We at Babbel think  that in order to make progress in learning, it’s important to stay present with the language. That means, instead of straining to slog through long lessons, it can actually be more efficient to review with short, bite-sized units — as long as they’re consistent and evenly spaced.

With this in mind, we’ve innovated Babbel Refresh, an application that you download and run locally on your computer. It individually calculates optimal intervals between sessions,  chooses words and phrases from your Personal Vocabulary that are due to review, and gently reminds you to engage with the language you are studying. It’s a great tool for staying motivated!

Download Babbel Refresh here.

Yesterday we released Babbel Mobile — iPhone Apps for seven languages. We’re happy to be receiving positive feedback from all over the world. In fact, in some countries, we’re already ranking in the top ten educational Apps in the App Store!

The idea of Babbel Mobile is to allow you to study languages anywhere, anytime. We think it’s a great way to make some productive use of your in-between time — whether it’s on the way to work, on the commercial break or on the beach. You don’t even need an internet connection. But if you do happen to be online, everything you learn is consistently synchronized with your Babbel Review Manager, making the time you spend learning efficient.

Babbel Mobile can be used to complement Babbel.com or as a stand-alone vocabulary trainer. Babbel subscribers can access the full vocabulary of 3000 words, while others can try a free lesson and purchase vocabulary for a onetime price of  €5.99 / US$ 7.99. In any case, downloading the App is free for everyone. You can use your existing Babbel login or sign up cost-free in a few seconds.

Here are some links to the App Store for learning the following languages: German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish.

When visiting these places, a translator could definitely come in handy. There is a new iPhone app which could have been a wonderful solution, but it comes with a catch: The iSpeak application ($2 for each language) offers translation from English to Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Swedish and vise versa – you type in a sentence, and it translates it and “speaks” the translation out for you. The only problem is that iSpeak relies on the Google translation engine – meaning you have to be connected to the internet. Which you may not be as a tourist without a contract with a local provider (or without wireless/WLAN, near the Victoria Falls for example).

Did you know that there are about 30 endagered languages on the westcoast of the US alone? Take Hupa or Hoopa, which nowadays is spoken by less than 10 people, according to the Rosetta Stone Project. It provides several layers for the online-globe Google Earth: Besides an archive of endangered languages you can find, for example, a selection of more than 1,300 recordings from between 1912 and 1941 documenting the languages, myths, legends, stories and songs of thirty-five Native American tribes.

Another educational use of Google Earth is shown in the video below (after the break). It’s simultaneously less than an archive but more than a learning tool. In it, students use the language they are learning to describe things on the basis of map-data directions, buildings etc. At the end of the video, they suggest using the cops and robbers boardgame “Scotland Yard” to stimulate language learning – have a look.

(via EduTechie)

There you go, web magic at its best: Visuwords gives you an interactive dictionary, letting you dynamically examine the connections and relationships betweens words – it’s a blast, and a bit mind-bending, to toy around with. Just have a look at the short video above to get an idea. The flash-based service incorporates WordNet, a lexical database of English edited at Princeton University.

Don’t worry: Our blog isn’t “corporate”, and most of the time we will leave you alone with news about our great language learning platform. If you’re interested, just check the Babbel press section. It’s not that we’re ashamed, but we want to hang on to praise like you see here: “Also, the fine folks at Babbel also contribute to The Babbel Blog, which contrary to almost all other online service blogs: it actually has useful information beyond self-promotion and being an overglorified FAQ website.”

YouTube just recently added automatic subtitle translations, though like most everything out of the Google universe, it’s still in “beta”.  Subtitles and annotations were added as recently as the end of August to the videosharing service. The interpreter robot seems to work pretty well, at least in the example video where I tried Italian to English and Italian to German – I understood what the guy was saying (though it wasn’t all that encouraging – scary Italian politics). Anyway, you can use the translation service for any video that already has subtitles – just click on the arrow in the lower right hand corner.

The machine translation system for search results and websites of the do-no-harm Internet giant goes back to 2006, but it doesn’t rely only on computers (yet): A “Google Translation Center” is in the works, thought as a translation service for documents.: You can request a (human) translation or translate yourself and review a translation; though of course the professionals are going to get paid.

(via mashable)

Zune

But Zune is not the only one laying their naipes on the table, with Baja Zune Música en Univision.com, the Latin entertainment conglomerate is ostensibly hoping that the rate of music downloads in that market will go up instead of bajar (go down). According to Billboard this has been historically low, with digital music making up only 2.2 % of all Latin album sales.

According to evolutionary musicology, “Musilanguage” is a proto-linguistic form of communication somewhere in between, on the one hand, emotive grunting/cooing/moaning/what-have-you, and then on the other, semantically/ symbolically appropriate but sonically arbitrary sounds that convey meaning (i.e. words). As most things are when it comes down to it, this particular concept is about gettin’ busy.

In “Descent of Man,” Darwin describes “true musical cadences” used by “some early progenitor of man” to woo the opposite sex (or to get totally whack with the same one). This “musilanguage” – a term coined by neurologist Steven Brown – would ostensibly evolve into language and music, respectively.

The Icelandic post-rock four-piece Sigur Rós is well-known for switching up the emotive and the referential. A made-up language Vonlenska (“Hopelandic” in English), which emulates the cadences of Icelandic without actually meaning anything, peppers their songs up to the current album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (“With a Buzz in Our Ears we Play Endlessly”). Now on tour in Europe, Japan, Canada and the US, the band’s bassist confessed in an interview with Pitchfork media, however, that all the hullaballoo about the nature of their lyrics and linguistic hijinks was, and is, rather hype. For example the title of a track on the last album, “Gobbledigook”, was not so much a comment on how they express themselves, but rather a misspelling of the Icelandic “Gobbldigob”, a word for the clippity-clop of horses’ hooves.

For those seeking to devolve employing the latest technology, a new iPhone app RJDJ is on the case with a lot of seriously funky features. One is converting normal speech into something more, let’s say, emotive, according to the music you’re listening to — a digitally generated “musilanguage”, as it were. Birthed over the weekend, RJDJ is explained in the below video, where an enthusiast describes it as “connecting the outside world to your acoustic perception.” This is, in his esteem, sort of like drugs: