An Aberrational Way to Learn a Language | Hacker News Reader

An Aberrational Way to Learn a Language

kumar.vc

39 pointskumarski19 comments

This most likely was not the author's intention, but it reads like an ad. We can pay them money to auto translate our own website. The learning stage appears to come from the manual corrections that come after that, and having a friend "grade" his corrections.

A cheaper approach would be to translate from native to non native language using google (or whatever other free tool you want), and performing the same translation step w/friend to assess your progress.

If I am missing something, please speak up so or modify your blog so that we can make use of your technique.

Ooops.

The admin panel of dakwak let's you see multiple phrases separated.

This means it is easier to see the accuracy of your translation versus a computer's for whoever your corrector/teacher/mentor might be.

Yea, that definitely sounds more useful than what the post alludes to. Any chance you can post a screen shot?

sure thing. I'm working off my mobile phone right now. Let me post a screenshot later this evening to reveal what I'm talking about.

@kumarski - I just left this comment on your blog, but it might not have posted, so I'll leave it here too:

Hi there -- My name is David and I'm the co-founder and CTO of a company called Nulu. We teach foreign languages in about 5 minutes a day using news content (so it's inherently interesting and engaging). Would love to hear your thoughts on our platform, which is in use today by tens of thousands of people throughout Latin America and the United States to learn English and Spanish, respectively. Shoot me an email when you get a chance!

feel free to message me at engineer (at) kumar (dot) vc . If you're in the valley, tennis or lunch works best to catch me.

Hey David, I'm the head teacher of a language school in the Czech Republic (US ex-pat) and I'm currently evaluating digital language learning products to bundle with our face to face courses. Yours sounds interesting, shoot me an email (in profile), see if we can work on something like co-branding.

Lee

Maybe it's just been too long since my last coffee, but I don't understand what's happening here.

Dakwak appears to be a tool wherein people can pay for i18n services on web properties they own, and yet from Kumar's description it's like he's using duolingo.

Duolingo is one thing, but DakWak let's you see the words on the page. This allows for a spatial sense of the words.

Remember in school when you used to remember where something was on the page? This is the same thing.

It means I can see the actual words on the page and have a higher recall of the instance of the word.

So, your process is to take some websites that you own, have them automatically translated, and then use the results to learn the new vocab?

I totally get what you're saying!! :) Thought it was just me who abnormally remembered where stuff is on pages.

Thanks for sharing, but if I don't know a language, how is having a tool translate it going to help me learn the language? Are you suggesting this only for those with a moderate knowledge of the language already? And what about those of us that don't have friends to grade us in a language? Without it, the automated translation may be wrong, and I'd be learning incorrect information.

I'd like to learn other languages quickly, but in past experience, conversational/immersion is the only way to go to get anything useful, and I don't have that ability or the time to persue it. Really the only time I have is the 1-1.5 hours in the car everyday- that is not enough and I have no one to converse with, and I'm an introvert anyway, so I don't want to talk to people typically.

I learned French in a way with many similarities: I took a semester of engineering courses at a French uni.

Like the author notes, the trick seemed to be (1) you are interested in the exact meaning of the words and phrases (2) finding many `hooks` for memorizing. In my case, it was specific problem sets, personalities of profs, ... (3) rhythm and structure. For him it was the structure of web sites. For me, it was class schedule.

I did about zero language specific training that semester. Got good grades, even by French standards. I did have a scare half way into the semester by doing poorly on half my midterms, but pulled it through by the end.

I did have a foundation of high school language courses, but I was about as poor of a language student as you can imagine.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't French Universities require you to have a knowledge of the French language at least at level B2 of the Common European Framework[1] in order to attend their university courses?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Re...

I'm doing something similar for Japanese and English, though there's no machine translation involved.

Instead, it's a pure wikipedia-style site[1], where anyone can post their best attempts. Multiple translations are allowed per sentence, and the best (as voted by expert editors) are shown first.

Even if you don't speak Japanese at all, you can take advantage of the parallel texts in both languages[2], both online and as pdf files you can download.

[1] http://www.macaronics.com/

[2] http://macaronics.com/translated_articles

We are actually implementing Dakwak in our website. It's by far the fastest & easiest web translation I've ever seen. Trust me, you are not going to understand unless you try a demo. It literally took me 60 seconds to translate the website into 50+ languages.

yeah and then I had to correct them all. / the reason I bumped into this learning methodology.

where I sought fit

This should be: where I saw fit

good catch. Thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com