Drill in a small handful of words in your favorite languages. Green flag. Choose languages. Choose vocabulary sets. Maybe make it a subset of that. Answer questions until you are getting them all right. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Keyboard stuff: * Use the "right arrow" key after each answer, instead of "return" or "enter". Think "next". * Use "left arrow" for backspace. * To get letters with accent marks and such (such as "ç" or "á") type the base letter, then type up-arrow to cycle through the variations. This project treats ligatures as variations of their first letter (so "œ" is a variation of "o"), and other characters (apostrophe, period, question mark, etc.) as variations of the space character.
Problems: 1. The Scratch Translation extension has big issues. For instance, it says English "ten" = French "ce" (should be "dix"), and it says English "tan" = French "alors" (should be "tan" or "tanne" or maybe "marron clair"). I've put in a hack to fix these few words, but I expect there must be similar problems with other words and other languages - report them in comments please. 2. Scratch Translation extension has small issues too. There might be more than one possible translation, and you can't tell which one is going to be the "correct" answer. For instance, a lot languages have different forms of "you" - a formal one and a familiar one. Or there might be several ways to say the same thing. The question "how are you?" could be translated literally, asking about health; or it could be translated as polite-but-meaningless thing people say when meeting someone. You have no way of knowing which one is expected, so how can you get it right? (Answer: you get it wrong once, see what it expected, and remember it. But that's kind of bogus.) 3. Scratch's Text-to-Speech module is flaky. Sometimes it sounds almost human, other times it sounds like it's trying to beat-box. I wouldn't trust it much. Advice: Learning a language is a lot deeper than just learning words. As one example, think about the word "brother". In some languages they have different words for "older brother" and "younger brother". Which word should you learn as the translation of "brother"? You need to know more than just a translation of the word. In other languages, where we would say "I have a book", they would say "there is a book with me". Or the word will change endings if used in different parts of a sentence. It's amazing how many kinds of differences there are. Still, having some words memorized is a good starting point. You can't even worry about the bigger stuff until you know some words. And it is good to have them really burned into your brain. When learning new words, don't think "livre means book"; think about the book in your hand while thinking "livre". Another way of saying that: don't connect "livre" with the English word "book"; connect "livre" with a book. Repetition is important. If you learn a new handful of words today and then ignore them for a month, they'll be gone. Instead, learn them today, refresh them every day for a week, then every couple days for a month, etc. If you are learning a new language, maybe work on just that one language until you have a good start. Trying to learn too many new words in too many new languages all at once is a recipe for trouble. Maybe use subsets to work on smaller batches of words - instead of learning 1 through 10 all at once, maybe start small and learn 0,1,2,3 first. Apologia: The language list is so short (only a dozen or so out of the hundreds of languages in the world) for two main reasons: First, this project depends on Scratch's translation and text-to-speech extensions - only languages which are supported in both of those extensions can work. Second, this project only handles "latin" input like the English alphabet. It was a big nuisance even just dealing with accent marks; coding up an IME for cyrillic, katakana, or devanagari might take a month of work. Maybe someday.... :-) #languages #vocabulary #educational #WIP #multilingual #polyglot #danish #dutch #french #german #icelandic #italian #norwegian #polish #portuguese #romanian #spanish #swedish #welsh #edumacation :-)
