Oliver Antosch
February 24, 2015

Don’t talk to me in English

Olly Richards from IWillTeachYouALanguage.com wrote an interesting blog post about the problem of people answering back in English instead of the language you are learning.

So you want to practise a language but they answer back in English. What do you do?

Here is a short summary:

Strategy 1: Pretend you don’t speak English or pretend you speak it poorly.

Strategy 2: Explain to the person that you want to practise their language and ask them not to speak English.

Strategy 3: Go to a place where they don’t speak English, such as in rural areas.

Click here to read the complete post from Olly Richards.

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Oliver Antosch
December 12, 2014

10 tips how you can easily remember new words

In today’s guest post, Yohana Petrovic explains how to easily remember new words.

Are you learning a new language? Or maybe just working on improving your vocabulary?

Did you stumble across a new word while reading the other night and want to remember it?

We are all always trying to remember things. Those of us who love writing are even more likely to try to learn and remember new words, whether they are in our own language or in a language that is foreign to us.

Would you like to be able to have much better recall of all new words that you are learning? Then, here are ten tips to help you out.

1. Tie New Words to Old Words in Your Memory

Let’s say that you want to remember that the word “polyglot”. First you look it up in your dictionary or type it into a search engine. You will find that the definition is “knowing or using several languages” (at least, that is the definition according to the online Oxford Dictionary). So to remember what “polyglot” means, you could link it to a word with a similar definition such as the word “multilingual”. You can find more information here.

2. Match Your New Words to Pictures in Your Mind

This time let’s take the word “vex” as an example. You just read it in Pride and Prejudice and looked it up in your dictionary. So you know that the word “vex” means “to cause someone to feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried.” How are you going to remember this new meaning? Well, what happens when you feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried? Do you get a headache? Do your brows furrow? Now, imagine a stick figure. A cartoonist would draw x’s for the person’s eyes. “Vex” sounds like “x”. So to remember “vex”, just imagine an annoyed, frustrated, or worried cartoon character with x’s in place of its eyes and eyebrows.

3. Display Your Words Around Your House

One of the best ways to learn a new word is to constantly look at it, think about it, and bring to mind what it means. A good way to do this is to put words around your house. Now, don’t just put your words that you are trying to learn in random places. Are you trying to learn the phrase “J’adore”? (It is French for “I love”.) Then, put it near something that you love.

4. Use Acronyms

What is an acronym? It is where you form a new word from the first letters of several other words. For example, let’s say you are trying to remember the words “wily,” “odious,” “rancorous,” “decorous,” and “systemic.” How can you link these random words so that you can remember them? Well, the first letter of each word, put together, spells “WORDS.” This is an excellent way for you to remember several new words at once rather than remembering the meaning of new words.

5. Try Connecting Each Word In Your Mind With a Number

Let’s say that you need to remember three different new French vocabulary words that form a sentence when put together. These words are “J’adore le chocolat.” But you keep switching up the order. So, you need to attach each word to a number so that you can remember them as a sentence. Use either picture or auditory devices to link “j’adore” with “1”, “le” with “2”, and “chocolat” with “3”. This way you can remember each word in its proper order.

6. Make an Acrostic Sentence With Your Words

Did you ever take music lessons? If you did, then you remember having to learn the names of the lines of the treble clef. To remember them, you probably learned the phrase “Every Good Boy Does Fine.” The first letter of each word corresponds to the name of one of the lines of the treble clef. You can use this device to remember practically any word, phrase, or letter. You can find more information at this website.

7. Discuss Your New Words With Someone Else

Have you ever found that you understand a concept, a philosophy, or any other idea better if you explain it to someone and then discuss it with them? Not only is this a fun process, it is a proven memory device.

8. Make Flashcards

This step is pretty self-explanatory. If you are trying to learn a new word, one good way of remembering both it and its meaning is by turning them into flash cards. Put the word on one side of the flash card and the meaning on the flip side.

9. Use Your New Words in Sentences

One of the best ways of remember either a new word or the meaning of a new word or both is to use the word in a sentence. This way you can remember the word and, by the context of the sentence, what the word means.

10. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

One of the best, most time tested ways to remember something is to keep repeating it over and over again. Whether you are trying to learn a foreign language or just a new vocabulary word, you end up having to repeat, repeat, repeat it to learn it.

Yohana Petrovic is a writer and educator. Yohana has 10 years experience in educating and now she is a proofreader at http://globalessays.org. You can reach her on Facebook or on Twitter: @YohanaPetrovic

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Oliver Antosch
October 19, 2014

Comparing digital and paper-based flashcards

I recently gave an interview for Kerstin Hammes’ book. In her book I discuss pros and cons of paper and electronic flashcards. In the book I only discuss this in a short version so I wanted to do this more in detail on this blog.

Since one of the main features of Antosch & Lin’s courses are electronic flashcards it’s no secret that I do prefer electronic flashcards to paper based flashcards.

Here are the advantages of digital flashcards:

– You can actually listen to the words on the card and there is no way to learn a language without listening a lot. Theoretically it would be possible to write down the pronunciation or romanisation of the word but it’s not the same. If you listen to the word it will stick better in your mind.

– Another great feature of a modern system is that new and old cards are shown to you automatically. You do not have to organize the cards shown to you. You simply tell the system when you want to see the card again and it will arrange the order for you.

– A good system will also allow you to choose the level of new cards. For instance you let the system know you are an advanced user and therefore only advanced words are shown to you. Our system will also let you know various statistics about the card, such as when was the last time the card was shown to you and how often in total. Not absolutely necessary but still a nice feature.

– If you want to practice on a train or a bus you can use your mobile phone. Taking a big box of paper flashcards would just not be practical.

– Our electronic flashcards offer related words, compound words and example sentences for the words you are learning. This is a decisive factor if you learn new words. Learning words without context should be avoided.

– If you are a serious language learner you will have to write thousands of paper flashcards. This seems really a lot of work to me. There is also the problem of writing it down incorrectly. On our website where you can enter your own flashcards and I see users getting the spelling and/or the translation is wrong all the time.

– Digital flashcards also allow you to practice the words in various exercises, such as where you have to enter the words, or multiple choice or sound-based exercises. The best way would be to combine all those exercises.

– Another thing I like about digital systems is that you can track your progress. If you see on a line chart how you get better and better it can give you a necessary boost to keep going, and motivation is everything in language learning.

– A electronic flashcard system will also allow you to share you cards easily. This is not possible with physical cards.

– Electronic cards can be shown automatically to you. You can just lean back, iron your shirt, do exercise, etc and words are shown to you every x seconds.

– Last but not least they are more environmentally friendly as it saves paper.

So what are the advantages of paper flashcards:

– First good thing is that you don’t need to buy an expensive computer, you can get started right away with a pen and paper.

– It might be easier to take notes or draw something on the paper flashcards. Even though a good flashcard system will also allow you to take some additional notes. So this is no longer an advantage restricted to paper-based learning.

I think I would only use paper flashcards for children who can’t use computers yet or if you can’t afford a computer. But then again tablet computers have become really cheap these days.

So all in all it’s clear that electronic flashcards have the upper hand. If you haven’t tried digital flashcards yet, why not give it a go today?

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Oliver Antosch
October 19, 2014

My thoughts on how to get motivated to learn a language

In the language learning blogosphere there are plenty of articles about how to get motivated to learn a language.

I’ve actually read an interesting point about motivation. It basically said that motivation is a fickle thing and you shouldn’t rely on it. Instead rely on discipline. In other words just get on with it.

Personally I would say that motivation and discipline are connected. If you are disciplined enough to learn for a few weeks you will see results which in turn will motivate you to keep going. In other words if you are not motivated from the get-go, try discipline first and later you will be motivated enough to keep learning.

Apart from this I’d say have a system in place to track your success objectively. This is why on Antosch & Lin we have progress tests which can be done on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis. These multiple choice tests take around 20 to 30 minutes. The final scores are shown on a line chart, so it’s easy to see whether you are improving. And if you see some progress every month it will give you the necessary boost to keep going.

A few days ago I listened to Chris Broholm’s podcast (with Anthony Lauder). The point they made is that progress is so gradual that it seems you are standing still, but you actually are progressing, it just happens so slowly that you don’t realise it.

Another good strategy is to read books about something that interests you. If you like “Lord of the Rings” for instance read it in your language you are learning.

Personally I read a lot of detective and crime books to learn English when I grew up in Germany in the 80s. I especially liked books from the Canadian author Margaret Millar. Her books often have a twist ending. Think “The Sixth Sense”, but in book form. One really good book from her is “How Like an Angel” which I read a few times.

I also learnt English by watching a lot of Hollywood movies with subtitles. In Germany movies are dubbed into German, so it was really hard to get your hands on these films. These days we have the Internet and things are much easier of course.

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Oliver Antosch
October 17, 2014

Italian Basics For Easier Communication

In today’s guest post, Brendon Gleaves explains the basics of Italian.

Italian is one of the most spoken languages in the world. Italy is a country that has a rich history, with the Roman Catholic having its origin in Italy. You might want to visit the country, or maybe you just need to learn the adorable language. There might be times when you could be on a job tour in Italy or you are on a special, short visit there, for that, you will need to learn Italian basics that will keep you on track.

If you need to learn Italian more effectively, you will have to practice more of it. On your trip to Italy, you will have to know some easy to say words and phrases that will help you be understood easily. These words and phrases are the once that are called the Italian basics, which are also easy to learn. It will help if you constantly practice them, for a quicker understanding, before you advance to the next level.

The Basic Words
The most common words that you would expect to say, nearly every time you meet or leave someone are the following; Some words or phrases have their pronunciation included, for the sake of avoiding, the wrong pronunciation.
• Buongiorno, pronounced, Bohn- jyouhr-no, or the informal, Ciao, meaning Hello
• Come sta, pronounced, ko-me-sta, means How are you?
• To say fine, thank you, you will reply, Bene, grazie, which is said be-ne, grat-zi.
• What’s your name – Come si chiama, said, ki-a-ma.
• My name is… Mi chiamo – ki-a-mo
• Pleasure meeting you – Piacere di conoscerla, it sounds, pya-che-re di ko-no-shayrla.
• Please – Per favore, said, peyr fa-vo-re.
• Thank you – Grazie.
• You are welcome – Prego
• Yes – Si
• No – no
• Excuse me – Mi scusi, this is said, mi sku-zi
• I’m sorry – Mi scusi
• Goodbye – Arrivederci, pronounced, ari-ve-der-chi.
• Good morning – Buonamattina
• Good afternoon – Buongiorno, this is pronounced, bon-jyior-no.
• Good evening – Bounasera
• Good night – Bounanotte

Basic Phrases
You might be in dire need of accessing or knowing anything when in a store or the bus, for that, these phrases would help you to communicate in a more understandable way.
• I don’t speak Italian – Non parlo Italiano
• Do you speak English? – Parla Inglese, this sounds like, ing-leze.
• Does anyone speak English here? Qualcuno parla Inglese?
• Help! – Aiuto, pronounced, ai-yu-to.
• I don’t understand – Non capisco
• Where is the toilet? – Dov’ è il bagno, said ban-yo.
• I speak a little Italian – So soltanto un po’ di Italiano
• This is…. (When introducing a person) – Le presento…
• What did you say? – Che cosa hadetto?
• Could you talk slowly? – Può parlare lentamente?
• Yes, I understand very well. – Si, capiscco benissmo
• Enjoy your day, or have a great day – Buoba giornata.

There are some Italian letter C that will sound -ch-, but other uses of C will sound -kah-, but you will learn more as you advance in the language. These phrases will help you to get along with people that you might meet on the way, or at a social gathering. They might also help you to know if there is an English speaking person around, who might translate more to you, or help you learn even more. Always try to pronounce them the right way, in order to avoid confusion. Nevertheless, you should know the phrases and the words, which will give the native speaker a clue of what you might need. If you attend a reputable school that has competent teachers, learning Italian is not difficult. Within a short time, you will become familiar with the basic of this language and be in a positron to communicate.

Brendon Gleaves runs LanguageHelper.net  where he discusses his best language learning techniques. Visit his website for more information.

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Oliver Antosch
September 13, 2014

Readlang – a language resource for advanced users

In today’s guest post Steve Ridout tells us how he started Readlang, a site suited for more advanced language learners.

I’m Steve and I create and maintain Readlang, a language learning web-application which allows you to consume media in your target language. Designed mainly for reading novels and other long form texts, but it’s also used to read websites, watch YouTube videos, and listen to songs. The great thing about it it’s simple inline translations which allow you to quickly understand unknown words and phrases, and that it tracks your progress to provide you with tailor made flashcards based on the books and texts you love to read.

Readlang

The idea came after I’d been living in Madrid for 6 months, and wasn’t happy with my progress in learning Spanish. This was largely because I wasn’t using it on a daily basis. I would almost always talk in English at home, and I was working remotely with English speaking people. The times I would try to socialise in Spanish were difficult and stressful because I just couldn’t understand most conversations. I was falling into the typical ex-pat trap and needed to make a change.

I decided to immerse myself in the Spanish language, and chose reading as my primary habit to do this. Reading is great because it exposes you to lots of new vocabulary and isn’t stressful like talking can be, at least for an introvert like myself. And from this the site was born.

I’ve been very pleased with the response. Nearly 10,000 people have signed up so far and a lot of have told me that Readlang is exactly the app they’ve wanted for years, which is incredibly encouraging and rewarding. And some are willing to pay a small subscription to use the site very heavily. On the other hand, it’s still not providing me enough to live on, so I’m currently contracting as a software developer for a few months to stock up my savings and will return to working on Readlang full time soon.

I still use it regularly, it’s especially useful now that I’m back in the UK to have a little exposure to Spanish every day. If you’re learning a language, and are ready to start tackling simple native texts, give it try. I think you’ll like it.

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Oliver Antosch
September 9, 2014

The story behind Japanese learning website Renshuu.org

This guest post is from Michael Hominick who talks about his Japanese learning website Renshuu.org:

renshuu.org started out as a tiny personal project to fight the most deadly of foes: laziness. At the time, I was a university student studying Japanese, and it was an almost daily battle to create and keep track of hundreds of paper flashcards that were going to keep me alive while I was learning Japanese.

While I did and still do enjoy studying, I have never had any love for the ‘secretarial’ side of studying: making flashcards, keeping them organized, and trying to rewrite the bad data in my head when I would realize weeks later that I had miswritten part of a kanji character on one of my cards.

I was majoring in computer science at the time, so it was a natural fit for me to make a site that would help automate all the busywork of language studying so I could focus on the actual learning. The only thing I would change if I could jump back to this point in time is that I would have build it from scratch as a tool for anyone to use, instead of creating it as a personal site and slowly growing it out from that point.

It has been about 13 years since renshuu.org was made and has been helping me (and many others) enjoy learning Japanese without spending unnecessary time fiddling around with my study materials. It has always been a second job next to my (hopefully) lifelong profession of teaching: I am currently designing and teaching a new curriculum for the language wing of a private high school in Japan. Fortunately, I have had two more people join me (we all work on renshuu as a second/side job) in building the completely rewritten renshuu 3.0, which is in beta at the time of writing this.

Although renshuu has grown in size and scope so that I could not possibly detail all the cool features built in, I am happiest with the level at which the site is able to customize itself to match any user’s Japanese knowledge level. No two students are alike – even a class using the same textbook will create learners of different knowledge levels as people supplement their Japanese with new words and expressions from books, anime, games, etc.

renshuu’s system keeps track of everything you learn on the site (with both broad and fine-toothed options for specifying kanji/vocab that you already knew before joining the site) and will, per your preferences, display all vocabulary, grammar explanations, and example sentences to match your personal knowledge level.

What does this mean? renshuu’s system will allow you to easily:
– rewrite any vocabulary term to show only kanji that you know (or show furigana above unknown kanji)
– automatically sort sentences in the dictionary/quizzes to best fit your vocabulary knowledge (not too many words you’re unfamiliar with)
– instantly populate words throughout the site with a kanji character as soon as you study it
– generate personalized quiz questions that help reinforce the material by never showing you incorrect answers that are easy to spot because they are words you’ve never studied before.
– grammar examples and explanations in the grammar library are automatically rewritten as well to match your kanji knowledge

While many study sites do a good job of keeping track of which ‘flashcards’ you know and don’t know, renshuu’s system leaps past that and makes ALL the content in the site aware of your knowledge level so it can react and provide you with a personalized study environment.

We’re a very tiny group and we like to keep in touch with our users, so if you join us and have any questions at all, you can post anywhere in the site asking for Michael and I’ll be there to help!

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Oliver Antosch
September 4, 2014

Introducing Judith Meyer’s LearnYu system

In today’s guest post Judith Meyer, a well known member of the polyglot community, introduces her new system LearnYu. Enjoy!

By the time I was 18, I was already conversational in 8 human languages and 5 computer ones. I loved learning languages and I loved programming. I was despairing over having to choose between them for my profession, but then my history teacher told me about the wondrous new study field called Computational Linguistics, which is the science that teaches computers how to manipulate language – essential for applications like machine translators, text-to-speech apps for blind people, dictation software, spellcheckers and much more.

So I studied Computational Linguistics. During and after my studies I worked as a language teacher, a language course designer (for GermanPod101, GreekPod101, Myngle.com and other sites), a web developer and a computational linguist, always looking to combine my passion for languages with my passion for programming. I got quite good at designing language courses as well, something for which there is no formal training. At one point, I was even hired to train teachers in the art of lesson writing.

I guess it was no surprise that when I saw Khan Academy and Duolingo, I was fascinated by the implications of using machine intelligence to create language courses custom-tailored to each student’s strengths and weaknesses. I wrote to Duolingo offering to drop all projects and work for them, but couldn’t get a foot in. Now Duolingo is not perfect – I studied several languages to completion on their system and noticed a lot of issues, for example the machine voices that are quite awful for some languages, the lack of basic conversational content like “Where are you from? – I am from Germany”, the complete lack of questions outside the one lesson they dedicate to questions, the ridiculously useless phrases (“The duck eats a strawberry”).

So I decided to built a better system and using a language Duolingo isn’t going to offer for a while: Chinese, which also happens to be my favourite language. I call my site LearnYu. Here’s a graph showing you what LearnYu does better than other kinds of courses.

grid_small

I started to develop LearnYu in summer 2013, so about a year ago, and I have been spending most of my time on it since then, except for when I was organizing the Polyglot Gathering (www.polyglotberlin.com/2014), which gobbled up more of my days than I had expected.

I did a lot of the LearnYu development myself and used my own funds to hire Chinese native speakers to develop content and make audio recordings, to get a good design for the site, to have the server set up and all that. All in all, there are four people regularly involved in the project right now. It’s in beta and access is by invite only – considering that there are currently probably a million people waiting to study Chinese through Duolingo, we’re afraid of our server getting overloaded if a significant share of them decided to test our system all at once, so we’re using a waiting list [www.learnyu.com] to gradually scale up the project.

We also still have to fix some bugs and add more content before the site is ready for the big launch. At the moment, we’re running a crowdfunding campaign in which you can get language-learning materials, lifetime premium access to LearnYu, language coaching and similar rewards in exchange for supporting our project. Check it out at http://igg.me/at/chinese

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Oliver Antosch
August 28, 2014

Lessons learned during our design contest

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We’ve recently relaunched our site consolidating our 13 sites into one domain (antosch-and-lin.com). As part of this we’ve had a logo contest on 99designs. I’ve used 99designs before, but there are also other companies such as Crowdspring or Hatchwise.

I’ve actually invited my language users to take part. A couple of users took part, but there were two users telling me that they really dislike design contests. One even unsubscribed out of protest. One user forwarded me this website which in their own words “educates the public about spec work”, and is very critical of design contests.

One of the reasons they dislike design contests is that only the winner of the contest gets paid. There is also the problem of designers ripping off designs. The simple reason being that anybody can take part in these contests.

However if you have an open contest (as opposed to a “blind” contest), the designers will report ripped off designs to 99designs who then decide whether the design should be removed  from the contest. Another advantage of open design contest is that if you indicate you like a certain design by rating it highly the other designers will submit their own version of it. (which is however disliked understandably by some designers)

One designer came up with the idea of a bird logo which I liked. Then two others designers submitted a logo with an owl and another with a hummingbird, which won the contest. We’ve also had a lot of designers submitting logo designs with speech bubbles, but this concept was already used by other language learning companies.

The winner was partly decided by letting users vote  which logo they like most. 99designs offers a voting feature for this.

In total there were design submissions of over 100 designers which was unprecedented for me. A lot of designers are from Indonesia or  the Philippines. The winner of the hummingbird logo is from the Philippines.

PS: If you do a logo it’s best to avoid these generic logos or these.

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Oliver Antosch
August 28, 2014

How to learn a language easily

In today’s guest post, William Delgado shares his thoughts on language learning.

Learning a language is easy for some people, while certain others find it very hard to learn a language. If you are someone who finds learning a language to be a tough task, utilizing all resources at your disposal to the maximum will make the procedure of learning languages easy for you. A passion for languages and a strong desire to learn is extremely necessary for learning languages easily. Let us have a look at some tips which make learning a language easy.

  • If you want to learn a new language, select a language which you are eager to learn. You also need to be passionate about the process of learning languages. When the learning process becomes enjoyable, the learner will be able to retain most of what he has learned and the language will be learned more fully. If you are planning to learn a language which is in the same language family as your mother tongue or your dominant language is, technically the learning process will become easy for you. Languages under the same family share some common features. You do not need to learn those features which your mother tongue has all over again while learning another language in the same family.
  • Learning a foreign language will prove slightly difficult when you do not have any exposure to that particular language or to some related languages. It is better either to hire a tutor to learn a foreign language or to attend formal classes. When you interact with a teacher your ability to ask questions develops. You will also be able to pick the correct pronunciation and correct your pronunciation if it is wrong.
  • With the rapid progress in technology, language learning also should be easy. There are language software, CDs and MP3s which facilitate language learning. The theories of language immersion program favor this kind of listening tasks. Language immersion is a method of second language teaching in which the learners’ second language is the medium of instruction. By this method the learner gets to hear enough linguistic input in the language he wants to learn. It will help the learner to absorb the language to his sub conscious mind and master it.
  • Learning in a group has its own benefits. It is applicable to language learning as well. If you are learning French you should get to interact with people who speak French. You can have lunch or dinner and socialize with people speaking the language you are learning. Various nuances can be exchanged by such interactions which will benefit both the participants in the conversation.
  • Creating flash cards of words can be a great step a language learner can take. If you have set a target for yourself for a week, you can meet it by taking various small steps. The words you want to learn in a week can be written on flash cards and you keep looking at those cards for the length of the week. You can learn the meaning and pronunciation of those words at the first place. It is important to memorize what you have learned and flash cards are a great help in this regard.
  • Reading newspapers and articles in the new language is another important step in language learning. You can consult a translation dictionary as and when needed to read an entire page or article. Such reading helps you to become more familiar with the language you are learning.
  • Different people learn languages for different purposes. If you want to become perfect in a language you need to pay more attention to the grammar and structure of it. If you are more interested in communicating with people, you should start speaking a language. From the very first day you should start speaking in order to become proficient in the spoken language. Language learners stop learning a language when they think their needs are met. Therefore, most of the times their competence is not up to the mark.
  • Many people lack confidence. Even after learning a language they hesitate to put into practice what they have learned. Language learners should shed all their inhibitions and become vocal about the newly learned language. Practice makes people perfect. None is born with a highly structured language. Errors and corrections are parts and parcels of the learning process. One should take the learning activity in the right spirit and make the most out of language learning.

Author Bio:

William Delgado is a good researcher, and for the past several years, concentrated on academicals for students who require quality of service to accomplish their assignments, and they can use the best services and buy from essayguardian. This has helped William to be expertised in writing services.

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