I notice that Mark has posted an interesting explanation of LingQ's improved tagging features at LingQCentral. LingQCentral has a lot of interesting explanations and comments on LingQ and its features. I will be posting more of my specific LingQ related comments there in the future and linking to them from here. It is well worth having a look there if you have not already done so.
I just posted a comment on Loic LeMeur's blog using his Seesmic system. It was very easy. Maybe we can create a LingQ or "litter" community at Seesmic. Just a thought. Or maybe it should be on Facebook or should we wait until we have our own community? Any thoughts.
Well we have our first bit of litter, or litterature, from Paige. I might add that Paige has just joined LingQ and is studying very hard. At the rate she is going she could be a learner of the month.
What about others out there ? What are you doing now? 你正在作什么？Que estas haciendo ahora? Qu'est-ce tu fais maintenant？ 何をしているの？ Was machst du jetzt? Que estas fazendo agora? Cosa stai facendo adesso? что делаете теперь ? vad gör du nu ?
Here is Paige.
We are looking for people to help us produce podcasts in their language. We would like them to be around 10 minutes long or so. Ideally we want conversations. Today I just loaded up one to JapaneseLingQ.com from a couple in Japan. It is natural, informal and kind of lets us into their living room. We have received some great ones from Latin America that are going up in SpanishLingQ.com. What about others? We will give 1,000 points to be used at LingQ for every podcast.
These should be long conversations. This is not the same as the idea I posted the other day about getting short comments from people in their language, along the lines of Twitter. I suggested we call them Litter. Litter posts can be text, or audio or videos and should be short and personal notes.
Podcasts, on the other hand should be longer, 10 minute or more, and ideally should be a conversation between two people.
Twitter is a social networking system where people talk about what they are doing and send this to their friends. Now LingQ is a multilingual community. What if our LingQ members just sent video messages, or even audio or text messages, in their own language, about what they are doing, like Twitter. Except only those people interested in that language would subscribe. We would prepare transcripts at LingQ and people could learn the language from it. We could call it Litter. Here is the first example of some Litter.
Chris Anderson has coined the term "freenomics" to describe the effect of the Internet on economics. Se this article. This has application for language learning.
He says, for example,
"The dominant
business model on the internet today is making money by giving things
away. Much of that is merely the traditional media model of using free
content to build audiences and selling access to them to advertisers.
But an increasing amount of it falls into the free-sample model:
because it is so cheap to offer digital services online, it doesn’t
matter if 99% of your customers are using the free version of your
services so long as 1% are paying for the “premium version”. After all,
1% of a big number can also be a big number ."
The silent period is an effective way to get started on a language. This is in response to a question by a person who subscribes to my youtubes.
There are a total of 7 of these, although the remaining four are shorter. They are available at Youtube (just search for lingosteve). Is it worthwhile putting them up here? Please let me know.
Multiculturalism and what I think of it. Pedro, from Portugal, is one of the more active members of LingQ, both as a learner and as a contributor of a lot of Portuguese language content. He asked me for my views on multiculturalism for him to use as background for a school project. So here it is Pedro. If there is interest I could have this transcribed, but I decided just to speak naturally on the subject. I am happy to accommodate Pedro who has done so much for us.
Here is the first video of the discussion at Sophia Books. I apologize for the camera angle. It was a small room. Robyn preferred to have me go first, so I got to kick things off. More of these videos are available on youtube. I think will also put them up here if there is interest. Questions and comments are welcome.
The language teacher's role should be to make the learner independent according to Krashen. Rubem Alves talks of encouraging students to fly, of helping them learn things that become a part of their bodies so they do not have to think of them. He quotes the parable of the centipede.
"Once a centipede was asked how he could operate all of his numerous feet in such an orderly manner without getting them confused. The centipede shook his head, shrugged, and said that he had never given it a thought. From that time on, the centipede became unable to move, the legs all got in the way of one another."
Alves wants teachers to create hunger so that students will find their own way. He wants the learners to fall in love with what they are reading, so that they will love reading. He disparages grammar and the other useless dictates of the curriculum. You cannot learn music just from the notes, he says, you first have to hear the song.
Many educators have a different view, one that is, in my view, not useful nor effective. Robyn Matthew falls into that category of educator.
Robyn Matthew wrote a book called Language Logic, Practical and Effective Techinques to Learn any Foreign Language. She and I debated at Sophia Book Store Thursday night. I hope to have some youtubes of the event later.
Let's just say that I am fundamentally opposed to most of the advice in Matthew's book. Her book is based on the assumption that the teacher has to control what the learner is doing.
The thrust of her book is always the same. Get a teacher, take a course, get instruction, learn the concepts of the language before jumping in, learn the words in the dictionary and colour the different parts of speech different colours, and on and on. To her, grammar is essential, and since many people do not even know grammar in their own language, they should learn that first. Syntax (term that most people do not understand) is even more important. She introduces the fashionable term "collocation", relatively recent addition to the long line of jargon invented by linguists and language teaching specialists to describe things that we observe naturally. Collocation refers to the fact that certain words in a language usually appear together with others to form common phrases.
To me it is simpler. Read and listen to things of interest. Study words from this content without worrying about what you forget. Enjoy yourself. Do not think of rules or parts of speech. And steadfastly refuse to analyse syntax or answer comprehension questions.
At times Matthew's impulse to control and advise in every last detail becomes ridiculous in her book.
She declares in the book that there are three levels of difficulty in writing a language;
most difficult-when there is no writing system;
next most difficult-when the writing system is different from yours (then it will take longer and you need instruction she advises) and
easiest-when the writing system is the same. Wow!
She goes to great length to explain that the child learns its first language differently, because the mother spends so much time in one on one discussion with the child etc. . Has she heard of families with many children, or where the mother works ?
I contrast all of this "guidance" with the wisdom of Rubem Alves. Let the learner discover. Encourage the learner to enjoy the music of the language or the interest of the text. Let's learn from the child and the playful way the child explores and learns. Just put in the time.
Let's not destroy the enjoyment of the language with "concepts" and analysis or questions. Let's not make the learner self-conscious like the centipede.
I have imported some Korean into the Chinese section of LingQ. It works OK sort of, but it sure would be nice to have access to a Hangul-Hanja dictionary. Many of the words that I read in Hangul would be easier to remember if I could also input the Hanja into my LingQ widget.
Anyone out there have any suggestions? The best would be if I could just cut and paste the hangul into a box, click and get the Hanja, or even if I could copy and paste the whole text and get it converted into Hanja where applicable.
I have a Macbook. Any suggestions welcome.
While I am at it, here is the Russian intro.
