A game to learn a new language

Pimsleur isn't the most efficient way to learn a language. I find Assimil to be a much more interesting method. The audio component is required purely in the target language with no instructional content and very little repetition. So it is up to the end user to decide how much or little repetition they need. This ultimately means that the recordings contain far more vocabulary and phrases than what you'd get in the same time as Pimsleur. Though it certainly doesn't feel like your hand is being held as with Pimsleur.

The audio is used alongside a printed book that has one side of the page in your target language and the other in your native language for a direct comparison.

You still learn good pronunciation, grammar, words and phrases, but in a far less boring way than Pimsleur. Also there's the added benefit that you get some language immersion since the audio is purely in your target language.

Even still I would say that Assimil isn't enough on its own. To make the process of learning a language interesting you need to utilise a variety of tools and methods.

While I agree you are likely correct, I would add that this can be used to augment your language learning. If you take learning a language as a holistic experience, then there is definitely a place for memorization of vocabulary.

Anecdotally, I'm working on Spanish right now as my girlfriend speaks native Spanish. The immersion that gives me is great, but I also just need to memorize the words for "wallet" and "scissors".

I fully agree with you, but Anki (with pronunciation) got me 12k German words in 12 months with 40 minutes daily where Goethe couldn't give me a functional understanding of German whilst travelling. Grammar and the functional language comes ter with constant translation or immersion with sites and experiences like the excellent DuoLingo.

I've found Duolingo to work quite well, probably because it deals with entire phrases.

If you're determined to learn a foreign language its because you have social pressure to do so.

Or because you can envision a career path that will allow you to use it.

Or because you're a pedantic prick/prickess.

But mostly because its a college requirement.

Yes we didn't hear about Duolingo yet, here on Hacker News.

Kudos for all the work that went into drawing those words. Great job.

This is obviously not a tool to learn a new language, but it's a lot of fun, and you can learn some new words. (But it could use some algorithm for repeating words.)

Agreed. After trying Rosetta Stone, then LiveMocha (basically a web clone of Rosetta Stone, in terms of course style), I think that style is one of the least effective and most boring/fast to lose interest of all such learning tools. And this new tool seems to largely imitate Rosetta Stone.

I found Duolingo has a much more efficient way of teaching you the new language (words get stuck a lot faster in your mind).

Thank you for the duolingo link! I found my ultimate procrastination tool :)

I wonder if there's any particularly good way to gamify learning grammar, though— you can't really quantify it in the same way as you can vocabulary.

My favorite suggestion for online language learning, whose source I've long since forgotten, is to have a story / article / other piece of writing that gradually transitions from English grammar to language-being-learned's grammar, then performs a similar transition over vocabulary (like http://dotsies.org/stories/the-lamplighter.html , but with an alternate language instead of alphabet).

I haven't seen any implementations of this, and it'd probably be practically impossible to automate, but feel like it has some potential.

I found a really good one last year : yabla.com

I paid for a couple of months for the chinese version, it's really well made but the content is not exciting enough. Can't speak for other languages but I really think this is the best way to learn (this and podcasts).

After trying it with my daughter:

- Some words are way too difficult for several reasons, from knowledge of the world (what's a typewriter?) to word length (in the "pictures to written words" game, "debajo de" was difficult to read, "mil" wasn't).. It would be cool if, when you add a difficulty grading, you have a separate path for children.

- In the "written and spoken word to four pictures" game, we clicked on the word expecting to hear it repeated, but the interface assumed it was a click in one of the four quadrants (so we randomly lost about 75% of the times we clicked). The expectation was there after playing with the "spoken word to pictures" game, where the center icon is a "play" icon that repeats the word.

- For children starting to read, and possibly for people whose native language doesn't use the target language's writing system, it would be cool if the interface repeated out loud the reading of the word in some of the games. Again, as an example, the "written and spoken word to four pictures" game where, currently, the word is read only once at the beginning.

Again, good job. My daughter told me she was tired of playing and went away, only to come back 15 minutes later asking for more.

Hey desireco42, you might want to take a look at this website (http://www.oplang.org). It's called the Open Languages Project. You'll like that it gives you the 7-9 languages exposure you're looking for. I've been using it to learn Korean and it's been pretty effective (I can read now but a way to go before I understand what I read) Their method reminds me of the Michel Thomas method where there is no need for notes or memorization. One word is introduced in each lesson and thought in a logical structure.

Sounds like a bug, that did not happen to me. (On chrome latest)

Can't confirm here on latest chrome.