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Learn 101: Learn Languages

learn101.org

57 pointssnake11715 comments

"Learn cantonese". Let's see how that one goes. Click.

"I would like to welcome you to the Cantonese lessons. I'm here to help you (bold)learn Cantonese(/bold)". Hello there, content-farm-robot-pretending-to-be-a-person.

Lesson 1: "Cantonese Alphabet". There is no alphabet in Cantonese, it's a Chinese language. Click.

"Today I will teach you the (bold)Cantonese alphabet(/bold). If (...more filler...). Cantonese contains more than 9900 letters". Hu, OK, let's stop here for the 'alphabet'. A quick look at the other 'lessons' shows what is obviously missing but would be in any true '101' Cantonese course: it's a tonal language, so you'd have to explain the tones first.

If you skim through multiple languages you will see a 'Translation' service (with a paid option, but it's the same page as the free one) that always point to the same (stock photo) translator. Not sure what that website is for, but it's not for learning any language.

I clicked on Cantonese as well. Their "alphabet" is just a bunch of Hanzi with Mandarin Pronunciations next to them.

It looks like they have switched the Cantonese and Chinese content, the "Chinese" vocabulary is Cantonese written in Yale romanization (edited to add: I assume, being a non-speaker. On second look I'm not so sure of myself).

Since there is not a lot of learning material for it online, I find Cantonese to be a good 'BS-meter' for language websites (in that it's not too hard to see if they got the basics wrong or not).

Chinese is Mandarin and uses Pinyin. There are one or two mistakes.

Re Cantonese:

There are numerous mistakes - the romanizations don't always correspond to the Chinese characters, and many of the phrases are Mandarin idiom, which is different from Cantonese. So I can't recommend it.

I think it's Jyutping romanization. I wish it did use Yale, which I prefer, mainly because of how the tones are represented. Cantonese has several competing romanizations.

This site's better: http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/

Tons of errors in the Thai section. I'm checking the gender vocab:

คน - Man - should be ผู้ชาย

มารดา/บิดา - Mother/Father - way too formal - should be แม่/พ่อ

Be very skeptical of language sites that have tons of languages from different families. You're better off on speciality sites/subreddits.

The German pronunciation guide also suggests ü sounds like the 'u' in 'ultra', but in reality it is more similar to Hubert[1] in English. Also 'z' is pronounced as 'ts' (not the suggested 'sea'), and 'y' is not similar to 'tea' (the Y in 'Yacht' is like the y in 'yes').

[1] http://inogolo.com/pronunciation/Hubert

Yeah, pretty rough. The examples of asking questions are wrong. Do you have milk? -> คุณมีนม? No, Thai doesn't have a question mark (or any punctuation). The Thai actually says "You have milk". To make it a question you have to add a question word at the end. Also missing the important topic of classifiers, which impacts the discussion of plurals making that section also pretty useless. Agree that trying to do too many languages means none of them are done well.

What is going on here?

http://learn101.org/marathi_alphabet.php

This is not the Marathi alphabet. It's the Telugu alphabet.

Yup. There are loads of errors. They're also showing Telugu letters instead of Kannada and Urdu instead of Pashto. Another error I noticed was that the letter (ழ்) in Tamil is shown as [ḻ] like"rag" -- I don't know what rag is doing here, ழ் is the retroflex approximant typically transliterated as zha.

I looked at the Kannada page in some more detail. Good news is that the phrases are in fact in Kannada (unlike the alphabet). But even here some of the translations are slightly off. The one for "he visits many countries" uses "urugalu" (places/towns) instead of "deshagalu" (countries).

I don't get the impression that this is a reliable site.

yup. the order of alphabet is very important for learning telugu (indian languages) and looks like they are sorted in some random order. if you visit the adjective grammar rules and click pronunciation, it pronounces the next rule. that's a big bug especially for new language learners who might not have a clue.

Clicked on japanese.

"Japanese contains 26 letters (consonants and vowels)."

Then goes on with a table of 48 characters representing syllables. (including the 2 very rarely used ゐ(wi) and ゑ(we)). They happily skip the part where there are 2 such syllabary systems, plus the Chinese characters.

Then there are pages about "Japanese Plural" and "Japanese Gender" (Japanese doesn't have such things), and one about "Japanese Numbers" not explaining a thing about counter words.

This all looks like templated information that is the same for all languages. You're apparently expected to just translate from English word for word and hope for the best.

Edit: Oh, and it's funny that they only introduce hiragana, but also use katakana and kanjis for all words and example phrases.

There are some basic errors, too, which are in the overarching structure of linguistic categories. For instance, 'and' is _not_ a preposition, as it states that it is in the language grammar sections.

Perhaps this is a curmudgeonly and pedantic observation, but linguists be linguists.

Admirable idea, but not sufficiently complete. For example, the Korean alphabet section shows you the letters, but not how they are combined into syllables. The Russian grammar section doesn't address the concept of declension, as far as I can tell.

The Esperanto part seems pretty good. There is one section with consistent errors, "Mi vizitis francio" does need a -n ending (francion). And again, "and" is not a preposition. But that's all I noticed in a quick skim.

The Khmer section has quite a few errors too. I was actually expecting them to have stolen / reused the audio files that my wife and I recorded for a Khmer learning web app a few years back (since that's happened on numerous occasions before) but there isn't any audio at all, or IPA, so this would be quite useless for someone learning Khmer.

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