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Comment by billpaetzke | Hacker News Reader

Nice idea, but I don't like that's it's not written by a native speaker. You're bound to learn bad habits. Just spend less time on English sites and more time on sites in your target language wherever possible.

Two easy ways to immerse yourself with content created by native speakers in your target language:

1) Listen in your target language whenever possible (via audio books, movies, tv shows, and podcasts). I like podcasts best.

2) Read in your target language. Major news sites and blogs will most likely exist in your target language for free. And you maybe be able to buy books (fiction or non) written by native speakers as well.

You can supplement those two with working through exercises in a grammar book of your target language.

Obviously, if you have a native speaker to practice speaking with, do so, but the listening and reading suggestions alone will get you very far. I'm immersing in Spanish right now, and this is working well for me.

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It's not about gaining perfection. It's about gaining vocabulary which is the single most important factor in language aquisition. If you pair it with a conversation group you should learn very rapidly indeed.

It certainly beats reading flash cards on my iPhone whilst sitting on the toilet, which was the previous cutting edge.

I'm liking http://memrise.com/ for vocab acquisition --- I've got the first 200 or so words of French in my long term memory and it seems to be working well. I've always found vocab learning to be the hardest part of learning a language, so we'll see I guess..

I'm learning A1 level French now and thought I would give this one a try. Put it on "novice" mode hoping to improve my vocabulary. The problem with it is that rather than translating nouns it ends up translating verbs. This is not really a good practice. For eg. "we will" gets translated to "nous allons". However, it's more important in this case to understand the verb conjugations of "aller"(to go) and how it is used in the future tense. Knowing that "we will" can be translated as "nous allons" is not useful - without the context.

One thing my French teacher keeps telling us is to not use a dictionary. Why is that? Because then everytime I try to speak/write in French I end up constructing the sentence in English and then translating it. This is a bad way of using a language. If I were to learn a language from scratch and independently, I can use it much better. Even though I'm not a native English speaker I'm able to think, write and speak in English without too much effort because inside my head I don't translate it from my mother tongue.

Putting the level of the extension on "fluent" seems to be useful. This translates entire sentences and thus gives me context. Even for an A1 level guy like me (novice) it's only useful on the "fluent" mode.

I'm a native french speaker and I tried the "intermediate" setting on a couple of english websites and was pleasantly surprised. I agree that most of the mistakes come from verbs, the times or person/gender are often wrong and sometimes the translation just doesn't make sense.

For instance I saw "tomber en amour" for "to fall in love", which is a literal translation but somewhat awkward. Even worse was "était due à arriver" for "was due to arrive"; once a gain a literal translation but this time the french version doesn't make any kind of sense.

So, definitely something to take with a grain of salt but still pretty useful IMO.

Maybe a more fool-proof approach would be to do it the other way around: have an extension that would translate most of a foreign website except for some words/expressions. This way the foreign language would always be correct (given the source is reliable enough, of course) and having mistakes in the automatically translated native language wouldn't be a problem.

You're assuming the average person using this is going to be as committed to learning a language as you. Maybe this isn't the tool that you go to when you decide to learn a language but it's an easy way to better yourself.

It's awesome that you're immersing yourself but I'm never going to do that unless my priorities change significantly. I installed this extension and now I'm going to learn some spanish words.

Would you mind sharing some of your resources?

I'm also looking for Spanish TV shows (on the Internet, since I don't own a TV), that have subtitles in Spanish as well. So far I only found them with English subtitles, but I guess they must exist in Spanish, too, for example for hearing impaired people.

If you haven't seen it already, check out Destinos. It's a soap opera written for Spanish language immersion for English speakers--the difficulty level goes up as the series goes along. (The first few episodes actually explain key plot points in English.)

As icing on the cake, the story is so engaging that I've seen native speakers watch it. :-)

If you live in the US, Hulu has added a crap ton of programs from Gala/Uni-vision and most of them seem to have spanish closed captioning. I don't know whats good but there's a lot to choose from.

I think this breaks down somewhat for languages that don't use phonetic characters, such as Mandarin and Japanese. It would take a long period of dedicated study before the average person could read media in these languages.

I don't think so. You just may get used to read without repeating each word to yourself. It's actually even useful, skipping the phase when you internally match the word with its pronunciation, and directly understanding meaning from the written form. (AFAIR this technique is also used for speed reading.)

Although while this extension is a neat idea, it the word “Immersion” in its title is probably misleading. It only automatically translates select words and phrases from web page—while immersion, I believe, means not using any other language except the one you're learning.

Still, the extension might be useful to acquire some initial knowledge of the language prior to actual immersion.

Yeah, the fact that they named it 'immersion' makes it pretty misleading. My idea of immersion has always been using that language and only that language. The official definition of immersion is 'a method of teaching in a foreign language that involves exclusive use of the language'. The plugin's implementation is more like the opposite of immersion.

I'm still skeptical of people without prior knowledge of the language using this plugin because learning via computational translations is unnatural and detrimental to beginners who don't know any better. Beginners don't know when something has been translated wrongly or if that phrase is how a native would express it. This makes the plugin a little redundant, since their market would have to be people who are neither beginners nor completely fluent (since someone that is fluent can engage in actual immersion). The only instance where the plugin would be useful is for people with prior knowledge of the language (can read and write it to a certain extent) but would like to expand their vocabulary bank.

I am just beginning to learn Japanese, and someone passed along a great site that takes a link to a kanji page and it adds kana to it. There's also a Firefox extension (Rikaichan) that provides kana in a tooltip when you mouse over kanji. Needless to say, this makes it easier.

links please?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rikaichan/

I use it too.

I will mention that a long time ago, I had trouble with the dictionary file extensions being "incompatible" with new Firefox releases. They're just dictionaries, though, so I hacked them to make them stop. They might have fixed that by now.

The web site that adds hiragana to the kanji of a link you give: http://www.hiragana.jp/

And Rikaikun, its Chrome based brother.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jipdnfibhldikgcjhf...

For Mandarin (not sure about Japanese), the plugin would definitely benefit from pin yin supplementation at the 'novice' level. Non-latin characters are difficult for people whose primary language is a language of Latin derivatives. But implement this, they would have to take Google's pre-existing translation tools and translate the translated text into pinyin using something like the Ruby on Chinese Pinyin tool (http://www.kawa.net/works/cantonese/canton.html).

But at the moment, the plugin seems to expect people to have prior knowledge of the language and its so-called immersion revolves around reading and literacy uptake. Pin yin is more for speaking/oral purposes so translating articles into phonetic characters is unconventional for languages that are not meant to be read in such a way.

Try Zhongwen Chinese-English Popup dictionary chrome extension. Simliar to Raikaikun for Japanese (above post). I've always found it really helpful :)

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kkmlkkjojmombglmlp...

I'm pretty sure that Google Translate already supports Pinyin since it shows the pinyin on the dedicated translate.google.com page (click the pronunciation guide button after you translate something to Mandarin - it's the capital A with an umlaut).

Do you have any recommendatinos for podcasts in spanish?

Anything by Radio Nacional de España, please take a look: http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/rne/

Also, there are two great shows aired by the same basque guy, "Ciudad K" and "Escepticos". Both of them are available for free viewing anywhere in the world (I am located in Brazil)

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