DuoLingo: German

So, spurred on by a friend who is working her way through it, I've signed up for DuoLingo and am working my way through the German course.

Have done the first few lessons (Basics 1) and am working my way through the next lot (Basics 2).  Eine, Das, Der, Brot, Mann, Zeitung, usw. usw. usw.  I tore through them at quite a pace, which is no great boast as I've been starting to learn German and then putting it aside since the start of the Britpop era.  I've read the first two or three chapters of every German textbook in the world.  I certainly should know the commonest words by now!

Each block in the skill map consists of several lessons and each lesson consists of several questions: translations and type-what-you-heard and cloze tests.

Verdict so far: pretty (looks very Twitterish); quite addictive; main annoyance is that the multiple meanings of common words such as Sie makes for questions that could have several answers, only one of which is accepted.  Lose all your 'lives' during a lesson and you have to redo it.  I was also taken aback at the end of Basics 1 to be faced with translation exercises for extra credit which were taken from real-life German texts way, way above the level of that elementary block.  I made a brave stab at them but felt foolish, and it was extremely daft that I had to try to rate the attempts of others at these tests from my position of ignorance.

I feel inclined to stick with this and see how it goes.  I've tried and failed to learn German many times and feel uneducated not knowing it; perhaps this time I'll make it.

DLI GLOSS archive

is here and has thousands of interactive lessons on various languages.  Via; I don't know how I failed to stumble on this while looking for DLI-related stuff the other week.

DuoLingo

Benny interviews the inventor of Captchas, who has come up with an intriguing-looking language-learning site.  I'm tempted to sign up for this; there is mention either in the video interview or the introductory video on the DuoLingo site (can't remember which) that they might be rolling out Chinese learning for English speakers this year.  This would be quite something.

The exact structure of the translation lessons doesn't seem to be spelt out explicitly on the DuoLingo site; it looks as though you have to sign up for further information, which is annoying.

More on the Defense Language Institute

Two more videos here and here (these two have almost identical scripts, and were filmed in 1970 and 1978; the latter one shows what glorious facial hair America grew to celebrate the bicentenary).  Just as the 1953 one had a lot of Korean in it, the 1970 one has lots of Vietnamese and the 1978 one lots of Russian.  Really interesting to see that hanja are still being taught in the 70s in the Korean class.

I read Anthony Kenny's A Path From Rome some years ago, a good account of Catholic life in England as observed by a young man who became a priest but then left the priesthood back when this was a very unusual thing to do.  Back then, in the 50s, trainee priests had a seriously good command of Latin: they weren't quite fluent in the sense of being able to converse without strain, but they were pretty close.  A few months ago I saw a documentary about modern English trainee priests, and they seemed to be doing only GCSE-level Latin in the first year or two of their training.  It's a different world.

Army Language School

Interesting documentary here (various formats) about US Army language training, circa 1953 (date guessed from the reference to the Korean War peace talks at Panmunjom).  I felt relieved for the class that had had the good fortune to be selected for Korean, which at least has a very rational writing system... but then we see them later down the line writing hanja, which were not as officially defunct then as they are now.  Armies know what they want from linguist-soldiers, and are good at getting it; and since learning a language is better than square-bashing or being shot at, the students tend to be well-motivated against the threat of having to drop out.  Forty-something weeks to full fluency is pretty impressive.

Anthony Burgess in one of his books on language debunks the myth that the British are rubbish at foreign languages: we can be good at them when there's a specific financial imperative, such as a proficiency bar in the old Colonial Service.  He inevitably claimed to have been brilliant: I passed my Standard One at distinction level after three months of instruction.  This did not make me popular among my fellow-expatriates.  I went on to pass my Standard Two in less than a year, a Federation record.  This made me hated.  Before leaving Malaya I took the optional Standard Three examination, all hard Arabic and Sanskrit loanwords and scrawled Jawi, which conferred a bonus.  This made me worse hated, but I did not care.  (From the not-always-believable "Little Wilson and Big God").  Memoirs and biographies of old Colonial characters such as George Orwell (who mastered several local languages when out in Burma) show that as a country we're not inherently rubbish at languages.

Benny interviewed in Irish

here - interesting for me to try to match up the audio with the English subtitles.

The only Irish textbook I have to hand is Teach Yourself Irish by Myles Dillon and Donncha Ó Cróinín, 1992 reprint of 1961 edition.  The exercises fully support Benny's contention that although Irish is certainly not a dead language, it can often be taught as though it were one.  A pall of hard-working gloom hangs over far too many of the sentences.  "We had six barrels of herring to bring home".  "Four sevens are twenty-eight, two shillings and fourpence".  "We shall all die, but we do not know when or where".  "It is a great pity that she is so tall".  Ireland comes across as a land of turf, death and rain.  Of course, with vocabulary you have to start somewhere, and it's depressing to come across language primers that try too hard to be trendy and yoof-oriented, but it's a good job that it's possible to tune into stations like Raidió na Life and hear something that sounds encouragingly like real life, like fun, but in the target language.

The issue of school language courses that take you, over a period of several years, pretty much nowhere towards fluency or even bare usefulness, is something else that I'll address another day.

Obenkyo for Android

Just installed it on my phone and it looks like a nice little tool for learning and drilling kanji, kana and vocabulary.  I had browsed the Android store for Japanese-learning stuff but had overlooked this for some reason; was finally directed to it by a comment on this thread on Charles Stross's blog.  Chances are of course that it'll turn out to be just another very useful thing that I don't actually use.  We shall see.

One thing my Android phone is useful for is listening to interesting radio while out and about; I frequently listen to Ban Ban Radio (Kakogawa) or FM West Tokyo when I'm going somewhere.  I rarely understand much but can at least make out syllables and particles, which is a start.