Thanks to Cornelia from the Deutsch als Fremdsprache Blog for posting about it.

Only Yabla language immersion sites give you authentic television, music videos, drama, interviews, travel, and Yabla exclusive shoots from throughout the world. Our unique player technology is designed with language learners in mind: Slow Play, Integrated Dictionaries, Listening Game, Dual Language Subtitles, and more.

I took their player for a spin, and quite liked it. The transcript isn’t just a big block of text, but instead, is integrated into the player. Each sentence or phrase appears as it’s spoken, and pressing back takes you to the beginning of the sentence. The Slow Play feature is also nice, slowing the video and audio down to perhaps 1/2 to 3/4 regular speed. The audio sounds slightly robotic after being treated this way, but it’s still quite usable. I’m usually wary of language “games”, finding most of them useless, but the Listening Game at Yabla actually seems useful. What it does is removes a random word from the transcript; you listen and watch, and try to fill in the missing word. I can certainly see where playing this occasionally could help one’s listening comprehension.

Hopefully, the amount of French videos catches up with the Spanish; as of right now, there’s around 5 hours of video at Yabla French, and nearly 20 hours at LoMasTv. Still, though, 5 hours of French video with transcripts and translations is a treasure trove for the French learner, so I won’t complain. Do check it out, just bear in mind that their is a subscription fee of $9.95 a month. If you sign up for longer periods of time (6 months, a year), you get a discount.

3. Is there a word missing?

By using an asterix in a sentence, Google will assume that a word is missing and search for phrases that it thinks fills in that blank. For example…

By searching, How are you * today?

Google returns search results that includes:
*   “How are you doing today?”

*   “How are you feeling today?”

*   “How are you guys today?”

*   “How are you coping today?”

Click here to see for yourself and pay attention to the phrases that are bolded.

I really like his ideas, as they help language learners (learning English or anything else) to compare what they think is right, to what is right. If you run a search on what you think is right and get 5 results, it’s probably wrong. If you get 150,000 results, you’re probably onto something.

You can read Jim’s post here, or download the full guide here.

Once you’ve made an account, Lingro keeps track of all of the words you look up. It also maintains a list of all of the sentences that the words appeared in, which makes it all that easier to add sentence items to your SRS application (I recommend Anki).

The site also has a rudimentary flashcard system, but it really is that: rudimentary. I’ve already poked the developers to add an “export” feature.

The dictionaries themselves are all open source, meaning they’re free, and they always will be. Furthermore, they’re largely user-built, so if you hit a word that isn’t in the dictionary you’re using, add it. If you’ve ever used the German dictionary dict.cc, Lingro works more or less the same way. The definitions aren’t always as good as you’d find in a commercial dictionary, but the ease of use – click the word, get a definition – still makes it a worthwhile tool.

Lingro currently has dictionaries for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Polish and Swedish.

For a long while, I thought it was that my ears just weren’t accustomed to normal speaking speeds; I thought I just needed more exposure to the spoken language. The more I listen though, the more I think Annik just talks really, really fast. In Alltagsdeutsch, there are often large segments in each podcast where they’ve interviewed people on the street, and I can usually understand these people just fine. While I very rarely understand the meaning of everything they say, I am at least able to understand what they’re saying, so I can look up the unknown words. With Schlaflos in München there will often be segments of each podcast that I just can’t understand at all – the words are flying by so fast I can’t pick any out, they’re just a bunch of syllables squashed together.

This, of course, is not an “attack” or any such thing on Annik Rubens. It’s her podcast, and she should be allowed, if you will, to talk however she wants. After all, she makes a specific Slow German podcast for us learners. I do think, though, that learners might find it useful to know that, in my opinion, her speaking speed is not representative of the normal speed at which Germans speak. If you listen to a few episodes of Schlaflos in München and suddenly feel as if your listening skills have taken a lunge backwards, try listening to something else. It may very well be the material, not you.

Can anyone else comment on this? Have you noticed it as well? Could a native German have a listen at Annik’s site, and let me know if I’m crazy or not?

Thanks, Harold!

However – I have come to the rescue! Before the files disappeared, I had downloaded them all to my hard drive. I was able to contact the creator of the courses, David Freedel, and asked if he had any problem with me sharing them. He said, basically, “Nope, I don’t work at Princeton anymore – feel free to share them however you wish!”

So, I’ve created a torrent of the files. You can download the torrent here. Please note that, since I just created the torrent, I’m the only seeder – so you’ll need to be patient with the download! I’d also ask, if it’s not too inconvenient, that you please help seed the files, at least for a while, once you’ve downloaded them. That way the whole brunt of the downloads won’t be placed on my internet connection.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: I screwed up the creation of the torrent, using a tracker that won’t work. I’m recreating the torrent now; I’ll post a new link soon. Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE #2: Alright, here is the new torrent link. Please ignore the numbers (0 seeds, 0 leechers); I know for a fact they’re wrong. I checked the actual seeding files a few minutes ago, and there were 25 peers connected out of a total queue of 66. And I know there’s at least one seed – me.

I was taking a look at my copy of Wheelock’s Latin yesterday, and while looking at it, I recalled having a hard time getting an answer key to the exercises, when I was using the book years ago on my own. I dropped by the amazon.com page for the book, and found that some other folks had issues with getting it as well. (Oddly, some people didn’t have any trouble getting it – it seems that the publisher is quite random as to whether or not they’ll give you the login information for the answer key.)

I think it’s silly that the answer key isn’t made available for free on the Wheelock site, without the need for any login information, but I suppose HarperCollins is making a killing on selling the answer keys to instructors (sarcasm alert).

I thought that perhaps, after all this time of so many people having issues in getting the answer key, someone might have made up an answer key and made it available for free. I was right. The site Textkit.com has a free answer key for Wheelock’s Latin; the key is up-to-date for the 6th edition of the book. Here is the associated forum thread about the answer key, and any errors that have been corrected in it.

By the way, if you’re learning Latin or ancient Greek (or want to get started doing so), definitely dig around at Textkit.com. They have free books and other resources for learning the languages.

1. Sprache f 2. (Fach)Sprache f 3. ordinäre Sprache 4. Spr, Sprache

While I won’t list all of them (you can see all of them here), here are some of the related phrases that are offered:

• by making the language extremely scientific ( or technical)
  durch die Verwissenschaftlichung der Sprache
  
• English is used everywhere there as the language of communication
  (die) Umgangssprache ist dort überall Englisch
  
• literary language
  Schriftsprache
  
• first language acquisition
  Erstspracherwerb
  
• technical language
  Fachsprache f n
  
• colloquial language
  Umgangssprache f n
  
• official language
  Amtssprache

Certainly, it needs a lot of work – plural forms aren’t given, irregular verbs aren’t marked, nor are the irregular forms given, etc. But I think it’s a good start, and the related phrases thing is nice, even if the definition section leaves a bit to be desired.

The languages available right now are:

• French <-> English
• German <-> English
• Italian <-> English
• Korean <-> English
• Spanish <-> English

You can access all of the episodes of Slow German here, at podcast.de. You can access the latest episode, along with its associated transcript, at slowgerman.com.