Learning new languages is tedious. At the beginning the lexicons look tedious, the texts look foreign, situations and sentences don't connect with the real world. Unless you have a decent command of a new language, you can't really use it daily in some meaningful way.
It doesn't have to be like that.
Imagine a novel that teaches you the language. Say, you speak English and you're learning Chinese. Your book is in English, but some of the words are in Chinese, because you know them. There's only a few, but you already know them! And your book is smart. It knows, which words are familiar to you. If you want to learn a new word, just click on the one in English - the book knows the language quite well - it'll replace the English one with one in Chinese. It will also replace all future examples of this word with the Chinese one right away.
Now let's learn the grammar. When all words in a sentences are in Chinese, English grammar doesn't make sense. The book will rearrange the words to match the Chinese grammar instead of the English one. It can explanation to you what happened and why. Now you can read the Chinese sentence right in the middle of your favorite English book.
Wait, wait, what about your homework? Of course we're gonna have some. Once you've learned the words, you'll have to spot them in the text and replace them with the Chinese characters. Once you know enough grammar, you'll start translating Chinese to English and English to Chinese.
Homework is important. First it will make you use the language. You really want to be able to use the language that you've learned. Second, the textbook will learn more about the language. It will accumulate the effort of people and expand available texts, quality of presentation and clarity of available information.
It's all quite easy to implement. If you have time and energy to push forward, let me know. I'd be happy to talk and maybe even code stuff (esp. in django).
Friday, July 11, 2008
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