Serious About a New Language? Begin With Lesson 1 | Hacker News Reader

Serious About a New Language? Begin With Lesson 1

nytimes.com

20 pointstokenadult6 comments

Mobile learning is the future! Imagine everybody spending their idle time learning new skills (languages or anything else) instead of playing angry birds! Additionally, mobile learning is accessible to a larger percentage of the world population than probably any other kind of learning. It's going to change the world.

> It's going to change the world.

The world does not simply "change". :)

edit: more seriously, making this statement is rarely advisable and is usually made in haste.

How right you are! Another reason to love HN: you even get constructive feedback on a comment written in haste :)

Yep, I put a simple language app in the App Store almost 2 years ago.

http://itunes.com/apps/h4spanishlite

I'm adding iPad support now, and I need to find a good source for audio. Recommendations?

I have an Android version too but long hours at my day job made be realize that I need to focus on one really good version.

Based on my extra-curricular time learning Portuguese for the last year, I think Skype and Google Translate (as a slightly more useful dictionary) are a thousand times the transformational language learning tool than any of these apps are. No app or comprehensive program really impresses me too much (and I've tried most, including Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur) because most are boring, inhuman, and lack enough content. The most useful app I've used is Anki, but that's just a general purposes SRS rote learning tool for drilling.

The ability to get on Skype with someone from another country though is really a game changer, because there is no app that comes close to the ability to communicate with another human being, which is ultimately what language learning is about. There seems to be a fight or flight mechanism that forces you to adapt and try your best to understand the bare minimum of what the person's saying that just isn't there with software. I started Skyping with people from sharedtalk (based on a comment here) knowing very little Portuguese but just memorizing "can you type that?" and "can you repeat that?" and I felt I moved a lot more quickly than I did with Rosetta Stone. It did help that many Brazilians are eager for an English practice partner.

While I try to combine a wide variety of learning techniques, my experience and the experience of various other's that I've read is that "apps" to teach you a language are a lot less useful than books, native podcasts, TV shows, music, and Skype. So while I think that the internet has totally transformed language learning, I'm less convinced that any software explicitly for that purpose has.

As someone who taught himself Brazilian Portuguese without apps or classes, I have to agree with you. It's all about the variety of approaches and the consistency with which you teach yourself.

As for the parent, if people aren't already learning via other existing media and/or methods, I highly doubt they will all of a sudden start, given the advent of apps. Mobile learning is the future because it's ubiquitous, not because it's game-changing.

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