Thought I'd share them.

Some are rather niche, some you need to be a bit loose on defining as offline (Yomiwa and HanYou), and some only had physical releases.
But since some of those are older than me and I still use them, maybe others can find use in the information too.

And with how many potential languages combinations there are, plus with how degraded DRM-free software culture had become, finding those handful few below was a task. Any other suggestions?

from korean_romanizer.romanizer import Romanizer
text = input()
romanizer = Romanizer(text)
print()
print(romanizer.romanize())

Very late, apologies.

I bought another exercise book. Time to ruin it with notes and never look at the notes again after finishing the exercises!

I just became aware of this site, which helps find tv channels livestreaming online across the world.

Feels like it could be useful when you want something to watch/listen to in your target language, but don't want to pick out anything in particular. Not every country has anything listed, but quite a lot do, representing a great variety of languages.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/34234868

The immersion style of language learning essentially entails an instructor who speaks only the target language, not the language you already know. The same way children learn their first language.

Immersion has irrefuted widespread acceptance and respect touted by pretty much everyone as the best way to learn.

I think that needs to be challenged. One of my wise profs once said something like:

You don’t /need/ school. Everything you learn in school can be self-taught and learnt informally the hard way from books and experience. What formal instruction does is accelerates the learning. I am here to organise the information for maximum absorption over time. What you learn here in 4 years would take you a decade to learn in an ad hoc disorganised way…

^ (Paraphrasing from memory). Seems spot-on to me. IMO, immersion is comparable to learning the slow way, by experience. The first language someone learns must be immersion, of course. There is no choice but to learn that the hard way through experience. But then the first language can be used to learn the next.

I was listening to a Brit (possibly Thomas Michael) teaching French on an audio tape. He said (in English) consonants at the end of words are not pronounced, but exceptionally if the consonant is in the word CAREFUL then it is pronounced (the “CaReFuL consonants”). He quickly conveyed a lot of information in a short time because he was able to give an English memory aid. At another moment he said something like: all words ending in TION, TY, ABLE? (I don’t recall all the suffixes) are all French words. Just like that in 1 single sweeping English sentence, I learned thousands of French words. He just needed a minute to give some examples of the French pronounciation (liberty→liber-TAY, revolution→ray-voh-loo-see-own).

In an immersion class that would have been impossible. It would have taken an absurd amount of time playing sherades one word at a time in an immersion class to accomplish the same learning task.

Yes, there are good reasons for immersion. E.g. a gov-administered public French class in a French-speaking region has students with all different mother tongues coming together to learn French in the same classroom. Such classes have no choice but to use immersion style.

But I conjecture that if you have 25 English speakers who want to learn French together, then that group is best served by a teacher who is good (better than fluent) in both languages. Those English speakers have the same uniform advantages and disadvantages that the instruction can account for. E.g. they would all benefit from the vocabulary tip (words ending in TION). They would likely all equally have the same struggle with pronouncing the R’s, and gender of objects. So the instruction can be tailored exploit the language simularities and differences.

I have never met anyone who agrees with me on this. But I think it should be studied (hence the post to !thought_forge@mander.xyz). It would be easy to take two groups of English speakers who don’t know a word of French and teach one group immersion style and the other group without the immersion limitation. Have a race measuring how many hours of instruction and study to reach the same passing level of fluency.

This week I only did duolingo, I was incredibly busy :(

I was just learning about the concept of extensive reading a little while back, and came across this cool website that let's you find media and rank it by difficulty level.

It only supports Japanese, Spanish, German, and Korean for now, and most of the focus seems to be on the former. Still, it seems like a great resource. And it's very easy/fun to jump in and contribute.

I've seen a similar site at https://languageroadmap.com/. It supports way more languages and has lots of media catalogged, but most seem to have no info. As far as I can tell it's kinda dead... but also seems like it'd be really cool if not for that.

To bring it back to discussion - what are some (recent or favorite) books you've read, or shows/movies you've watched in your target language? What are some that you found especially good for learners? And how do you find new material at your level?

I was reading that the reddit community "languagelearning" doesn't allow language-specific posts and comments. Fortunately we are not on reddit and we do allow it!

There's quite many of us keeping an eye on this community, so if you've got questions/thoughts/personal wins or losses: don't hesitate to post!

Apparently I forgot to post the weekly thread last week. Oh well, maybe people here have a two week update for us :)

Small language models offer a cost-effective and resource-efficient solution for indigenous communities by reducing computational and data requirements while improving output accuracy through fine-tuned and context-specific datasets.

There's a lot of talk about comprehensible input and how language acquisition works. I came across this video and thought it was interesting to hear it directly from the researcher that pioneered the idea.

(On balance: I think he's a little too gung-ho in saying speaking practice and many other things are unhelpful. But that's just my speculation. It's an old video, even 15 years ago when uploaded, and may be outdated in ways. Also, sorry for the delightfully terrible VHS level video quality; but it's kind of appropriate I guess.)

Watching his little drawing while he speaks German is a good reminder of what good, beginner-level comprehensible input videos should look like. The comprehensible part is important!

Late, like always. Sorry!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31122420

Moved to sundays since it seems saturdays don't work well for people (including me) :)