MP3 recordings can be downloaded individually, but nice iTunes interface is also available from the home page of the project.

(via LearnOutLoud.com)

So, I was really happy to discover an audio course Story of Human Language from The Teaching Company taught by John McWhorter. It is quite long a covers a lot of material, but - apart from some overly long parts on universal language - it is really interesting and Professor McWhorter is a great presenter.

I actually had a chance to listen to both an audio version of the course and to see some of it on DVD. Personally, I prefer just audio for several reason.

Firstly, I can listen to the course on my MP3 player when I am walking or doing chores. Video version requires allocating dedicated time, which for such a long course would be difficult.

Secondly, I actually found visual part of the presentation quite boring - for the most part professor is just standing behind the lectern and talks from his notes. In fact, I found the visual part distracted me from the really great and expressive rhetorics.

There was a number of great section in the course, but I found the one explaining language structure of Arabic and Chinese particularly interesting. He talked about Arabic first and I was all keen to learn that language. Then, he switched over to Chinese and I found it even more fascinating. And then, there were comparisons of languages and his cat. This has to be heard to be believed.

The course is obviously available for purchase, but it is also found in quite a few libraries. If you do borrow it from the library, try requesting all volumes at once. I only requested one volume and it was quite annoying to then have to wait a long time for the rest of the course arrive. This is another way I knew for myself that the course was enjoyable, as I had plenty of other audio material to listen to otherwise.

• SpanishSense - they have podcasts, PDFs, daily emails and a lot more. This site has been done by the same people who have been doing really successful ChinesePod for several years now. It looks very slick.
• LiveMocha - they are doing social network style language learning. Others have done it before them, but LiveMocha seems to be a bit stronger on multiple modes of learning than other similar sites. Of course, building yet another social network is a pain and will be limiting factor.
• Mango - This website is an invite-only beta, but my invite arrived less than 30 minutes after registering. They have lessons for a number of languages, but the lessons themselves are in a power-point style presentation. I guess they hope that nice presentation will make up for somewhat inflexible format. And of course, they are still beta.

Among these three, my money is on SpanishSense. I feel that trying to do too many languages at the same time, means none will be done right.

It is true that internet allows to leverage Long Tail effect and create a super-niche website (with a niche per language), but I do not see how one company would have enough time and money to support all those niches well enough. This is my main annoyance with the WordChamp, which I quite like otherwise.

I have now found an example of what could be a step in the right direction. It is an online research system called WERTi from the Computational Linguistics and Language Technology group at The Ohio State University. The system allows anonymous access and it uses real English news sources.

In nutshell, the system finds interesting texts (using your keywords) and then identifies all propositions (at, in, by, through, etc.) in that text. It allows you to read the text with propositions highlighted; allows you to try picking propositions in the text and even allows you to test yourself by hiding the propositions in the text and letting you to fill your guesses.

The purpose of the system is to make the learner notice how the propositions are used in the text and through increased awareness speed up the memorisation process.

Obviously, WERTi is just one piece of the total language learning system, but - in my eyes - this is a good demonstration. I cannot wait until such systems will become available for commercial use.

LingQ’s methodology (from my understanding) is based around repeated reading and listening to the target language material with the learning process based around finding new words, recording them down with their real-world usage and identifying known and new words in the texts. LingQ will suggest the consequent texts to read and the words to learn based on the learner’s individual collection of words to date. A basic dictionary lookup is available as well as simple flashcard facilities. A recent description of LingQ’s ideas is available from the founder’s blog.

WordChamp does not have a methodology as such, but instead concentrates on helping a learner to acquire words fast. It provides word lookups that include dictionary definitions and pronunciation of the word (where available). WordChamp also allows people to add the content to the system by writing down their own definitions for words and common phrases as well as by recording pronunciations of the words. The service provides a large number of different flashcard training methods. WordChamp, like LingQ, does not provide grammar rules of the language, but it does provide much stronger support for understanding and practicing verb conjugations of at least couple of languages.

WordChamp has several tools I have not seen in other language services yet. For a long time, it had a WebReader, which allowed to look at the text or an external website and have WordChamp automatically pop up definitions of the words under the cursor. Recently, this functionality became available as a FireFox plugin, so it could be activated on any website without needing to take a side-trip to the WordChamp’s own site. There is also an option for webmasters to embed the interface into their own webpage. I have an example of that on my website.

WordChamp also allows to export the list of words into an audio file - something like basic audio-flashcards. This allows to practice the word lists while not at the computer. LingQ does not have similar functionality, but it does have audio files corresponding to the texts, so a learner can listen and read at the same time.

Neither service is perfect and both require a dedicated learner to succeed. My preferences are currently with WordChamp, but I am hoping that LingQ will improve rapidly, as it has some interesting ideas in its core.

It is also possible to combine the services of the two systems in a mashup. At the moment, LingQ’s dictionary lookup is quite slow and it uses basic dictionary definitions that do not recognise common phrases the way WordChamp does. It is possible to install WordChamp’s FireFox plugin and activate it while on the reading page of the LingQ. This provides fast lookup of the WordChamp, with the methodology of the LingQ.

Unfortunately, at the moment there is a small problem with the mashup. After using LingQ’s dictionary lookup/word creation popup, the WordChamp toolbar stops working. Reloading the page and reenabling the toolbar is a quick solution, but is a bit annoying. My recommendation is to read the text once with WordChamp’s toolbar enabled and then read it the second time while extracting interesting words into the LingQ system. As the texts are supposed to be read several times anyway, this is not the biggest problem available.

I consider both LingQ and WordChamp to be the second generation web-based language-learning systems. They have started to discover what web allows them to do, but perhaps not yet explored all the possibilities. I also think that both system exhibit ‘Jack of all trades, master of none‘ problems due to their attempts at targeting multiple languages at once. I think the best system will combine great support tools like flashcards and read-and-listen activities with deep support for the specifics of the learner’s target language. That - to me - would be a real web-native language learning system.

I believe the future of language learning methods is with the web. The standalone language packages (like Rosetta Stone) take too long to develop, are limited in the amount of material they can package and do not leverage community effort (which WordChamp does with user translations).

The biggest challenge with the web based services is to convince people to pay for them. As with many web 2.0 companies (e.g., MySpace, YouTube), WordChamp is currently free, but obviously this cannot continue forever. I hope they figure out the profitable and sustainable model soon, as I would hate for their service to disappear.

A problem specific to WordChamp is that they are trying to cover most of the languages of the world. However they only have language-specific grammar rules (e.g. conjugation tables) for some languages. This means that grammar specifics of other languages are not picked up and some words do not show the translation even though one exists for the same word in a different tense, conjugation or declension.

(This article is available with WordChamp’s embedded reader on its own page)

That did not used to be the case. I looked at them just over a year ago and they had some interesting ideas, but the best features (like Web Reader) were for paying customers only. They received a reasonably good review from Calico Journal (Computer Assisted Language Instruction COnsortium), but the interface was a bit busy with trying to be all things to everybody. You also had to be online and on their website to use it.

How things changed. Everything is now free. Interface has been simplified, so most of the time only the language you learn and the language you know show up. They have added downloadable version of the audio from the flash card lists. They have even released a Firefox plugin, so you can use their translation while browsing the web, rather than always starting from their own website. Finally, to notify people of all these exciting new features, they setup an RSS feed.

And here is the clincher, they have contacted me directly to talk about the latest and greatest feature they just released: developer/reader API. I was planning to test the API already (I saw it in RSS feed notification), but being contacted about it made me feel like an important A-list’er. They knew my email because I submitted site feeback, error reports and suggestions to WordChamp before, but usually all these reports are one way.

The thing is - I have submitted feedback to other companies plenty of times before, but rarely got even a confirmation back. With WordChamp, I received a personal email from the company’s founder with thoughtful commentary on features and bugs I talked about. In fact, I think at least one of my suggestions has since been implemented. This is what I call listening to the users.

As it was, I was going to test the reader API anyway, but now I will make sure it gets done soon. I will need to dig a bit into the internals of my blogging software, but it is doable.

Now, all this does not mean that I think WordChamp is the best thing from the sliced bread. I still think there is a lot of room for improvement. I would really (really, really) like the flashcard quiz interface to use Leitner spaced repetition system. I think there is a lot more that can be done with podcasts. I believe adding stories (audio+text) with a bit of computational linguistics magic would take the service to new heghts. But - even without all that - I still like WordChamp more than hundreds of other sites I have reviewed and I recommend it to language students (and teachers) any chance I get.

I am really looking forward to new features WordChamp will bring in and I will certainly keep them notified if I will notice a problem or think of a feature they could add. And if you haven’t tried it yet, do!

Today - 21st of February - is the International Mother Language Day. My mother language is Russian! I am proud of my mother language, even if I do not get to use it every day.

Apart from Russian, I know reasonably good English and have dabbled in French, Esperanto and - now - Spanish. I feel that starting from Russian, many other European/Germanic languages are easier, because Russian has a very complex grammar system with its conjugation and cases, tenses and moods. This helps with relating features of other languages to the examples in the one(s) I already know. This, of course, does not help at all with pronunciation, which for me is now atrocious in whichever language I speak.

Studying Spanish, I do find omitted pronouns in Spanish, but even that has its equivalence in Russian. Unfortunately, there is no equivalence for conflating conjugation for he/she and you (él/ella y usted). Using accents to differentiate words is a bit confusing too (él y el, qué y que). I am sure as I progress in Spanish, these things will become the second (3rd? 5th?) nature, but for now they do grate a bit.

I find Esperanto the easiest language of all, which is not very surprising, since it was specifically designed to be really easy. If I had to design a language from scratch, I don’t think I would be able to come up with anything significantly simpler than Esperanto, while still addressing the real use.

This was not always a case though, at least for China. Until 1844, it was illegal for a foreigner to learn Chinese. That changed for America, when Caleb Cushing had negotiated the Treaty of Wanghia, which made it possible for Americans - and Americans only - to learn Chenese. Later, the privilege was extended to Britain and other countries.

This whole story comes up, because China has a new project of translating Chinese classics into modern Chinese, English and - potentially - other languages. This Library of Chinese Classics spans 5000 years of Chinese culture and includes all the famous works.

It should be useful for language learning as well as for general reading pleasure, as it will come with original and English text on the facing pages.

It would also be very interesting to find out what other languages are planned and in what order. Russian used to be a language that many official documents got translated to early on. Would Russian be even on a list now? Would Esperanto, still one of the transmission languages of the China Radio International?

I used to talk about Pasporta Servo, ability to listen to other countries’ radio and global community. Now I just go straight for the big guns.

I ask them whether they ever tried learning another language. Usually the answer is yes and usually the language was never learned well. Then I tell them about the studies showing that learning Esperanto as a first foreign language gave enough ‘language learning’ meta-knowledge that it allowed to learn the next language faster and more thoroughly. This usually gets their attention!

I don’t think I have convinced anyone to learn Esperanto yet, but my arguments are getting better every time. Maybe I should make a badge Learn two languages for the price of one. Ask me how. That might get some attention.

More information about these benefits is also available at Springboard to Languages website.