Tools

I recently came across lingro.com through my ‘net travels, and while it could be improved in many areas, it’s already one of my favorite tools. While the site has a regular dictionary look-up, what I really love is the overlay feature (or “web viewer” as they call it). You go to lingro.com, select your target language, and enter a website URL; once the page loads, every word on the page is clickable. Click one, and a pop-up window appears with the meaning of the word. There’s also a toolbar at the bottom of the window that you can type a word into, to look up a word that isn’t on the page. (It’s also helpful to look up compound words, as many that are logical in nature don’t have a unique entry.) Here’s what it looks like:

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.

I’ve been doing a lot of listening to German lately, mostly podcasts. I’ve been listening to Alltagsdeutsch from Deutsche Welle, along with two from Annik Rubens, Slow German and Schlaflos in München. To perhaps stop other German learners from going mad with frustration, I thought I’d point something out: either the variety of stuff I’ve listened to thus far is misleading, or Annik Rubens speaks extraordinarily fast in Schlaflos in München.

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?

I’ve been studying German for 4 years or so now, and since I began, I’ve been pounding away with alt-code keys. Alt+0220 for Ü, alt+0246 for ö, etc. I just discovered something which will save me quite a bit of time: DeKey.

It’s a custom German keymap for Windows Vista or Windows XP, which allows you to easily type letters commonly used in German, e.g.:

ü, ö, ä, ß, «, », etc.

Instead of using the alt-codes, all you have to do is hold down the Alt key and hit the corresponding letter, so:

R-alt + u = ü
R-alt + a = ä
R-alt + shift + o = Ö

You can download the installer here; instructions on how to enable the keyboard are included in the zip file.

I blogged earlier this month about listening to Schlaflos in München to work on your German listening skills. In my previous post, I neglected to mention that Annik also offers a special version of Schlaflos for learners of German, Slow German. With these, she selects a topic from one of her podcasts and does it again, except slowly (I bet you couldn’t have guessed that based on the title, huh? ). Each episode of Slow SiM (Schlaflos in München) also has a complete transcript, so you can hunt down the words you can’t quite understand while listening.

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.

I have written previously about some German podcasts I listen to, which are produced by Deutsche Welle. Those aren’t the only podcasts I listen to, though. The podcasts by Deutsche Welle, while of high production quality, are more formal than everyday speech. It’s clear listening to them that they aren’t spontaneous, but more like news articles read aloud. They’re good to learn vocabulary from, but Germans don’t really talk like that. That’s understandable; I don’t normally speak like CNN news anchors!

Schlaflos in München, however, is (I think) a better representation of how most Germans speak. Annik (the maker of the podcast) talks about all kinds of things - her cat, her life, stuff in the news. It is essentially a personal German blog, but in podcast format. However, don’t let that fool you - in making over 400 episodes of Schlaflos in München, Annik has learned how to keep the production quality high. The sound quality is great, as are all of the “extras” she edits in - funny sounds, music, clips from listeners.

Listening to her podcast is a good way to train your ear to understand “rapid fire” German, complete with emotions. Unlike the Deutsche Welle podcast folks, Annik often laughs, speaks in fake voices to imitate someone or something, speeds her speech up when she gets excited over something, etc. And let’s face it - we all do this in our native tongues. While it would make things easier for foreign language learners if everyone spoke in the same dull, unemotional voice, it’d get pretty boring.

Her podcast is also a great source of everyday vocabulary. As I wrote in this post, not all vocabulary is alike. While it’s good to know the vocabulary that news articles use, knowing that vocabulary won’t necessarily make it easier to understand natives speaking about everyday things. Some vocabulary is formal; some is informal. You need to strike a balance. Schlaflos in München will give you your dose of informal vocabulary.

So, if you’re learning German and haven’t listened to Schlaflos yet, please give it a try. I think you’ll enjoy it. If you do end up enjoying it, you’ll have plenty to keep your hands (or iPods) full. The complete archive of her show is available through iTunes. (You can also get all of her old episodes via this feed, if you’re not an iTunes user.)

The Slavic department of the George Washington University offers a bi-weekly podcast (or webcast, as they call it). The webcast, entitled Новости недели на упрощённом русском языке (News of the week in simplified Russian) offers, as the title of the webcast indicates, summaries of the news from the past 2 weeks. Snippet from the site:

Новости недели на упрощённом русском языке is posted to the web bi-weekly and delivers a survey of the previous two weeks’ news in simplified standard Russian Listeners of Voice of America’s “Special English” broadcasts will recognize the slightly slower rate of speech and textual redundancy which characterize these webcasts.

Why упрощённый русский? Back in Soviet times, the news was easy to understand. The propaganda-laden messages were predictable and the diction clear and slow. Post-communist newscasts feature telegraphic speech and slurry diction. Our webcasts serve as a stepping stone between the teacher talk of the classroom and the “real” Russian of the media.

Authentic news. The news itself is taken from a number of Russian sites, including Lenta.Ru, Vesti.Ru, Ytro.ru and other authentic sites.

Perhaps one of the best features of the site is that there are full transcripts of every episode they’ve ever done. It’s recommended that you listen to the audio first without the text, to get the most out of it - but once you get stuck, you can always fall back on the transcripts. Not only are transcripts available, but there are also exercises for every single episode.

The archives for the website go back to 2003, so there’s a lot of content here. The interface of the website is a bit clunky, but it’s worth fighting with.

In regards to language level, the webcasts are recommended for “students with listening skills at ACTFL Intermediate Mid to Intermediate High. In most cases, that corresponds to college Russian at the end of second-year.”

Last (but certainly not least!), the webcasts are a project of the National Capital Language Resource Center (NCLRC).

I posted back at the end of March that Natalia of A Spoonful of Russian was making videos of how to write Russian cursive letters. In the videos, she also sounds out the letters. I hadn’t checked A Spoonful of Russian for a while - until today actually! - but it looks like she’s finished up her series. Here are links to all of the videos, along with the letters that are covered in each one:

• Lesson 15 (Letter “A”)
• Lesson 16 (Letters “Б,В,Г”)
• Lesson 17 (Letters “Д,Е,Ё,Ж”)
• Lesson 18 (Letters “З,И”)
• Lesson 19 (Letters “Й,К,Л,М,Н”)
• Lesson 20 (Letters “О,П,Р,С,Т”)
• Lesson 21 (Letters “У,Ф,Х,Ц,Ч”)
• Lesson 22 (Letters “”Ш,Щ,ь,ъ,Ы,Э,Ю,Я”)

And of course, don’t just watch the videos and leave her site. She’s got a lot of good material there, both in her regular podcasts as well as in her Downloads section.

MIT has an article about using podcasts for what is essentially 24/7 foreign language learning. Of course, a student can’t really listen to their foreign language material 24/7, but with portable devices like iPods, the potential is there:

MIT’s Foreign Languages and Literatures (FL&L) section is exploring ways to use podcasting and mobile media players such as iPods in foreign language teaching, thus enabling their students more frequent and non-traditional ways to hear and speak foreign languages.

…

The common goal in the faculty podcasting projects is immersing students, as much as possible, in a foreign language during the course of a semester. Given the ubiquity of mobile devices (e.g., cell phones, MP3 players), students can now experience many types of media in nontraditional surroundings 24 hours a day. They can fit in a few minutes of language learning while riding the bus, walking the dog, or exercising in the gym. Podcasting, as a distribution medium, has changed the learning landscape, providing many more opportunities for immersion.

Portable devices really have turned the whole idea of a “language lab” upside down. With iPods or other MP3 players, you can basically take your language lab anywhere you go. This is a huge jump even from the home computer becoming a language lab over the past years. With the internet and access to so much foreign language media, both text, audio, and visual, a computer with a broadband connection can easily serve as a language lab. But unless you have a laptop, you can’t very well carry your computer around with you. Portable devices solve that problem wonderfully.

Another segment of the article that I thought was pretty cool was this:

At Groeger’s request, LLARC is investigating tools that would allow for an oral threaded discussion, in the style of a regular online forum.

That would be pretty amazing. Students and teachers could post to the forum whenever they had time; after a while, after a thread had been heavily active, you would essentially have one long dialogue to work with. A teacher could then slice in their responses to each student with corrections. This would be great for the students, as well as anyone else who wanted to listen to the exchange.