Langalot Blog

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!

The language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) are available in the public domain. These are often repackaged and sold for beaucoup dollars (Barrons does this). But they’re free.

The best site I’ve found for downloading the materials is fsi-language-courses.org.

It has PDFs and mp3s to learn Amharic, Arabic, Bulgarian, Cambodian, Cantonese, Chinese, Chinyanja, Finnish, French, Fula, German, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Italian, Japanese, Kituba, Korean, Lao, Lungala, Luganda, Moré, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croation, Shona, Sinhala, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Twi, Vietnamese, and Yoruba.

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.

Photo by 708718

Along the lines of the vocabulary memorization technique, there is another method to help remember noun gender.

Books and teachers all say to always learn the gender of a noun with the noun. When you learn that “chair” is der Stuhl, you always put the “der” in to remember this and to make it seem natural in your mind. But even when you try to do this, some help would be nice.

The basic principle is that you put the noun in a special location in the world based on its gender. If you are learning a language with two genders, you only need two places. And a three-gender language requires three. This place where you put nouns has to be big as it has to be able to contain every noun in the language. And it has to be a place you know well so you know your way around. I recommend using cities. For German, I am using Manhattan for masculine nouns, Brooklyn for feminine nouns, and Chicago for neuter nouns. There are two different ways you can place the noun.

You can incorporate it into a mnemonic phrase. My phrase for der Stern then becomes “Howard Stern is a star in Manhattan”.

Or you can just think of the city where it should belong and put it somewhere you know. For der Stuhl, I think of the chair in my old apartment in Manhattan. For das Restaurant, I picture a particular restaurant in Chicago. For der Stiefel, I picture a fashion model wearing boots walking down the street in Manhattan. For die Küche, I think of my kitchen in Brooklyn.

You can use the notes feature of langalot to add these notes to words. After a while, your brain will skip the intermediate step of trying to picture the model in boots and figuring out which city she is walking in to figure out the gender. It will just jump to knowing that Stiefel is masculine.

Photo by vobios

A very popular method of memorizing things is mnemonics. For example, HOMES to remember The Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior). I still remember the episode of The Facts of Life where Tootie learns Au is the periodic table abbreviation for gold by remembering the phrase “Hey you, come back here with my gold!”

These can also be used to learn foreign language vocabulary. There are several examples on the wikipedia entry linked to above, but if you can come up with ones yourself, then even better.

While learning German, I came up with “Howard Stern is a star” to remember that der Stern means “star”. As you can see on the langalot entry, langalot allows you to add notes to words where you can record these memorization phrases.

The interesting thing is that after a few times of going through the mnemonic in your head when you encounter “der Stern” or try to translate “star” from English to German, the mnemonic step disappears and you just know that “der Stern” is a star without needing the mnemonic.

It takes a lot of time to come up with these phrases, but it’s definitely worth it.

Photo by anniemole

1. All Japanese All The Time

   My favorite. Khatzumoto is opinionated, never at a loss for words, but most importantly, lays out a program to learn a language by yourself. It concentrates on Japanese (and more recently Chinese), but the same techniques can be applied to any language.

2. Fluent in 3 Months

   Right now, the author is trying to learn Czech in three months. It doesn’t look like he’s going to make it, but there are some good tips and resources anyway. The author is a freelance translator.

3. Learn Spanish On Your Own

   All the examples are for learning Spanish, but there’s no reason you can’t apply the techniques discussed on this blog to a different language.

4. Langalot Blog

   Hey, there’s not much here yet, but it will get there. So you should keep reading this blog!

5. The Blog of Tim Ferris

   This is by no means just a language learning blog, but Tim writes about it often.

6. Language Log

   Not just about learning a language and can tend toward the academic, but worth reading.

7. Doubting to shuo

   This one is about learning Chinese. Looks promising.

8. Global Maverick

   This site is about “exploring what it means to be a global citizen,” and a lot of being a global citizen is speaking other languages. Lots of good language learning posts here.

9. Aspiring Polyglot

   Written by Kelly McGuire, there is a lot in the archives to read about her adventures learning many different languages.

10. Dreaming in Kanji

    Also by Kelly McGuire, this contains a lot about Japanese culture, but also a lot of useful language learning posts and links, mainly about learning Japanese.

11. Spanish Only

    Targeted toward learning Spanish with many word-of-the-day posts. The author learned Spanish in one year.