Paralleltext: Learn languages by reading
paralleltext.io
paralleltext.io
I know http://lite.cnn.io/en which has all the articles in Spanish as well. Really useful but sometimes a bit to cumbersome to read for my level.
http://lifehacker.com/5903288/i-learned-to-speak-four-langua...
Start with that article. Follow the advice about building core vocab to get a baseline set of words under your belt. I highly recommend Anki, but you can obviously use whatever tool fits our needs; although spaced repetition is something I'd definitely look for.
For the early stages, I'd recommend Pimsleur. It's roughly 30 audio lessons per unit. They're about 30 minutes each. They'll familiarize you with basic travel phrases and help you to start getting a feel for the mechanics of the language.
You can take Pimsleur all the way through the 4-5 units that are provided, but it's pretty narrow (travel/business Spanish), and it's VERY formal, so not a great long-term resource.
I'd supplement Pimsleur with something like Destinos (telenova online for learning Spanish) to get some variety into your practice.
Your real goal is getting to the point where you can consume level-appropriate media to make learning less of a chore and more fun.
If you're serious about making progress, find language partners and a teacher (or two) on italki.com. I can't emphasize how helpful this has been.
Look for podcasts that are geared towards Spanish learning. Notes in Spanish is pretty good, but it's Castillian, so I avoided it for that reason. Españolistos isn't terrible if you can handle the husband's terrible Spanish accent (he's a gringo from Texas).
Both of those would be in the intermediate phase. The intermediate phase is a LONG journey to get towards advanced, so that's where most folks fall off. You can make some tremendous early gains just by getting some basic vocab and travel phrases, and that kind of learning is pretty intoxicating; however, really learning a language is just a matter of discipline (practicing every day), and grinding it out.
Duolingo has a good introductory podcast for folks that are earlier on in their learning. I recommend duolingo to learn basic vocab, but don't expect any miracles to happen regarding "fluency" with ANY app.
Clozemaster is good once you're further along for drilling the mechanics of sentence structure into your brain via thousands of "reps" (yes, sometimes it really just feels like physical exercise for your brain).
Also, get yourself a decent book that explains grammar, and a book will all the conjugations of the main verbs. Spanishdict.com is an amazing resource for contextual sentences and conjugations, but books are nice for laying in bed and reviewing stuff.
"Easy Spanish - Step by Step" is a pretty good introduction to the basic language mechanics. I read it from cover to cover (and did the exercises), and it was pretty helpful.
Barron's 501 Spanish Verbs seems like its the standard verb conjugation reference. SO much of learning the language is just knowing how to conjugate properly. The explanations of the tenses at the beginning of the Barron's book have been indispensable in my understanding of how each tense works.
I wish you luck. Feel free to email me if you want any additional pointers (tinymountain [at] gmail).
Edit: sorry for not checking the site. I now see the site links to the es ending url and that times out for me as well.
Yes this. It would make a huge difference for me at my level. I'm finding that I lose my focus on specific words. I can gather the general meaning from the sentence and/or paragraph but...
Translating the entire paragraph is too much of a crutch and forces me back into thinking in English. If I can get past the single word(s) with a click, I can keep my thoughts entirely in the second language. I suppose an extension could probably fix this...
I've given it a quick try, and it seems to work fine with this site
Also, the "I speak" list needs to be checkboxes, not radio (and remember the choices).
The book is the basis of the film Stalker, which is a must-see
Wtf. I thought we were beyond that now.For example I chose French as the language to get better at and selected "Tour du monde en 80 jours" as the text. The very first paragraph of the French text is
> En l'année 1872, la maison portant le numéro 7 de Saville-row, Burlington Gardens -- maison dans laquelle Sheridan mourut en 1814 --, était habitée par Phileas Fogg, esq., l'un des membres les plus singuliers et les plus remarqués du Reform-Club de Londres, bien qu'il semblât prendre à tâche de ne rien faire qui pût attirer l'attention.
and the English translation is
> Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814. He was one of the most noticeable members of the Reform Club, though he seemed always to avoid attracting attention; an enigmatical personage, about whom little was known, except that he was a polished man of the world.
Notice how there's an extra sentence at the end about him having an enigmatic personage not present in the French version. Indeed that's in the next paragraph. And the matching goes basically out of whack. The second paragraph of the English is
> People said that he resembled Byron--at least that his head was Byronic; but he was a bearded, tranquil Byron, who might live on a thousand years without growing old.
But the third paragraph of the French is
> On disait qu'il ressemblait à Byron -- par la tête, car il était irréprochable quant aux pieds --, mais un Byron à moustaches et à favoris, un Byron impassible, qui aurait vécu mille ans sans vieillir. Anglais, à coup sûr, Phileas Fogg n'était peut-être pas Londonner.
Statistical machine translation uses curated parallel texts for training, but they tend to match with multiple corpora so the translation is some sort of average I believe. I wonder if matching with just one translation might produce less reliable results?
There's no real "paragraph matching". They just took old texts translated in 2 languages and assumed they match paragraph for paragraph.
http://paralleltext.io/read/?b=0c8b4c11-bd2a-4ded-8d3e-96058...
Really interesting idea but a bit disappointing first experience.
You get the same collection of short stories in two languages (one always being English) on facing pages. One important difference these books have with that website is that (I believe) in all cases, it's the English that's the translation. This is, I think, best for a native English speaker who's learning the other language. The non-English is not simply correct, but actually idiomatic. Any deficiencies in the English are easy to gloss over/ignore.
Someone further along can shift their mix back.
I want to copy words to keep my own word list and to translate the word.
On the other hand, Cervantes and Shakespeare were contemporaries, so I think it enhances reading Don Quixote for the translation to use early modern English - e.g. "Idle reader: thou mayest believe me without any oath".
The use case here might be exceptional, in contrast to contextual ad overlays.
Maybe it's individual metadata for Sherlock Holmes - when I tried Spanish to English worked on a different book it worked ok.
On Vivaldi (browser's locale is Spanish): Anything is read with a Spanish voice, unless I choose I want to read English, then an English voice is used.
Unintelligible German spoken by an English voice. My German-speaking friend thought it was trying to speak Chinese!
Sorry that the user interface is so bad, please just try clicking some items in the heading row to see what's there.
So (based on a sample size of one), I'm afraid it doesn't look like the translations are necessarily reliable.
After collecting a messy tangle of special cases over several days, I threw in the towel and just used BeautifulSoup's UnicodeDammit to brute-force a working encoding.
Maybe the Swedish book didn't indicate a vs å in the first place, though.
(E.g. see the Swedish alphabet at http://omniglot.com/writing/swedish.htm)
> I threw in the towel and just used BeautifulSoup's UnicodeDammit to brute-force a working encoding.
For a limited definition of "working", at times! "A working encoding" that shows the wrong letters isn't "working" in a very useful sense.
-- Harris sade, att han drabbades av sa utomordentligt starka yrselanfall emellanat, att han knappt visste vad han gjorde; och da sade George att han led av starka yrselanfall, och knappt visste vad han gjorde.
This made very little sense to me, until I googled it and found another source where the second sentence italicized some words in the second half, making it at least make some sense. (https://sv.wikisource.org/wiki/Tre_m%C3%A4n_i_en_b%C3%A5t._K...)
Learning through translation is also an anti-pattern. Best to learn the basics of the target language then bootstrap your understanding of the more complicated bits by breaking them down to the basics.
I can understand the time benefit to learning through reading and translation, but I can't help but think it's a path to mediocre reading skills and poor speaking skills at best.
(And some kinds of languages are not speech anyways)
Also I found https://www.lingq.com pretty solid for learning vocab while reading.
http://paralleltext.io/read/?b=3b323333-ad58-4dba-9629-72851...
My only complaint is that the Spanish AI lady seems to have suffered a stroke, see below:
http://paralleltext.io/read/?b=cac6e2c6-19fb-4c60-9fef-c4c39...
But being native Spanish speaker... No Spanish as source language but many texts with Spanish as language to learn?
Shouldn't be the same texts but viceversa?
Maybe the audio can be initiated with a quick highlight on the text or sentence?
Great job!