts and can browse and subscribe to what looks interesting. These will of course be natives discussing science, news, politics, or whatever you are into, and they will be speaking naturally.

When it has downloaded, transfer it to your MP3 player and enjoy!

International radio station podcasts

When on your computer, listening to live streaming radio from the country where your target language is spoken is very easy. Here is a list of European radio stations. For other countries just Google “[country name] streaming radio”. This is completely free of course. You don’t have to be in the country to listen to its radio!!

If you can’t be on your computer so much, then go to the website associated with the radio stations and see what podcasts they offer for download to listen to on your MP3 player while you wait or travel to work/school. You will very likely need to understand the target language to do this, although you can also copy the URL to Google Translate to help you navigate the entire website easier to see if there are podcasts. For example, Spain’s Radio Nacional has a podcasts download page here.

Almost all major radio stations provide podcasts for their most popular shows nowadays. This can give even more interesting content than the iTunes suggestion above, although these may occasionally be iTunes links rather than direct downloads, so it helps to have the program installed.

News websites are another great source. For German I’d recommend people check out DW’s Learning German site for daily news spoken in slow German, or the rest of the website (audio and video) for natural German. France24 has a great video podcast with international news.

LingQ library

I wrote a detailed review of the LingQ learning system, and one of the things that I appreciated (and that is free) is the Library of material to listen to. The system currently offers 11 languages (English, French, Russian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, Korean) although the amount of content available varies greatly depending on the language.

Another advantage of this is that the transcript is also provided so you can read the text after/while listening to it, but you can skip that if you are more focused on just listening and download the audio to your MP3 player. You need to sign up for a free account first to be able to access LingQ.

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Of course, I would personally recommend listening to podcasts on your way to a meeting that involves actually speaking with people in the language, if possible. Passive exposure does have its benefits, but don’t forget what you are ultimately aiming for! (i.e. speaking! Although if you are actually aiming to be the world expert in listening to others have all the fun, then ignore this paragraph).

If  you have any other sources to access many interesting podcasts recorded by natives in other languages, be sure to share them in the comments!
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On Monday (17th) I’ll be releasing the Language Hacking Guide [Edit: it's available for download now!] with a detailed account of the unconventional methods I use to keep my progress and positivity up when starting to learn a strange new language, speak it my first week, and the techniques I use to reach fluency quickly and get along with native speakers while doing so (either travelling or from home), all of which can be applied by anyone. The guide includes over 30,000 words and hours of fascinating audio interviews with some of the Internet’s best known language learners, as well as worksheets, transcripts, tons of free resources, e-mail updates and more!

But it will be growing and getting updated. I’ve learned a lot in the last 7 years of trying to rapidly pick up new languages, but what has always helped more than anything has been openness to new techniques.

In today’s post I want to share with you a technique I started using just a few weeks ago that has totally transformed my vocabulary learning approach!

SRS: Spaced Repetition System

SRS is a presentation method that gives you the information before you would forget it and makes sure that it stays constantly fresh in your mind. So, you might see a word a few minutes after the first time, then a few days later, then a few weeks later etc. always at the time you need to see it most to make sure it is constantly fresh in your mind.

It’s a more complex version of the flashcard system where you have a word on one side of a card and its translation on the other. You look at the word, test yourself to see if you know it and turn over the card to see the translation. You couldn’t get more low-tech than that even if you tried, but SRS uses 21st century technology to make this possible while considering the time dimension.

So how would a guy like me who hates studying indoors, definitely dislikes flashcards and already has a pretty good learning strategy, be interested in software for improving recall of vocabulary?

Finding the time to study

Like many people, I’m a busy guy! I’m trying to work, write a book, dramatically improve my level of a language, have a social life and grocery shop/clean/sleep/eat/write blogs & e-mails/exercise etc. every day. But there are ways to make time – get it back from the time spent waiting.

Note: the next paragraphs are taken from the Language Hacking Guide

You wait for the bus/metro/train to arrive, you wait in it while going to work/school or home, you wait in the supermarket queue/line, you wait in a traffic jam in your car, you wait when ordering coffee in the morning, you wait for your water to boil if you prepare it yourself, you wait for your friend to arrive, you wait at the doctor’s/dentist’s, you even wait for a minute or two in lifts, elevators, at traffic lights, when waiting for something to load on your computer, for someone to answer the door after you knock etc.

In most of these situations you may be alone – so if you can’t talk to someone, what do you do? Stare into space? Read advertisements around you? Twiddle your thumbs? Press the pedestrian cross or lift button again in frustration that nothing has happened yet? These little segments of our day fly by unutilised and actually add up to a huge amount of time wasted. You can’t avoid these situations – they are natural parts of your day.

For most people, these little segments are annoyances – why is the other person so late? Why does there have to be so many people ahead of me in the supermarket? Why did my computer have to crash to be rebooted now of all times? Waiting in frustration is simply what we end up doing – considering how much time per day we spend doing this, this is an unneeded source of stress!

I actually don’t mind when these occasions arise! Seriously – if someone is arriving a little late, or if I just missed the bus and the next one won’t come for 15 minutes, or the Internet goes down and I can’t work – rather than cursing at my “bad luck”, and adding stress to my life by being angry during this time, I think to myself – great! Another chance to study some vocabulary!!

Improving on the old-school method

For several years, in these situations I would take out my phrasebook, or pocket vocabulary book for these moments, open it up to a random page and learn whatever I saw. Sometimes I’d see a word I never did before and sometimes I’d see something I needed to review and had already long forgotten and need to relearn rather than just remind myself. It did the job but to be honest, in retrospect it was inefficient and sloppy. (Although, if you learn by listening, these moments are good times to take out your MP3 player and press play!)

Randomly or even systematically going through vocabulary in order like this means that you might not review the hardest words when you need to, or you’ll keep seeing the easy words too often, or you’ll forget words because you didn’t review them for a very long time.

SRS answers all of these issues by letting you decide when you should see a word again based on certain criteria (usually, how hard you felt it was). So the easy words are pushed way off into the future, the hard ones keep constantly reappearing until you are finally happy with them, and the middle-difficulty ones will reappear just when you need them most, to refresh your memory.

Deciding when to study a word again when you see it in a printed list is too hard, but that’s where technology comes in!

Anki

Anki is an application developed by Damien Elmes for reviewing things you need to learn, using SRS. Not just vocabulary, but city/country capitals, medical terminology, a script for a play etc. Anything you need to apply to memory really!

It’s a completely free download (or low-bandwidth website) and works on Windows, Mac, Linux and even on mobile phones!

On the surface, the program does more or less what you would expect from a flashcard – it shows you a word with no translation (the word can be either in your native language or in the target language) and you can decide if you know what it means. Then press “Answer” and it will show it to you.

If you thought it was super easy, press the button on the right (which includes a distant time factor, depending on how you reacted to the word in previous attempts), if you had absolutely no idea press the button on the left (it will reappear very soon), and otherwise press one of the other buttons. I like having 4 levels to decide how “easy” I thought it was, and I use each one accordingly.

If it sounds drastically simple, that’s because it is! The most important part of the interface is actually pretty much just that (as you can see on the iPhone screenshot I took; similar on other systems) – the impressive part of all of this is actually the algorithm working in the background to decide precisely when to show you the words.

You don’t really have to think about that aspect though, since the system covers it for you. All you have to do is think about the word and then grade it on difficulty (hardest one if you’ve never seen it before).

Using the program

There are broadly two ways to use this application and they depend mostly on the resources available to you. Everyone can use it for free on their computer, and you can simply decide to devote 30 minutes a day to using it and make sure to set aside that time every day.

A huge amount of people have been recommending this program to me since I started this site, but I dismissed it as “not for me” without really trying it, because of how I dislike flashcards and generally don’t like sitting down to study. If you have that focus, you will get a lot of use out of this program!

Based on the time-wasting description above, you can guess where I do my studying! On the go! You can see in the post’s main picture that I even swipe it out for 2 minute waits before crossing the road!

I happen to have an iPhone (invested in it just before my laptop broke and replacing it meant I suddenly couldn’t afford to have bought an expensive Apple device, and still can’t, but that’s a sob story for another day) which is jailbroken, but if you have an Android device or Nintendo DS you can also use Anki offline (no Internet access required). If you have any other portable device that can access the basic webpages (modern mobile phone, Palm device, Sony PSP etc.) either by wifi or 3G/Edge (mobile phone network), then you can use the Anki system that way too (on a very low bandwidth website).

The way I did this was as follows: Install Anki on your computer, then download “decks” of prepared vocabulary sets to study in the language you are working on (on the Decks screen click Download – there are lots already waiting for free download!). You can also prepare the vocabulary yourself based on words you want to study, as explained in this video. If you don’t have the right mobile device, then stick to this computer interface and use it to study the words whenever you have time. Its use is pretty self-explanatory, but here are some videos of how it works.

SRS must be used with other learning strategies

Despite how obviously enthusiastically I’m sharing this system with you, it is important to be aware of the fact that it is just one way to acquire new vocabulary. The best way by far is to hear and apply it in context with native speakers. Even if you “knew” all the vocabulary in the world you still wouldn’t be able to actually apply it in actual conversations if you didn’t work on other skills important to language learning (which I discuss a lot in the Guide).

Since you are usually hearing words in isolation (although it’s possible to include example sentences), it means you have no context and this is quite an artificial way to learn words, as simple translations of something from your mother tongue, rather than understanding how to use the word itself. You can’t learn any language just by learning translations. Someone using too much SRS would not necessarily be any further along compared to someone using other strategies.

On top of this, just looking at the word is not enough and SRS can turn into nothing more than a fancy version of rote learning by pure repetition if you don’t think harder while using it. If you are exposed enough times you will be forced to remember it, but what I prefer is to try to make an image association of the word and/or to think of an example to use it in and say that to myself, so that I use it in its right context. This way I’m much more likely to remember it next time.

SRS by itself is far from perfect, but if you use it while thinking independently too, its potential is much greater. I’m sure lots of you know the feeling that you have learned a word, and you are sure of it, but you just can’t say it. This may simply be because it’s been too long since you reviewed that word, and using SRS a few minutes a day will make sure that all words you use in the system will never be neglected if you use it right.

Another thing to take into account for learning words efficiently and avoiding forgetting them is to avoiding learning the vocabulary only one way: foreign language to native language, focusing on recognition rather than production. This focus means a lot of people understand languages but are at a loss when the time comes to speak them. In this case, it’s important that you see words appear in SRS for translation to the foreign language too.

When used on a computer, you can acquire single-word vocabulary very quickly (it works easily with the keyboard 1,2,3,4 & space keys for quicker navigation than with the mouse) if you set aside 30 minutes a day to review words. And in its mobile form you can take advantage of time that you would otherwise waste, to improve your vocabulary!

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I interviewed the Anki developer Damien as part of the audio for the Language Hacking Guide, to understand SRS better, and he is going to continue to develop different versions of this open-source software for people to enjoy. Give it a try!

If you have experience with Anki or other applications that apply SRS let us know! Has it helped, or do you prefer other systems for vocabulary? People also use it for learning scripts such as Kanji, and you can add audio and pictures if you feel that would help!

Wish me luck for Monday! I’ll have an extra bonus for the first people to get a copy of the Guide. I’ve been working for about 6 weeks full time total to produce this and share it with the world! You can see that I haven’t been posting regularly to the blog because of that, so hopefully that will change soon! I’m looking forward to releasing it into the wild
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Over the last weeks, I have been attempting to learn German through various different interfaces. Some have been a huge improvement to how I learned previously, some can be helpful in particular ways, and some just aren’t for me at all.

This post shares a little of my experience using both Busuu and LiveMocha. The reason I’m reviewing them together is that I find both their advantages and their disadvantages to be very broadly similar, even if the actual systems are very different and present different types of interfaces. I’ll start with how I think these can be useful and then say where I feel they fall short.

Note that this article is just my opinion to explain why I wouldn’t generally recommend these popular sites. If you have gotten use out of the parts I personally criticise, then great! You can also find a much more detailed review of LiveMocha that mentions other points I would agree on as positive and negative on the street-smart language learning blog.

Both site courses offered work by mainly using the flashcard system of showing you an image of the item or scene, and playing the sound of the word or sentence at the same time.

Free online courses

Now, I’m going to get into a little rant about the “courses” offered on these sites below, but at the end of the day they are free. No matter what setbacks they may have, you can’t really complain too much when it has a 0 price tag associated with it. The reason I will is simply because too many people might think these sites are better than what they are. To be totally honest, I’m surprised at how much Livemocha in particular was recommended to me after using it myself.

Although there are certain paid aspects of the courses, I simply cannot personally recommend these paid versions with a straight face because of how little the free versions managed to inspire me. But the free versions can be very useful when you are starting off.

The main reason I didn’t appreciate the courses offered on either site is because I was hoping to learn a language beyond the basics, since I’m already at more or less intermediate with my German. This means that I can’t really fairly review how useful these sites would be for absolute beginners but I can see how they would be a fun and useful tool to start off.

Either one can be a useful tool to become familiar with the sound of the language and to acquire some basic vocabulary, while also enjoying yourself thanks to the helpful images. If you are starting off, and want to use one, I’d recommend using Busuu for the first week that you sign up (after the first trial week you lose certain useful features unless you upgrade to a premium account) specifically if you are learning English, Spanish, German, French, Italian or (Brazilian) Portuguese. For any other language, use Livemocha.

Livemocha: The main advantage of Livemocha here is its wide selection of languages; an impressive 35! However, this list is not the misleading drop-down list you will see on the home page. Since you use the system to contact natives, you can do that for a larger range of languages (as in Busuu), but the actual courses are not offered in all of them – based on the standard template nature of how the system works (which is a point I criticise), I’m confident that the number will increase further though.

You can’t learn Irish through their courses for example, but you can select it as a language you are learning if you would like to try to practise with someone (whether you’d actually find them or not is another issue). The list is already impressive and interestingly enough; you can even learn Esperanto as one of the 35 languages through it for example. Unless you are learning a minority language you can be pretty confident that you’ll find a course for it.

In Livemocha, to get the best out of the system without paying, you have to contribute by providing corrections of text/audio in your native language given by others. You might need to do this for quite a bit before earning enough points to open up a new aspect of your courses etc.

Busuu: Although the list of languages is limited to only the 6 that I listed above, I find Busuu’s course itself to be better than the Livemocha one.

Firstly, vocabulary usually comes with the definite article, which in the languages listed is crucial for getting used to the noun gender. Livemocha does not do this except for inconsistent user submitted comments on the side. Although you don’t want to be bombarded with too much information when starting off, it’s important to get used to this idea of associating some article/gender with a noun even if you don’t necessarily remember it the first time.

Next, Busuu has integrated an excellent keyboard control system, so you can go through the course and replay the sounds without using your mouse. I personally prefer to do this – you can do it with the mouse instead too if you prefer.

Busuu also gives you the individual word you need to learn, followed by an example in context (with audio for your first week). Livemocha gives either a single word or a full sentence, not both.

For the first week, Busuu gives you free access to normally-paid content, such as audio in dialogues and in the sentence examples for the flashcards. After that first week you can still read these even if you can’t hear the audio. You also have access to the grammar course in the first week – I liked the way grammar points were presented in Busuu more than in LiveMocha.

Busuu also lets you go through a review of your lesson for free immediately, which Livemocha doesn’t in certain cases. With LM you either have to pay, or earn points. Luckily you can earn the points quick enough in LM, so this is just a minor annoyance. I found some serious disadvantages in the test/review in both that I mention below, and this makes the paid aspect of Busuu’s grammar course (after the first week) way less useful.

Help from natives

I don’t find the courses useful, but both of these systems offer fantastic opportunities to communicate with and get feedback from others. There are written exercises included within the courses for both of them and you will get corrections about text relevant to a specific topic. More independent learners would be better to use Lang 8, but it’s good to be encouraged to write something specific to a topic you need to practise, and you can always go off topic if you like. The feedback is hardly professional level, and it’s quite inconsistent, but it will be helpful in the early stages.

The best thing would be to get to know other users and to come to a mutual agreement about helping one another, preferably outside of the system, and with a user that you find to be particularly helpful. The fact that you can find such people eager to help you within the system is a huge plus.

On Livemocha you can also submit audio samples that you read, to have your pronunciation efficiency level rated, although the number of stars given to you depends as much on the other person’s personality as your actual level, so this becomes quite useless other than for encouragement unless the right people respond.

One criticism I have for LiveMocha is that it does not make these corrections available only to natives. I’ve set my level of Spanish and French, for example, to fluent and I was given more text to correct in French and Spanish than I was English (which of course is set to native). This means it’s important to be aware that your text may not actually be checked by natives. Then again, the level expected for these checks is so low that this may not be an issue, since any corrections advanced speakers can provide would be just as good as from a native for the basics.

The system requests that you be clear in your review, but because you would want to earn more points quickly you are encouraged to give a quick (perhaps sloppy) review to get to the next one faster. I earned the same points for a detailed response as I did for just saying “good work”. My own text in German was corrected very slowly – it took several days until I got a response, this was despite contributing by providing my own corrections, so it felt very unbalanced. This suggests that certain languages, although technically in the system, are still too infrequently represented to be able to provide consistent help. Once again, you are better just finding a native and collaborating outside of the system.

In Busuu I got a response much quicker. Once again, Busuu’s focus on particular languages works to its advantage if you are focused on one of these languages. It also depends hugely on the availability of actual speakers. I submitted a text in Spanish to test it out and got dozens of responses within a few minutes! It would make more sense that there are more Spanish speakers than German speakers in the system of course.

In both systems, the biggest advantage by far and main reason I’d ultimately recommend either system is the conversation practise. Both systems provide interfaces for typing and speaking live with a native for free. Each one of these deserves attention within itself, so I’ll come back to both sites, as well as several other sites that focus specifically on this aspect, and compare all of them specifically for finding conversation partners. Although from trying to use both a little, I find Busuu’s way easier and more flexible and LiveMocha has very few options for finding natives of the language I would like so easily.

Then again, Busuu’s chatting system couldn’t recognise letters with accents over them (ü, é etc.) typed from my keyboard unless I copied and pasted from its own keyboard window. A disappointing aspect to a language-based system to say the least! This made it unenjoyable to use its interface for chatting, but it worked well for a spoken conversation. I didn’t like LiveMocha’s interface much either, so I would prefer to simply give the other person my MSN/Skype etc.

I was told in advance that the advantage of both systems was definitely this “community”, although I would never call either of them a community. You can find single natives to speak with, and get corrections, but there are no forums, public chatrooms, Livemocha makes it difficult to find people flexibly (at least Busuu has a search tool), and there are no dynamic profiles with walls etc. that quite a lot of other social networking sites have. I didn’t feel any community aspect of either site when using them.

The “courses”: nothing more than lazy translations of the same material

The reason I would find it very hard to ever recommend the courses offered at either site, for more than just a quick glance to get familiar with a language when starting, is because the entire material offered is nothing more than a lazy translation of exactly the same content. Even grammar points are precisely the same material!! This is a ridiculous simplification of how languages should be treated. A positive attitude and certain learning methods can indeed be pretty universally useful for all languages, but once you are dealing with the actual content you have to tailor it to learners of that particular language!

Both sites translate precisely the same material to every language as if they had the best sentences and vocabulary in the world that magically work to perfectly teach any language. This appears to be copying the format used by Rosetta Stone. LiveMocha even has “vastly superior to Rosetta Stone…” in a testimonial on its main page. Sorry to be the one to break this to you, but Rosetta Stone is not that great either. Comparing yourself to and emulating expensive rubbish just makes you free rubbish.

Feel free to correct me if you’ve somehow reached fluency just by flicking through flashcards (and please share your wizardry with me), but these are not courses. They can help a bit, and they are fun to use, and make you feel like you are making lots of progress, but I can’t imagine anyone having more than basic phrases after completing either site’s entire course material.

I’m discovering flashcards’ usefulness in other systems, but basing an entire learning system around them is a mistake in my view.

Busuu‘s system happens to me more aesthetically pleasing to me, so I was starting to like it a bit until I finished one module and got to the review. Wow. I am genuinely impressed with how useless its review was – in years of learning languages I have never come across such a worthless testing system! Questions would be totally irrelevant to the purpose of the module and test memory for useless information such as people’s names… who weren’t even mentioned in the dialogue (just indicated off the side). In the multiple choice tests, it would also ignore the point of what it was supposed to teach me and I could very easily cheat by using a basic word I recognised as in the image/selection, or by process of elimination, and prove in no way that I had properly learned anything from the lesson.

Livemocha‘s lesson reviews on the other hand, are tedious repetitions and, of course, based on translations not designed for that language. If I get a particular aspect of a lesson right a few times in a row, I would hope for the system to dynamically accept me as knowing it, but I’d still be tested on it again and again. It was barely passable as useful for German, and other users have told me that it’s a downright waste of time for other languages where that format really doesn’t help. I was scratching my head to understand how it could possibly be useful to me learning German to hear the phrases being pronounced to me in English (when they are already written anyway).

The system ignoring crucial grammar points is apparent when you see comments on particular flashcards from people pleading with those behind Livemocha to do an overhaul.

Important aspects of how the language works are not explained in any useful way other than going straight to examples. If you want to avoid explanations entirely, you are better at least exposing yourself to languages as they are naturally used, but there is no natural language to be found anywhere on either site (other than chats with natives, or in Busuu a page with a few Youtube videos). They are all single sentences or simplified dialogues made in a recording studio based on translated text from the standard template.

One part of the tests that I did like in both systems was the sentence construction where you click on certain words until you have a sentence. It was nice, but still quite pointless in terms of practicality of using the language, and sometimes it was very hard to imagine what sentence you would construct from a bunch of random words – this is not something you naturally do when speaking a language. As I said – the systems are enjoyable to use, and I appreciate this effort to make the learning process more fun. But these are still games and not necessarily helping you make any appreciable progress. I still think people will learn very slowly and make only a tiny improvement to their level when using these courses. These systems give the illusion of progress and I feel like a lot of people will be quite disappointed when the time comes to actually use the languages they would have invested a lot of time into learning.

Overall Busuu was the better of the two. Apart from the nicer and easier to use interface, the themed lessons with icon representations let you choose what you want to learn, whereas LiveMocha just labels non-grammar lessons as “vocabulary 1, 2 etc.”

Conclusions? After learning the basics only use the system to chat!

Both systems claim to teach you up to intermediate, but I would not call the level you would reach after using these courses as anything vaguely resembling intermediate, no matter how flexible the use of the word was.

In either system it was nice to have so many words spoken to me and associated with the image, so I do believe they can be useful for people starting to learn a language. But anything beyond that and you should really use the systems for nothing more than finding conversation partners. If you find someone patient enough to help you, you could learn quite a lot with their help. As I said before, I’ll come back to both websites to compare them to other systems specifically for this.

Sorry for not having too many positive things to say, but I had been referred to these sites so many times and perhaps had too high expectations of them so I’m quite frustratingly disappointed with how little use I can imagine someone getting out of them.

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I will continue my search to try to find free or cheap online useful learning materials, but for the moment if you want a free language course to study, separate to actually speaking/listening etc., I think the best thing you can do is go to your local library!

Hopefully this post will be useful to people curious to hear what I thought about the systems. Sorry to be so frank in most of this page, but I am ultimately looking at how a system can help you speak, and I think that the poor-man’s Rosetta Stone (or even the rich man’s one) is not the way to do it!! I’ll continue to share other resources that do help here on the blog and in the Language Hacking Guide. I am hoping to make it available on May 17th!

Let me know what you thought of this review in the comments! Make sure to stay on topic or your comment will be banished to oblivion! Feel free to point out any aspects that I missed, or share your tales of woe in using either system with us!
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Warning: Very long and detailed review!!

This month the majority of what I learn from German (other than in actual conversations) has and will be on various on-line and computer based input systems. (I usually focus on speaking more and learning from books). I believe I can improve my learning method using certain aspects of one or several of these systems, as many other people have been enjoying these tools to learn languages.

For the first week of the experiment I’ve been using the LingQ website and tools for several hours a day.

Before I start this review of LingQ I should point out two things.

Firstly, you can earn points for spending in LingQ from referrals to this system and I am choosing not to when I link to the page. This system has several paid aspects to it (I link to free alternatives where relevant), and I am not earning anything by referring new paid/unpaid users in all links except the example badge for illustrative purposes. I just want to share my opinion of the system and how it can be useful to people.

Secondly, the founder of this system, Steve Kaufmann, has sent a wave of negativity my way because he is uncomfortable with the advice I give on this blog. This means that I am not quite in the mood to do him any favours to be honest! Despite that I am recommending his site as a useful language learning tool, especially in its free form.

This review is an honest look at the 7 days (about 3 hours a day) that I have spent almost exclusively learning German through this system, and I’ll list all the pros (first part) and cons (second part) as I see them. I will be reviewing other systems in some detail too if I see they are worth discussing, to try to see how they may benefit people not previously familiar with them, and will choose aspects that I like from them to ultimately improve how I learn languages.

I thought I would do this for LiveMocha too for example, but can’t see it as useful except for some beginner-only courses, and will compare it along side other sites later specifically for the purposes of finding natives online to converse with, since I only see that aspect as useful to non-beginners. Since I may not be going into as much detail in other systems as I had hoped because of this beginner-focus, you can read a useful review of these systems on the ielanguages blog.

Overview: LingQ as a web-based learning system

LingQ is a collection of various different interfaces for learning a language, gathered on one site. It provides features for working on the 4 main means of communication in a language: reading, writing, speaking and listening and has an active community and a vast collection of material both for listening to and for reading. The site has both free and paid options. You pay for “points” to spend in the system, but you can also earn these points by contributing and helping other learners. However, some useful and practical aspects of the site remain exclusive to paid members.

In this review I’ll be focusing on the benefits of the free options, but mentioning the possibilities of the paid ones for those curious, while mentioning work-around to keep it free.

The system is currently available for learning English, Russian, Italian, Swedish, Chinese, Portuguese, French, German, Spanish and Japanese. Other languages are occasionally added based on demand, but if you are studying a minority language it’s unlikely you’ll ever see it in the system. I was reviewing it for German of course, but the features work the same in other languages (which, as I say below is not always a good thing) [Edit: I've already been receiving comments saying that they can't use the system properly to learn non-European languages]. You can use it to learn as many of these languages as you like, even as a non-paying user.

The entire interface is very clean and user friendly, and generally pleasant to use.

My favourite feature: Reading interface

I have to admit – reading is not usually my focus. Although I have naturally improved my reading ability in languages through practice and enough to be recognised formally in several cases, my learning method could do with some improvement and LingQ’s reading interface is one way to do this. As I will be sitting an examination in just over 2 months I do need to make sure I am improving my reading ability in the best way possible, and I will likely continue to use LingQ to do this.

When you open a “lesson” you will be able to read the document through the interface. However, any words that you have never come across before in the system are highlighted in blue. In your first lesson all words are blue, but after several lessons (once you have confirmed that you know these words) you will see less and less and have a real feeling of progress. This is integrated with the “words I know feature”, a measurement system that I actually dislike, as mentioned below. However you will be reminded how much you are progressing and this is excellent encouragement.

The benefits of this clearly appear after using the system for longer. After a week, I’m still seeing some basic words appearing (as shown), but after a few more weeks I am sure more highlighted words will genuinely be ones I need to learn.

If you don’t know a word then hovering the mouse over the word will translate it for you (you can do this anyway in your browser on any website using plugins, but this is integrated into the system for adding hard words to your study list or known list). Several options may be given and if you click the one relevant to your context then you add what’s called a LingQ, which is basically a word or term that you need to refer to later to study. This allows you to continue reading.

Unfortunately there seems to be no language separation in the system, and non-English (i.e. non-native language) translations came up occasionally in my suggestions. This is due to other users who have set English as their default language (because the system is not practical to use in their language due to lack of translations), and enter translations in their mother tongue, so it’s something that you would just have to learn to ignore.

Using the system you can read documents quite quickly and make a note of tough words way faster than you would do it manually.

Something very important here is that you are learning words in the right context. Many systems I’ve already seen give you lists of words to learn off with no example sentence or even as part of a larger flow such as in a text document or audio. When you see a word as it’s actually used you can appreciate it way more than in other systems.

All of this reading aspect is free, however you have a maximum of 100 LingQs that you can add before you need to have a paid account. You can simply learn all of these when you have lots of them and then delete them, so you can add new ones. This won’t influence the number of words the system is aware of you “knowing“, which will continue to go up, so by deleting LingQs you can keep it free.

It’s actually better to make sure that you can continue to learn hard words, by making a note of them in a separate learning system as I mention very briefly below.

Great library of audio & text to learn from

Another excellent, and free, feature of LingQ is it’s library of “lessons”, which are actually short text documents accompanied by an audio file. I had looked for something similar before, and this is the most extensive and easy to navigate free database I’ve come across online for several languages, especially for varied language levels. It’s important to note that LingQ is genuinely useful for improving recognition (less for conversation) at different levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced), which is not the case in other systems.

This means that you have huge amounts of audio you can download to listen to on the go (as podcasts for example), and compare them with the documents. This combination means that LingQ is definitely an excellent system for audio (as well as reading) comprehension. Since they are integrated, you can combine your reading lessons for learning vocabulary and the listening aspect, to make sure you understand them when spoken.

This feature alone makes the site worth checking out for people who need more content in their target language to practise with. You need a free account to be able to access this library.

Community

Most people who use the system tell me that one of their favourite parts of the LingQ system is its community. I’ve started using other popular systems this week and I can already see that LingQ is an improvement on these in certain ways.

You can search for other members based on their language, and there is a forum that you can ask questions in. It isn’t as active as the how to learn any language forum, but there are regular messages and helpful responses. I started a discussion about this review I was going to write and got many helpful replies and a very interesting discussion.

A troll came to insult me too, but this would be very unlikely to happen to other people as I have a reputation there based on Steve’s somewhat misleading blog posts about me, as well as the unconventional ideas I have in language learning that I talk about so confidently.

If you were invested enough in learning through this system, it’s great to know that the community will be there to help, and you can always ask them when you need it. I noticed that some topics have not been active for a month or longer, but most of them have several posts a day and there are categories for you to practise the language you are learning.

The forum needs some technical work too; most URLs are broken up if you include them in a message (unless you use a URL shrinking tool from another site, which is a frustrating extra step), and you cannot edit posts or use formatted text. To me, this gave the forum a very “classic Internet” feel and it needs to be updated.

I can’t say that I was very active in getting involved in the community, so there is likely way more to discover here that I may come back to later. I am personally a very independent learner, but a lot of new learners would benefit greatly from support offered there.

Also, the site itself, while using very clever programming for the interface, needs some server or other technical work because the entire site was unavailable twice for much longer than a few minutes, and I’ve been using it for a very short time. It was suggested that this happens regularly. This was inconvenient for a specific time that I had set aside to study, and the error message is misleading and the links provided for explanations are unhelpful.

Import feature

I enjoyed testing out the paid features, but I will downgrade to be a free member before my first month is over. The free alternatives to LingQ’s paid ones that I list are fine for most learners, especially if you don’t mind deleting things you are sure of. To be fair, if you were to pay for the features I will mention, they aren’t expensive to use if you do it infrequently, and you do get value for what you pay for.

Another feature that I enjoyed is the Import feature. The export feature I mention below is for exporting vocabulary to study, but is a paid extra that you can bypass by copying and pasting as I suggested. Luckily the import feature is actually free, but is for importing your own text. Free accounts have a ‘limit’ of 5 imports, but you can just delete the documents when you are done with them to keep below this limit of 5. (Paid members do not need to do this, but it’s a simple extra step).

Use of this feature depends on how much of the language you come across on the Internet for reading and isn’t practical for reading newspapers/books etc. (without time consuming scanning and conversion). Since I put my e-mails and random websites through it, I quite enjoyed this option. However, since the database of ‘lessons’ is quite big, there is more than enough free content already there to keep you busy for quite a while.

As I said above, this helps for reading documents faster in languages that you are learning and using the interface for this is handy.

Paid vs point earning options

As I said, I am happy to recommend the free version of the site, and some other features are possible for free members, by earning points by contributing to the system.

Certain features work on a points system, but in my opinion they are not very practical if you don’t pay, so I don’t see this as a real solution for most people. For example, if you wish to have a spoken lesson, you need to have earned at least 500 points. To earn these points you actually have to give two spoken lessons (375 points earned each). Since the student chooses the time for the lesson (beneficial to the learner of course), the tutor has to be flexible around this (although they choose the availability window) and give their attention and a report after the lesson for each of the 3 people. Some people may not be interested in giving two lessons to get one in return (although there are excess points that will add up later).

People who are passionate about the community are happy to lend a hand, and I like this enthusiasm and genuine wish to help others. I’m told that this extra work involved is to maintain the quality of the system.

You can also earn points from referrals (as I could have done by using a specific referral link in this post every time I mention LingQ if I wanted), but I also think this is not practical as you only earn 200 points per month for each referral that opens a paid account (you earn nothing from friends that sign up to use the free system). So you need to convince THREE friends to take out their credit card before you can have one brief conversation a month.

This is ridiculous when you think about it and makes what you earn almost completely pointless in my opinion. I can only see it as a practical solution for people like me with popular blogs that could potentially get lots of clicks, and this explains why I have seen a few websites with their vanity badge of how many words they “know” so prominently displayed, with a referral link behind it. How it can help the system itself with more funding is apparent. If you refer people specifically to help maintain the system then it’s a good idea, but it’s a promotion gimmick, and I can’t see how it can help the actual users to earn enough to make it worthwhile.

As well as this points can expire. This means that even if you pay to use the system, your money can still go nowhere if you aren’t quick enough to use those points. This encourages you to use the system often, but is unfair in my opinion. If you earn / pay for points you should be able to use them whenever you want.

Conversation lesson

Rather than earn points, I paid for these lessons to try them out and was very pleased with them. For $10 you get 1000 points (2 lessons) if you already have a paid account (so I had spent a total of $20 on LingQ, with my basic subscription). With a free account you would pay $10 for one lesson, since points that you buy are worth half as much to free members. A chat session usually lasts 15 minutes, however my tutor Vera (and the next day Annett) were kind enough to go over this time with me.

It’s important to note that there are completely free alternatives for finding conversation partners online, such as http://chatonic.com/ , http://www.babelyou.com/ , http://www.sharedtalk.com/ , http://www.italki.com/ , http://www.mylanguageexchange.com/, http://www.lenguajero.com/ for Spanish and http://vraiment.info/parlezfrancais/index.html for French, you even use chatroullete equivalents in other languages! Other sites offer the interface in French, Chinese, German, Italian and Spanish. I don’t think chatroullete is a great alternative, but you can see that there are lots of free alternatives for practising a language in some way.

I originally thought (mostly from all the hype) that LiveMocha could be a good learning alternative, but from what I see in trying to get use out of it, it’s only really practical for finding natives to practise with and not for learning a language beyond the basics.

I will come back to review some of these systems to see which I prefer as a free alternative for finding free conversation partners, but of course because it’s free there are certain things missing that you get for a paid alternative.

After a pleasant conversation with Vera, she sent me a detailed report of the mistakes that I had made that she had been noting while we were chatting. I did appreciate this and if you are already a paying member then $5 extra per conversation is indeed worth it for the chance to converse with a very helpful native and get the report afterwards and could be a great target to aim for at the end of a week of studies.

However, if you wish to have more intensive spoken practise (which you all know I prioritise) then this would not be so practical and free alternatives (or meeting in person) would be preferable. One or two conversations a week will definitely help, but nothing like the kinds of speed of spoken progress that I personally prefer. I know lots of people prefer to take their time in language learning so this would may not be an issue for them.

Writing correction

There is a completely free alternative to this over at Lang 8 that I have already linked to. I have used Lang-8 and am happy with the free corrections, however LingQ’s one would have the same level of detail in the report as the spoken lesson review, and a level of focus/quality that you might not get in free alternatives.

Once again, it depends on what you are looking for. If you just want to write an e-mail to a friend for example, or get a general idea of your weak points in writing, then a free correction from a native is all you really need. However, if you are writing a cover letter, want to keep the text a bit more private, or are preparing for an examination then you might want more detail about what what you need to improve. How many points you need to pay depends on the length of the document.

You can also correct other people’s text to earn these points, like in Lang-8, although it’s not as balanced in points earned vs points spent. As well as this, in LingQ you have to wait until people submit text to you, but in Lang-8 you can do the corrections yourself immediately. However, this will likely not be much of an issue for English speakers in LingQ, as there is high demand for that.

Criticisims – the vanity badge

As well as the point-earning system that I’ve mentioned, there are certain other aspects that I didn’t like. For a balanced review, it’s important to share this and I hope those at LingQ will take this as constructive criticism, since as I say clearly, I am happily promoting this website as a good learning tool.

The vanity badge (my title for it, not LingQ’s) that states how many “words you know” is quite misleading in my opinion. You can see it here (this example does have a referral link that I would earn points from, if you are in a spending mood, which I don’t personally need to be honest, but you can click here to access LingQ in the same way without me earning points).

I’m very glad to see that LingQ focuses on all 4 means of communication, but using number of words you “know” as the measuring tool is meaningless in terms of your ability to actually use those words. There are many ways to assess your level in a language and I feel this one simplifies things way too much.

Then there’s the use of the word “know”. The writing and speaking aspects don’t directly influence your word-count (unless added individually), so this is more accurately represented as words you recognise as you see/hear them in the appropriate context. LingQ’s focus on context is a fantastic feature for helping you learn words as they are actually used, but that context does a huge amount of the work to help you recognise the word, that simply won’t be there to help you when you need to say/write it yourself. You will eventually learn to know this word if you are exposed to it many times in context, but this is slower than what I would normally do. Once again, if you prefer to take your time, this isn’t so much of an issue.

However, recognising a word does NOT mean that you know it. Remembering words is not bidirectional – it takes more effort to remember a foreign word than to recognise it. In my opinion, you only truly “know” a word when you can produce it yourself.

Even forgetting all that, the count of the vanity badge is not realistic – different conjugations and plurals and declensions count as different words to LingQ. If you think that knowing cat/cats, house/houses, dog/dogs means you know 6 words instead of 3, then you’ll agree with this measuring system. I don’t.

On the other hand using some form of a counting system to see that you are progressing is very encouraging and I like that aspect of it at least. I’ll continue to use the LingQ system, but I will not be displaying the badge on this site’s sidebar.

The flashcard system

I have mixed feelings about LingQ’s flashcard system. It’s great to review the difficult words that I’ve marked later, but the interface operates in a way I would not expect it to that slows me down. I’ve used both the one on the site and the free iPhone/iPod app. (There are no other options available, so tough luck it would seem if you are among the majority of people in the world who have a non-Apple mobile device…)

It categorises words as 1. New 2. Can’t remember 3. Not sure 4. Known and the status goes up automatically after a certain number of views, but I wanted to change the status to Known/Not sure for several words after the first time. If it was a simple matter of clicking one button to change the status and review the next one, then this wouldn’t be an issue. But you have to change the status separately, and then click to go to the next flashcard and this slowed me down considerably.

There are other aspects of how these words are presented to you that I didn’t like, but that is a matter of taste and is based on how Steve himself likes to study. I decided to start my experiment with SRS early and downloaded Anki and found it way superior to LingQ’s flashcard system, even though the interface is almost as simple. The SRS system is way more suited to how the majority of people think, and you can use it way quicker than LingQ. But this is something I will explain in much more detail later, as I continue to learn through SRS over the coming weeks.

If you have a paid account then you can use the Export feature to send your LingQs to any SRS application for studying. To me, this is by far the most important benefit of having a paid account, however if you don’t mind copying and pasting the hardest words to SRS, not having this isn’t an issue.

You reverse the order for testing production rather than recognition ability within LingQ’s system without needing to export, (“Reverse” on the website) but the terminology is confusing on the iPhone (you need to change “term” to “hint” in settings – to me this is far from intuitive and I needed help for it to be pointed out). The website system would do well to incorporate keyboard strokes (like in Anki) so you could use it quicker than clicking.

When using the free version of the site, I suggest you have a separate document open at the same time and copy and paste new words you wish to review later into that document, so that it can be opened by an SRS program and so you can keep your LingQ count below the free limit of 100. I’ll describe the details of how to do this while coming across any vocabulary (not just in LingQ) when I discuss SRS later.

Oversimplification of how a language works

One final thing I didn’t like is the oversimplification (not in presentation, but in progress and learning) of a language being nothing more than single words that you can translate into your native tongue, albeit in the right context.

For a language like German, separable verbs means that you simply can’t select a term to create a LingQ, since other words would be between these parts. Literal translations of these will do nothing but confuse the learner, and can’t ever help you truly understand a text. This is yet another reason that the vanity badge count is misleading, but this time in how much you can understand.

English also does this, e.g. “get your point / the idea / humour across”. In this case “get across” is the crucial term, and individual word translations do not help the learner in the slightest, and “get across” cannot be selected as one term to be learned, and adding it separately (only if you already know what it means; if you haven’t seen it before you wouldn’t think to do this) requires you to leave the lesson (or open a new tab). People not generally familiar with learning languages would not know to do this.

Also, the entire Interface is identical for learning all languages. This does not take important differences required when learning particular languages into account.

Like Steve, I’m not a fan of grammar, however there is no mention of it at all in this system. I try to get through understanding grammar quickly when the time is right, not avoid it entirely. You can always ask for help in the forums, but at a certain stage you need to get some detailed advice on how a language works beyond translations. I personally don’t like this idea of learning a language almost entirely via translations, but others would. As I said, the context helps hugely to improve on this.

You will eventually get most of the gist of it when reading and listening to words spoken in a particular way, however without a few basic guidelines you would need a lot of exposure for certain grammatical points to become natural to you without ever studying them. If using LingQ, it absolutely must be combined with other tools to make good overall progress.

Final thoughts

As you can see, this is an extremely in-depth review, so I hope people see that I am taking my input experiment seriously!

There are some other aspects that I found frustrating about LingQ but that are much more down to personal taste. Ultimately, I want to see what aspects of online learning tools can improve my speed and efficiency in learning languages rapidly, and what would work well for others too, and I will likely be recommending LingQ for free reading/listening improvement along with other tools, and precisely how I combine them, in the Language Hacking Guide.

If I feel another system is worth discussing in detail, I will do so. However, as I said above, I found LiveMocha to be a disappointment for non-beginners, and I will likely rate it among tools for searching for people to practice with, rather than an actual learning system.

If you have used LingQ or have any thoughts on what I said here, feel free to leave a comment. But I should point out that I will delete any rude/irrelevant comments. Lots of this post is mostly just opinion, but I’ve presented quite a lot of facts and important analyses. Take it or leave it!
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One month ago I started the Language Hacking League (LHL) e-mail list, and I am really pleased with how it has evolved!

Every Monday I send out an e-mail with a language hacking tip, links to the Internet’s best free resources for language learning and then I end by asking the league a question. E-mails also include behind the scenes updates from the fluent in 3 month project and advanced news on upcoming language missions, and on the Language Hacking Guide.

The responses and feedback I’ve been getting have been incredible from the almost 400 people who have signed up so far. If you’d like to join us, just fill in your name and e-mail on the right – you can unsubscribe at any time of course! People’s responses have been fantastic and usually inspire the links and language hacking tips in later LHL e-mails.

So today, for those of you who haven’t joined yet, I thought I’d share some of the LHL‘s favourite links so far. The Internet is full of some amazing resources, so this is just a small sampling that I’ll be constantly adding to in the e-mails.

The best links for free language courses

I’ll start by going overboard and give you a whole 175 links:

100 free foreign language classes online & 75 free language learning resources online

These two lists were exhaustively researched by the authors to gather the best free resources for language learners online – it’s true that quite a few of them appear in both, but I’m sure you’ll find something for whatever language(s) you are studying here! Let me know what your favourite links are!!

Ideas for mnemonics

Over the next weeks, I’m attempting several interesting techniques to try to quickly improve my scope of vocabulary, which I’ll be writing about in more detail later. But up until now, image association has been extremely effective for me to rapidly and efficiently learn new vocabulary. One problem a lot of people have when they try this is that they are not used to creating interesting associations.

That’s where Memorista comes in!! This site does the work for you by giving you already prepared associations (image and sounds-like) for particular basic vocabulary (in French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish). Some of them are very clever and will burn a particular word into your mind for good if you really imagine it, and give you great ideas for what to do on your own There aren’t a huge amount of examples, but it will certainly get you started on remembering the basics and give you ideas for how you could do it yourself!

Have a native say it for you!

If you’ve ever needed to hear what a particular sentence sounds like, it can be a bit of a problem; even phonetic languages can have their ways of catching you out, and you might not be sure about one exception. There are loads of cases where you just need to hear a native say a particular sentence, and if that’s the case for you, then definitely check out this site:   Rhinospike

To test it out I requested a German tongue twister that I’ve been challenged to pronounce (apparently some people have told me this will be my “true” test of speaking German with no accent ) and a native pronounced it for me!! I’ve also seen short texts (introduction speeches, or even short romantic poems) recorded that would clearly have been useful to the requester.

The time it takes to get a response back depends on whether you contribute your own native readings of texts for others. It’s a fantastic idea since it encourages you to help others and others will help you quickly too. All you need is a microphone and speaker, and a completely free account on the Rhinospike site.

Continuing from this, there is another site that is extremely useful when you want to know how a particular word is pronounced:   Forvo

In this case, just having a (free) account is enough and you can hear the word you are looking for immediately. Of course, you can contribute by recording words and phrases that others have requested in your own language. I thought of a few tricky words in several languages and they were all already there and pronounced very clearly!

Free instant text correction from natives

I’ve talked a lot about speaking languages on this site, and not so much about writing them. Well, the same rules apply! I personally don’t believe you should study for years until you are “ready” before ever trying. You need to write soon, make mistakes and see where your problems are.

The only problem is, when you write something, there may be no natives around to correct you, especially if you are still in your home country. Well of course, the Internet comes to our rescue! Check out: http://lang-8.com/

Similar to other sites above, you sign up for free, ask for help, and give help with your native language. I tried it out with a short e-mail that I wanted to write in German and I got a response within an hour with corrections and even a helpful comment! This site is definitely worth checking out for those of you who are interested in improving your writing skills!! You can bet that I’ll be using it a lot when preparing for my C2 exam.

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Of course, the e-mails also include an unconventional language hacking tip every time, based on what I’ve picked up over the last 7 years. Have I given enough of a sales pitch for the LHL yet? Go join it!

If you are already a member, let us know if you’ve been enjoying it! Did you check out any of the links above and find them particularly useful? Any links that I haven’t written in the e-mails yet that absolutely must be shared with language hackers? Let us know in the comments
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I was about to update my facebook status to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, but this creates a certain problem; most of my facebook friends are not native English speakers and some don’t celebrate Christmas.

While they may have enough to understand the simple phrase “Merry Christmas”, it’s forcing a language in their feed that they may not be able to respond to well.

When I do get responses to some updates, I get them in several languages and a real discussion can never take place, and people get notified in their inboxes of languages they don’t understand, if they have responded or liked an update.

As well as this, I have friends who don’t celebrate Christmas (several Jewish friends, and some atheist friends), but I’d still like to wish them well with different wording.

I’ve noticed some of my friends get around it by simply repeating the well wishes over several statuses or even clogging up one status with various messages or languages; this can get annoying to those reading it in their feed.

This was a problem until recently, but facebook has made a fantastic upgrade to how your statuses are displayed: filtered updates.

Setting up the filters

This takes a few minutes, but is worth the investment if you want to make targeted status updates. There are so many ways you could use this: just to those who speak a particular language, just to those in your town, just for the single pretty girls, block the update from those you don’t want to hear about it, just for family, just for work-colleagues etc.

When logged into facebook, click “friends” at the top and then “Create new list”, write the name of the list (Argentina, Esperanto, fellow nerds, etc.), then select that list on the left, then Add friends to list… and simply click through all those friends and save.

I like to simply label the country first (if enough people are part of that country, otherwise I’d go straight to language), and add any other label for that person (they can have several, for different types of filters) and then after labelling everyone’s country, I can sub-filter just the countries and assign languages broadly to countries (Spanish to Spain and Argentina for example) if relevant.

If you are filtering by language, make sure to put everyone else into the English category (or language you usually update the status in), because otherwise everyone would have to read these statuses, including those who have already read it in another language. Also, when you accept new friends, you’ll notice that there is an option to add them to a list as you accept them, so they can be included with the correct category.

Depending on the number of friends you have, this may take some time to set up, but it’s a worthwhile investment for filtering your status updates, sending emails, seeing the friends separated in chat and many more reasons.

Updating the status

Once you have your lists set up, all you need to do now is write it out for one group (language, location, religion, etc.) and then click the lock symbol to the left of “Share”, followed by Custom. Here you can select the group that will see the update by selecting “Specific people” and typing the name of the list. Everyone else will not see it. You can also select a group to not see it (ex-girlfriends, parents, co-workers etc.), in the “Hide from these people” option, which can be very handy when you want to share some sensitive news.

This means that you can write “Happy Christmas” followed by “Feliz Navidad”, “Joyeux Noël” etc. all one after the other, and your friends’ will only see one of them and their feeds will not be flooded by you. It also encourages you to practise foreign languages by always updating your status in English and in the language you wish to practise, without annoying those not interested in reading that language.

If you enjoyed this post, please share it on facebook, but there’s no need to use a filter (non English speakers can read the translation of this post given above by G-Translate).

So go on and wish your friends a Happy Christmas, a late Happy Hanukkah, feliz navidad, happy holidays, Joeux Noël, etc.

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By the way, thanks to everyone so far for filling out my survey from yesterday’s post! I’m still hoping to get a few more answers so if you have 3 minutes to spare, I’d love to hear your opinion on how I can make this site better in 2010!

If you liked this post, you may be interested in seeing how to make your computer multilingual.

Do you already use this feature in facebook? How else have you used facebook’s lists? Do you have friends from many languages and cultures, or is there another way you might think of using this status update? Do share in the comments
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Change your computer’s interface language

Even if, for all practical purposes, most things you do on the computer may be in English (writing emails, reading blogs, chatting, work, etc.) why not try using the interface in the language you want to practise? This is surprisingly easy in most cases! Even if your familiarity with the language is still weak, the position of the words within the program is usually the same, and may even be helped by icons. You get used to it very quickly and you will learn some important words relevant to how you naturally use your computer, as well as just feeling like you are in the foreign language, which can help your motivation to improve your level.

Right now almost everything on my computer is presented to me in Portuguese, to help me stay in the right mindset for my current mission. When it’s time to get in the mood for speaking the next language (actually Esperanto again for a week around New Year’s in Poland for the JES event, before I start my already-decided next language mission somewhere else in January; to be revealed later!) I don’t need to install any new programs and can change my entire computer to any of several languages I choose in less than 5 minutes. Today I’ll show you how!

Localizing your browser and browsing

I am definitely not Internet Explorer‘s biggest fan; no use winging too much about it though, since Google Analytics tells me that 20% of visitors to my site use it! So if you’re happy with IE then here is some info for changing the default language on some websites (that redirect to a particular language if available). You can download the entire browser and install it in several languages (but each language requires a new full download), and you should reinstall the program anyway if you are using anything older than version 8.0.

Luckily, for the rest of us it’s much simpler than that! My browser of choice (and of 60% of my readers), Firefox, lets you install a handy plugin called Quick Locale Switcher. After setting it up, you can change the language the entire browser is presented to you in (File, Edit, right-click etc.), the language of most of the plugins, the dictionaries available for spell-checks, and even the language of websites themselves if they are available in it, in just two clicks. [Edit: this plugin is crashing for some people; if that's the case for you, then another solution that requires a few extra steps is outlined here, or a less extensive locale-changer plugin can be found here] If you use Firefox, don’t forget to check out my tips for taking advantage of its spell checker.

Google Chrome natively makes it very easy to change the interface language. On a Mac, Safari’s display language is linked to the system language settings (see below).

Some sites that can change, do not automatically change, despite the browser’s default language. This is due to your profile settings and can easily be altered in sites such as Facebook.

Turning your entire computer’s interface into another language

A lot of programs that you can download are available in several languages from the website itself, or the display language is an option that you choose in the installation set-up. Some (like Skype) even let you change the interface language from within the already-installed program. For other applications, you may have to go through them individually and see how easy this is and if it’s worth re-downloading or reinstalling. For example, if you have a chess program, why not play it in Spanish, Italian, French, Japanese etc.?

But the ultimate interface change is for your entire Operating System. If you are on a Mac, then changing the system language is easy; that is directly linked to many installed programs such as Safari, so most of what you see on the computer is translated!

It’s possible in Windows Vista, but a bit complicated [edit: and you can do it in XP too], but unless you have the more expensive Professional/Enterprise editions of these Operating Systems you will have to actually buy a new installation CD for each language. This is also the case in Windows 7. Even changing the Windows interface language still leaves you the problem of the languages in MS Office and other programs. Luckily, for those of us on a PC there is a much handier (and free) solution; Ubuntu.

Try Ubuntu instead of Windows

Ubuntu is the easiest to use flavour of Linux; an operating system and alternative to Windows (and OS X) that would have been too complicated for most users in the past. However, nowadays Ubuntu is extremely easy to test, install and use, and is actually easier to use than Windows in many aspects, as well as being extremely customisable. Best of all, it’s completely free.

If you don’t like Windows (because of viruses, constant crashes, waiting 8 years for an “OK” upgrade that you still have to pay a lot for, etc.) then consider downloading this and trying it out from the CD, without even needing to install it (so it won’t even affect your system if you decide it’s not for you). After I lost all of my data about 2 years ago when my Windows system crashed, I moved to Ubuntu and have been very happy with it since; just a few days ago the latest version was released – a free download as always!

Since Ubuntu is open source (a concept I’ve mentioned before), the community helps to write it, and that includes language availabilities. What makes it different from Windows, and even the Mac, in this respect is the scope of languages available. It can be viewed in an incredible 244 languages, including Irish and Esperanto, which I certainly appreciate! And best of all; you can change the display language in just a few clicks! This change goes right down into almost all applications, including Open Office, for example.

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Do you use your computer in the language you are practising? Any experience with Ubuntu? Other tips that I didn’t mention here? Do share them in the comments
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As a technical translator for technology-based documents, the concepts of most documents I translate didn’t even exist ten years ago, so a printed dictionary may already be out of date if I were to buy it for the ridiculously high prices that most of the best large dictionaries sell for nowadays…

So today I’m going to share several of my favourite free online dictionaries with you! Note that most of these are actually technical dictionaries (apart from Wordreference), so they may not be so useful for looking up basic words and would thus not suit beginner to intermediate learners. For legal, economic, medical, litherary, political, technological, financial, scientific, industrial etc. words, sometimes you need a more efficient solution than a general dictionary for finding the right translation.

If it’s a basic word, don’t forget my advice about using Google Image to see what it means without even needing a translation (presuming it’s not an abstract quality)! I’ve also discussed the use of online forums and special Google searches to clear any language doubts you may be having. However, if you need a good translation of a word in the right context and you don’t know it already, these are an excellent place to start!

Multilingual dictionaries

Most of these sites do not actually specialise in one language. Since they are mostly not even written by one company, but are open to the community for editing, they can be used for several languages. Don’t think of this as them “spreading themselves thin”, some of these have vast amounts of words in particular language combinations that would put several specialised large printed dictionaries to shame! Of course, you should always be a bit sceptical before committing to a translation, and try to confirm your translation on several dictionaries or online forums.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is already well known as the free online encyclopedia, but did you know that it is also an essential tool for many translators? If you look up an entry on Wikipedia (and some on Wiktionary), it is very likely that the page has a frame on the left indicating several translations for that entry in other languages. You can read those entries in the other language if you wish, but sometimes the title of the entry is all you need; especially once you have confirmed that the entry you originally came to is in the right context (e.g. there are two main ways of looking at the English word “nail”; what is at the end of your fingers, and what you hit with a hammer, each with very different translations).

Of course, you need to go to the particular Wikipedia for the source language of the term you are looking up, rather than necessarily the English version. Wikipedia has over 100,000 individual entries in each of the 28 top languages, which can make it a very useful dictionary indeed! Overall, it is available in over 200 languages, and you can see the list of them here.

Wordreference

Wordreference is my favourite dictionary for looking up simple words, concepts, expressions, and some grammatical doubts. I especially like it’s automatic suggestion as you type and it’s ability to conjugate (regular and irregular) verbs in a search (e.g. searching for quepa in Spanish will direct you to the verb caber, “to fit”, as well as tell you what conjugation quepa is of this verb and give a link to its full conjugation table). If the base dictionary doesn’t have the term you are looking for, unless it’s really obscure, it’s likely that someone else will have asked about it in the forums and there will be a link to that discussion for you to read. You can of course ask the question yourself if you sign up for a free account.

One advantage of this over some other simple dictionaries is that it usually has several entries on a single word if it can be translated in other ways, and would usually give at least a one word synonym as well as possibly an example sentence to suggest context. It can help for some technical terminology, but I usually avoid this dictionary if the word is technical. This dictionary is very good for Spanish, French and Italian (to/from English) since these options have been on the site for several years. It is less extensive, but is constantly improving for German, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Romanian, Czech, Greek, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic.

Proz

The Proz term search results (using the Kudoz option) are provided entirely by translators who have spent time working on researching that particular term. It is excellent for more technical words, and all terminology is given in categories, and the term itself is almost always given in the sentence and context that is relevant to it. This is important for confidence, since one-word translations of words for all situations are actually not that common as I suggested above in the Wikipedia example. It has a huge amount of language options and you can ask a question yourself if you don’t find a satisfactory answer in the search.

Because nearly all of these solutions are given by professional translators, this dictionary is not useful for basic terminology that fluent speakers are presumed to know already. If your term contains several words, use quotation marks ” ” for that exact phrase, or plus signs + to include each word in no particular order. Just searching for all the words directly will give an “OR” result, which is not useful for set phrases.

IATE

The InterActive Terminology for Europe is a vast database of terminology applied in official public EU documents, covering many fields and all official EU languages. Depending on the word you wish to translate, this may be the most appropriate source. Example translations are given and you can search by category. This is quite technical, and not the best for more natural language.

MyMemory

I have recently discovered MyMemory from translated.net, and I am quite impressed! It opens up Translation Memories from professional translators and makes them searchable. Like other sites mentioned here, it has many language combinations, and category relevant search options and is constantly updated.

Bilingual dictionaries

It’s harder to be general here, because there are so many languages to cover, and there may be very good dictionaries for any given language (to/from English). Ones that I have come across so far include Grand dictionnaire termilogique, Quebec’s officially promoted dictionary, which has saved me on occasion for French translations much more than some of those above. Once again, this is a dictionary for technical terminology.

For German you can use Leo, for Irish there’s focal.ie, Slovnik for Czech and many, many more! Instead of listing them all here, maybe you can help me and provide a link to your favourite online dictionary in the comments? Any experience with the sites that I’ve mentioned? Do share! In a later post, I’ll be coming back to how you can better use some of these dictionaries, so if you haven’t subscribed to this site yet, now is the best time

If you found this post interesting, please share it with your friends on Facebook, twitter, Stumbleupon or however else you like!
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In an ideal world, you would have a native beside you every time you spoke or wrote something, so that they could help and correct you. This is not possible for many of us! Luckily, thanks to modern technology and the Internet, you can have your grammar and spelling corrected immediately and automatically, in any language!

I have only been learning Czech for 7 weeks and this week I was writing lots of emails entirely in that language to natives and have been told that there are very few mistakes in them! Rather than this being a reflection on how great my Czech is (trust me, I have a long way to go still!!), it is actually due to applying the methods described below. As well as improving my writing skills in learning my mistakes as I go, I am also improving my grasp on the language and will be less likely to repeat these mistakes once I have been corrected a couple of times. All of these correction methods are free and instant!

Google phrase search for great grammar

Is the word masculine, feminine or neuter? What case ending (genetive, dative etc.) goes with that word after a particular preposition? Does this word require a preposition after it? You could look all of this up in a grammar book or even a (good) dictionary, but these and many other grammar issues can be answered indirectly by a basic Google search! The best part is that the process is very quick - you don’t even need to carry out the search a lot of the time thanks to the suggestions that come up in the search bar on Google’s main page. Unlike with most searches, we aren’t actually interested in the pages that it provides us with. We want to know how many results come from the search and compare it to other possibilities.

For example, if you forget if the Spanish word coche is masculine or feminine then just attach any -o or -a ending adjective after it and see how many results come up! Like I said on my post about using Google Image as a dictionary, it is best to start from Google’s site for that language. So at google.es I will simply say “small car” – is it coche pequeño or coche pequeña? Just type coche peque (not even needing to finish the word) and it will suggest 2,620,000 results for the masculine version!

In French it can be hard to remember which preposition follows a verb acting on another verb. If you simply want to say “start doing”, is it commencer faire, commencer à faire, or commencer de faire? Just search for each one! When you group words together in Google for this purpose, always enclose them in quotation marks ” ” to make sure that exact phrase is being searched for. “commencer faire” gives 3,450 results, “commencer de faire” gives 1,020 results and “commencer à faire” gives 333,000 results! We have a winner!! (The other results may never be zero, because the words may come together in other less common ways, or may simply be written wrong on some sites).

Czech’s 7 cases (genetive, date, locative etc.) makes it hard to remember how some nouns decline in certain situations. Simply saying “in the city” has the problem of remembering if you should say město, města, městu, městě or městem for the singular translation of city! Process of elimination gives me “ve města” with just 1,350 results but “ve městě” with 2,970,000 results. No need to go further!

You can imagine how many different ways you can use this. If you think that a set of words can go together, but want to check, just ask Google! There are so many sites out there and people have written so much that you will be provided with excellent statistics on how something should be written. I’ve used this method for all languages that I know, including Esperanto and even Irish Gaelic, and Google has almost always provided me with the correct way of saying something. Note that this is obviously not a foolproof method, but only a basic good indicator. There’s no good number to look for, just comparisons, but usually hundreds of thousands or millions of results is a pretty good indicator! If possible read the summary of the first few pages to make sure that the words are indeed appearing in a natural sentence (instead of a new sentence starting half way through your phrase for example).

Firefox and Open Office spell-checker

Google has a spell-checker too of course, with its “Did you mean…” suggestion. But this can be tediuous if you want to be sure that every word you are writing is spelt correctly. That’s were the excellent dictionaries included in Firefox and Open Office come in! Anyone who has used MS Word may be familiar with the red squiggly lines that are put under words, with a right-click option to correct it. This is fine when you are writing in English, but (at least in the versions that I’ve used) it’s been quite hard or impossible to use it with particular foreign languages. Of course MS Office is quite expensive anyway!

And that’s where Open Office comes in. It’s a completely free equivalent to the Microsoft Suite that works just as well (and even better in some cases), and can be installed on Windows, Mac and Linux systems. It’s free not because it “isn’t as good”, but because it is Open Source and written by the community for the community. This has given it a lot of extra features, and a widely covered language range is one of them. You can add any language option you like, which includes a spell-checker, thesaurus and hyphenation check. This will automatically indicate when you have written something incorrectly as you type, and suggest a replacement. If you keep making the same mistakes you will soon get the idea!

BONUS TIP: I have occasionally used Open Office to keep a journal in the language I happen to be learning, to encourage me to write something and think of ways of expressing myself every day. I have started doing this in Czech to force me to “use” the language even on days when I am not being social, and its automatic corrections have taught me plenty!

Of course, you don’t even need to leave your browser! I’m glad to see that according to my site analytics, 52% of you use Mozilla Firefox! Google Chrome, Safari and Opera are also excellent browsers. If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, please consider clicking one of these links for a much-improved browsing experience. I will be coming back to advantages that I have found in Firefox for language learning another time. For spell-checking purposes Firefox has been excellent! (Feel free to share other-browser spell-checking experiences in the comments). In my current version of the ‘fox, right clicking any text input field (in an email for example) with “check spelling” enabled, includes a “Languages” option and “Add dictionaries”. Add your dictionary of choice (or several!!) and select it when you are writing in that language. This also works live for in-browser chatting, such as in Gmail and for facebook chat. It’s is ideal for someone who likes switching between two or more languages in their Internet communication.

Yahoo Answers: Ask a native and get a response immediately!

Yahoo! Answers is an interesting site: you can ask a question about a wide range of topics and get an answer within a very short time from someone interested in that topic. There are plenty of other sites equivalent to it, but the problem is that most of those using the (non-paid) sites, including Y! Answers, are amateurs just there to pass the time, so the answers they give sometimes may not be that useful.

However, Yahoo! Answers has equivalents in many major languages! Looking at the links at the bottom of Y! Answers shows the International equivalents, which includes Y! Answers in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Japanese, and a few others. (No Czech version unfortunately ) If you are still in the very early stages of learning a language and would be more comfortable asking in English, it’s best to use the English version of the site and ask in the Society and Culture, Languages section. But be careful because a lot of lazy people will just use automatic translation sites if you want something translated. It’s best to write down your attempt and ask people to correct it and someone who is fluent in the language will come along (usually very quickly!)

Ideally, you would ask in the language itself, on the equivalent site in that language (again, in the Society and Culture, Languages section). These will be read and answered by natives. Even though most people using this site are teenagers there to kill time, most questions that we may have are very easy for natives, so they are happy to help. If possible wait until you get a few answers (many answers may be provided even within 5 minutes of posting) to be sure. A free Yahoo account is required for this. Since the methods I mentioned above work fine for basic grammar and spelling, you only need the forums when you have a more complicated question that a native really has to answer, or if you want a short (non-confidential) text proofread by a native.

So many other ways!

There are plenty of other online forums, and the best ones to ask questions on are those specifically for language learners or language lovers. I focussed on Yahoo! Answers simply because the responses are always given extremely quickly, but there are loads of more. The forums at wordreference.com are excellent for the best explanations from other language learners and natives and it has a very wide range of languages (including Czech). For Irish Gaelic you can use the forums on irishgaelictranslator.com and for Esperanto, the forums on lernu.net and for other major languages there are a lot of forums out there! Almost all are free and have plenty of helpful and intelligent people on them!

If you know of good websites for this purpose, please share links with us in the comments! I’ll be discussing good online dictionaries another day, but what other ways does your computer and the Internet help you learn languages? Do share all of your favourite (free) programs and links with us in comments!
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There is a huge problem with almost every single dictionary you will come across. The translation is always wrong! Yep. Demand your money back!

When you look up a word such as “voiture” from French, your dictionary may suggest “car”. But “voiture” doesn’t mean “car”. A “voiture” is “a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor…” which in English we happen to call a car. But it isn’t a “car”! That’s just a word, a set of letters. That voiture/car/coche/auto etc. thing is a concept.

This is an important idea for learning languages. When you see a new word, which is spelt entirely differently from how it is in English, you may be tempted to just think yourself “Why do they make it so hard?? Why can’t they just use the English word?” Well, there is no universal relationship between an object and any particular word, even (gasp!) English words!

OK, that may be an interesting philosophical discussion or whatever, but how can that help me learn a language quicker?

Stop using English to learn your new language!

The main problem with traditional dictionaries is that you look up the word and see what the translation to English (or your mother tongue) is. This means that if you apply it to memory you always have to go via another unconnected language. This is NOT the way to speak fluently. When you hear a word you know, the thought process for most language learners is something like “Ordenador”… “Computer”… ….! Ah ok, I remember! You translate one word to another word and then get the concept via the second word. Or vice versa when you are speaking the language yourself. But fluent, and especially native speakers do not think like this! This is kind of thing that slows learners down into umms and uhs; because you have to go through twice as many words (native language + learned language) to be able to say the same thing. “Dónde está el… What’s the word for computer in Spanish?? Damnit, I learned this yesterday, it begins with an O I think…“. Your entire flow and rhythm in speaking a foreign language is lost when you keep switching between it and English. You should actually be asking yourself something like “Dónde está el… ¿Cómo se dice esa palabra? Si quiero mirar internet, entonces lo utilizo.. coño, cómo era?”. So, your entire thought process should be through the language; abandoning English entirely (even if you make mistakes). I’ll come back to this idea another time, but back to the word itself…

When I hear “ordenador” or any other translation of the concept I’m familiar with, I associate it with the concept, not with the word “computer”. It takes a bit of practise at first, but it’s not as hard as you think because it’s all part of how we naturally learned words in our native language when we are growing up. We should use the same approach for our second (or third etc.) language! But, instead of just saying “it takes a bit of practise”, I can actually offer one good way to get used to associating the word with the concept:

Google Image to the rescue!

Most of you may be familiar with http://images.google.com as just a quick way to get an image from the Internet to use in some document (like I just did with the computer image above). But it has much greater potential than this. As suggested a while back, over at Lifehacker, you can use Google’s Image search as a dictionary. Try it for my examples above (voiture, ordenador). Or try it with any word you are learning! Obviously it gets trickier when looking up verbs that are hard to represent as images or emotional concepts etc., but on the other hand it does much better at representing harder specific words that your cheap pocket dictionary or even the best online dictionaries can’t find.

When using this, note that you should set Google image’s URL to the domain of the country that speaks the language you are learning whenever possible (this ensures Google doesn’t think you misspelt the word, or if there is a false friend or brand name etc. in English with that word). Spanish is http://images.google.es , French is http://images.google.fr etc. So if I want to find out what the Czech word “komár” means, then I’ll look it up in Google Image (.CZ) and I see what it is, associate that word with the concept in my mind (not thinking about the English word), perhaps applying memory techniques (that I’ll get to later) and when I hear the word later, then I will think of it quicker because I’m not slowing myself down with the English word. Note that Flickr is also an excellent resource for image searches and this can potentially be even better than Google Image because of its well applied tagging system.

Give it a try! Let me know if it works . Of course, standard dictionaries aren’t all that bad; I use them too all the time. But remember that my point here is that you need to get used to NOT thinking via English! If you must look the word up in a dictionary then after you see its translation, picture what the word represents and associate that with the foreign language word, not the English word with the foreign language word. Give me your thoughts on this in the comments below

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