Langalot Blog

Do you want to improve your immersion environment for the language you are learning? Well, clearly you use a computer, and if you’re reading a blog post, that probably means you use a computer a lot. In two minutes, you can change your computer’s environment so that you are being exposed to the language you want to learn whenver you are on your computer. Just change the language your operations system communicates with you. This has been suggested before by AJATT (see #5), among others. But in case you don’t know how to do it, here are some instructions for a Mac running OS X, Leopard or Snow Leopard (perhaps earlier versions too).

First, open System Preferences. You’ll see a window that contains the following:

Select the International icon in the top row. You’ll see this:

In the panel on the left, drag the language you are learning to the top. If you’re learning Japanese, it will look something like:

If the language you are learning isn’t in the list, click the Edit List… button to get a list of all the available languages:

Enable the language you want. Back in the original International window, the new language should appear. Drag it to the top to make it priority number one.

Close System Preferences.

The next time you restart or open an application, its interface should be in the language you just made the top priority. You need to relogin to see the changes in the Finder.

Many applications, such as web browsers, will pick up on the change you just made and certain websites (Gmail, for example) will also be in the immersion language.

The same courses that were used by The Foreign Service Institute to teach foreign languages to diplomats and the State Department are available for free on langalot:

• FSI Learn German Courses
• FSI Learn French Courses
• FSI Learn Spanish Courses
• FSI Learn Italian Courses

Some companies sell these courses (see Mastering German: with 15 Compact Discs, for example), but they are free on langalot for all users. You can listen to the first lesson of each course as a guest without an account.

The vocabulary can be a little odd (you’ll never forget how to say “Where is the embassy?”), but they still do a great job of teaching you the language. Each course has at least one PDF manual that you need to follow while listening to the audio. The courses take work, but they are a great tool to help you learn a foreign language by yourself.

It’s very new, but Langalot now starts with an incredibly fast online foreign language dictionary. We wanted the site to be immediately useful to anybody on the web. No sign up is required, just start typing a word in in any language and it will simultaneously search five dictionaries for matches. And it’s fast. Very fast.

The current dictionaries are German, Spanish, Italian, French, and English. It will search translations based on your browser language preferences. There is no need to tell it which direction to search (e.g. English to Spanish, German to French).

While searching five dictionaries at once is prety cool, you can also limit it to one of the languages by clicking on the language name, or you can go directly to the specific dictionaries:

• German Dictionary
• French Dictionary
• Italian Dictionary
• Spanish Dictionary
• English Dictionary

Please try it out and let us know what you think of it!

In high school, I had an HP-28S scientific calculator. It was a great calculator: you could graph functions, solve equations, store formulas, and write little programs for it. The way you did all the operations on the calculator was called ”Reverse Polish Notation”. It has nothing to do with the Polish language, just a Polish mathematician. If you’ve studied computer science, it is also called “postfix”. The basic idea is that the operator comes after the the operands. So to do three times nine, you would enter “3”, “9”, then ”*”. This might seem silly or pointless, but once you got used to it, it was so much easier to use. The results were stored on a stack that allowed you to do complicated calculations with ease.

Anyway, back to languages. In German, a verb often comes at the end of the sentence. The simplest case is with modal verbs (Michel Thomas calls them “handles”). When you use a modal verb, the second verb comes at the end.

Ich kann Klavier sehr güt spielen.

“kann” is the modal verb, “spielen” is the second verb. As soon as a modal verb is used, the RPN calculator starts up. Each word (operand) you see gets pushed onto the stack until you get to a verb (operator).

A phrase that uses “weil” also uses the stack/RPN calculator.

Ich gehe nach Hause, weil ich sehr müde bin.

“Weil” triggers the calculator, words are pushed on until you get to a verb to operate on the stack.

“Denn”, on the other hand, doesn’t use RPN:

Ich gehe nach Hause, denn ich bin sehr müde.

More complex phrases also follow this pattern.

Ich werde es kaufen, weil ich es haben möchte.
          stack 1         stack 2

I imagine this explanation of this part of German grammar just made it more confusing. But for those of you RPN/postfix aficionados learning German, I hope it will help!

Looking for a fun language game? Here are five to choose from:

1. translation zilla

   A translation game where you have sixty seconds to translate as many words as possible. The languages you can choose from are english, german, french, spanish, italian, and simplified chinese.

2. How Many Languages Can You Recognize?

   Given the phrase “I can eat glass and it doesn’t hurt me”, how many translations of this can you recognize? There are 33 languages represented. Full disclosure: this is the first game we developed at langalot.com.

3. Etymologic

   Billed as “The Toughest Word Game on the Web”, in this game, you are given ten etymology multiple choice questions. It is tough: I only got three correct.

4. Digital Dialects

   While these are fairly basic games, they do have a vast number of languages: 59! Most of the games are simple multiple choice quizzes. Given a word in a foreign language, pick the correct meaning.

5. Word Association

   Given a word, what’s the first word that comes to mind? There’s no right answer. The site is simply building up a database of associations between words. But the results can be interesting. It’s kind of like Family Feud: associations for “tease”.

Have fun! Let me know of other language games out there…

Before all the social networks existed, there were forums. And they still exist today and should not be ignored. They are still vibrant communities and valuable to people learning foreign languages.

1. How to Learn Any Language Forum

   With a reputation longer than its name, this forum is pretty active. By my rough estimate, it has about 150,000 posts on it.

2. Unilang Forum

   Boasting approximately 400,000 posts, Unilang has a ton of content. It seems a bit slow to me…

3. Omniglot Forum

   This community is smaller than the others, but I like it: it is very active.

4. Word Reference Forum

   The most valuable part of Word Reference are the forum discussions about a word and the one thing that distinguishes it from other online dictionaries.

Update Here’s a good one that I missed:

1. Antimoon Forum

   There are a lot of good threads here, especially for self-learners.

Did I miss any? Put them in the comments!

Here’s a video showing how to search for and save a word using the Langalot iPhone app:

Demo Video: Langalot iPhone App Search and Save (30s quicktime m4v 714k)

So you signed up for langalot on the web or your iPhone and now you want to know what you should do.

You should search for words and save them!

There are two places on your home screen to search for words:

On the search result page, you can save words by clicking on the green “plus” button:

Or on a word details page, there’s a save button as well:

Once they are saved, you are ready to learn the words. Stay tuned for a blog post about that…

I’m trying a new experiment: I’m reading a German novel and I’m not looking up a single word. When learning a foreign language, you need to stuff your mind with “input” in the language you’re trying to learn. There are many ways to do this: immersion in a country where the language is spoken, watching TV and movies, talking and writing with native speakers, reading. Usually when I read something and don’t understand it fully, I’ll look up any words I don’t know on Langalot and save them so I can study them on the site. I still do this daily with other stuff that I read or hear, but with this book, I’m not going to look up anything.

I’m reading, aptly enough, Der Vorleser (The Reader). My German vocabulary is pretty small: around 1,100 words saved on Langalot. My German grammar level is probably intermediate. There’s rarely a sentence that I read that doesn’t have a word or phrase that I don’t understand. But, somewhat surprisingly, I do have a general idea of what is going on. Just like when I watch a German movie without subtitles, I can tell who is sleeping with who, who is mad at someone, and the basic gist of the story. And it’s getting easier as I get further into the book.

My plan is to watch the movie after I finish it (I’ve never seen it). Then I’ll read the book again and translate any interesting sentences and look up any intriguing words, of course saving them all to my langalot account. After knowing the story, I believe that doing these queries on the second pass will be an effective way to choose valuable, interesting sentences and words to learn instead of looking up everything.

This has been a great experiment so far and I recommend others try it. Just pick a good book, perhaps one where you already know the story. And don’t get frustrated when you don’t know a word or don’t understand a sentence, just keep reading.

A lot of language learning techniques focus on jamming as much input material into your system as possible. One great input material that I have found is comic books.

Like a movie or TV show, comics give you visual clues of what’s going on. Unlike a movie, you still go at your own pace and you’re still reading as opposed to listening.

If you like manga (I haven’t learned to like it yet), there are tons of manga series that are translated into many languages. Besides that, there are many native comics and lots of the popular comics get translated into different languages, so there’s a good shot you can find interesting stuff.