Back to language learning

July 17, 2006 by Oliver
Filed under: Computers, PHP, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML 

After spending a couple of weeks dealing with foreign text and Unicode at work, my interest in foreign language learning with the aid of a computer has returned.

My main goal is a Pimsleur style system but with the repetition handled by computer – i.e. with just the individual phrases (and words and syllables for earlier lessons) as audio files, the program should generate complete conversations with sensible parts repeated and useful instructor comments in between.

That sounds like it requires some sort of script in some sort of markup language. Since it needs to be highly structured I guess that only leaves XML as a sensible possibility. So I marked up a conversation from Pimsleur’s German I. There was an unexpected result. It’s fairly straight forward to have multiple source languages in one script file. Although there are certain things that would not work best this way, a lot of things in German (for instance) would be taught the same regardless of what language you are learning from. Ultimately source-language-specific scripts would have to be supported though.

Pimsleur, foreign language learning, German

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Comments

8 Comments on Back to language learning

  1. RyanC on Mon, 17th Jul 2006 11:50 am

    2. I think ultimately you should aim for your script to upload the language directly into someone’s brain – surely we’ll be able to do that at some point?

  2. Oliver on Mon, 17th Jul 2006 11:51 am

    3. Penultimately then…

  3. RyanC on Mon, 17th Jul 2006 10:56 pm

    4. I think I’ve been playing Eve too much :P

  4. Alexandre Rafalovitch on Tue, 18th Jul 2006 12:53 am

    5. Oliver,

    Glad to see you haven’t given up on this. You may find this French/Russian audio-collection of words useful. Not enough to build phrases, but at least you can practice the exponential back-off test.
    http://shtooka.moostik.net/dico-fr/

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