Obras de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer - Tomo Primero is a collection of stories in Spanish available with recording and text (both plan and PDF). It was produced by Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse that has a lot more audio/text stories in English in its Lit2Go project.

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

(via LearnOutLoud.com)

These are new style language-learning websites that are trying to leverage community and/or new capabilities allowed by the internet:

• 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.

WordChamp and LingQ are competing online language learning services that use learner driven approach and try to support multiple languages. WordChamp is a (recently) free service. LingQ is free during the current beta stage, as it is a rewrite of the existing paid English-only service The Linguist. Because both services try to be language-agnostic, they use methods that are largely independent of the target language.

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 really like WordChamp to help me with learning foreign languages. It was good for me when I was learning French. It is good to me now that I am learning Spanish. And the last couple of months it was getting better nearly on a weekly basis.

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!

Сегодня - Международный день родного языка. Мой родной язык - Русский! Я горд моим родным языком даже если я не использую его каждый день.

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.