Language Tech
Tech Background: Babbel Speech Recognition
Interview with Technical Director Thomas Holl Speech recognition is the exciting new feature at Babbel. It’s not only fun – it’s also amazingly efficient for learning a new language. But how does it work? I got the low down from our Technical Director Thomas. Crisi: What does the new speech recognition tool do? Thomas: [...]
Let the machine guide you: Touring with your ears
To know the world, just listen to it – these words from writer Amin Maalouf are the motto of Zevisit. The website offers free audio guides to a number of destinations, mostly in France, but also to other places around the world, such as tours to Istanbul or the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. The number [...]
Library to go: Google books go cellular
While I have long since forgone interactions in the physical world in favor of their counterparts/improvements online — listening to the radio, going to the videodrome, banking, learning German, just to give a few examples — one thing I can’t bring myself to throw into the dustbin of materiality is a good book. But also [...]
Learning with the heardrum
“Neural tissue required to learn and understand a new language will develop automatically from simple exposure to the language” – that’s Paul Sulzburger’s main argument . The PhD graduate of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, taught Russian for several years to Kiwi students and watched them consistently drop out. What makes it so hard [...]
Playing Chinese in Korean
Assuming that most of us can’t read either Korean or Chinese characters, news about a new Multiplayer Online Game – Hanjamru – for school children to learn the latter, might not be so exciting. But the blog of the creators of the game – Eduflo – is a little: they describe there the design process [...]
Does code count as a language?
The following statement of Kristian over at web-translations made me wonder. He was writing about how much is too much in language learning, and ends with the following: “As for me, well, I speak 6 languages…English, French, small talk, MSN speak, some basic programming languages (do they count? They should as they have strict syntax [...]
Save an endangered word, redefine the dictionary
I’ve always found it curious that the Americans have no centralized institution which establishes the end-all be-all of language. I mean, something along the lines of the German Rechtschreibungen, grammars that all of which incorporated a rather catastrophic spelling reform mandated by an official agreement between German-speaking countries in 1996. Or the Real Academia Española [...]
MILLEE: Literacy phones home
After 4 years of field-testing, the MILLEE Project hopes to go big time in India. MILLEE – Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies – grew out of Matthew Kam’s doctoral thesis at the University of California, Berkeley. His idea was to use phones and educational computing to improve English language learning for [...]
