I love languages. For as long as I can remember, I begged my Irish-American parents to teach me Spanish. I had to settle for Sesame Street lessons until I was old enough to learn it in school. I took Spanish all through high school and practiced outside of class whenever I could. I have always felt that I did not really study Spanish; it feels like I am remembering it. I have spent most of my life in South Florida, where Spanish really is a second (or even first) language, and I lived just outside of Mexico City for five years. My husband is Mexican, and we are a bilingual family. Learning Spanish has served me well!
In college, my major was chemistry, and my prescribed language choices were Russian, German, or French. I chose German, and those classes turned out to be the best classes I took at UF. I took Deutsch Intensiv, which meant all German (no translation allowed) from Day 1, two hours a day. Everyone in the class learned extremely quickly, and we all stayed together for more than a year of German classes. Since that time, I have not really spoken German much. Since we have language-learning tools on our list this week, I chose two to compare...and I chose German as my target language. Here are my impressions so far:
Duolingo: This program allows you to take a language test to see if you can test out of some levels. The test was adaptive, and I was able to pick up information as I went and apply it to later questions. I was able to test out of the basic levels. I went through two sub-levels, doing translation activities and one sentence repeating exercise. It seems that language learning here is based on translation and drilling (repeating, repeating, repeating) sentences and phrases. There are a lot of analytics I can check to assess my progress. I can earn badges for my skill, for the amount of time I spend over my chosen goal, and for being friendly. I can also earn lingots (currency) to buy things at the Duolingo store. Unfortunately, friends come via facebook connection, which I do not have. I cannot really judge the friend part of Duolingo for that reason. I can see discussion threads to add to, but I don't think that is the same as friends.
Speaky: I joined Speaky through Google. I was on Livemocha years ago, which also had a very strong peer-to-peer component like Speaky. I set up my profile, which included stating my own assessment of my level of German, my interests, location, and then tried to find "friends" to talk to. There were many profile pics and 140 character descriptions...Lots of young people and a few people more my age (like the parents of those young people!!!). I have to say that some of the pictures and descriptions looked/sounded more like they were looking for something other than just language. It was a little weird, just like Livemocha was! I was able to set search parameters to look for women around my age. I sent out friend requests, and I got a friend request from a person who, despite his very floral profile picture, turned out to be a Syrian man who lives in Germany and is learning German. His German is better than mine, so we spoke in the IM section for a while. I learned/remembered some words and said tschuss. I do not see any kind of lesson on this site...it looks like it is all peer-to-peer.
As a language teacher myself, I think it is critical to communicate with real people. I am not sure how I would learn a totally new language on Speaky. Without the basics, I don't think I could communicate with anyone in any useful way, and there are no lessons to help. On Duolingo, I do not think translation is the way to learn; the program is a more traditional language-learning program (like Rosetta Stone, for example), but I can't really judge it in its entirety since I cannot add friends. I am going to continue with Speaky for a while to see what happens.
Bis bald,
Tory
In college, my major was chemistry, and my prescribed language choices were Russian, German, or French. I chose German, and those classes turned out to be the best classes I took at UF. I took Deutsch Intensiv, which meant all German (no translation allowed) from Day 1, two hours a day. Everyone in the class learned extremely quickly, and we all stayed together for more than a year of German classes. Since that time, I have not really spoken German much. Since we have language-learning tools on our list this week, I chose two to compare...and I chose German as my target language. Here are my impressions so far:
Duolingo: This program allows you to take a language test to see if you can test out of some levels. The test was adaptive, and I was able to pick up information as I went and apply it to later questions. I was able to test out of the basic levels. I went through two sub-levels, doing translation activities and one sentence repeating exercise. It seems that language learning here is based on translation and drilling (repeating, repeating, repeating) sentences and phrases. There are a lot of analytics I can check to assess my progress. I can earn badges for my skill, for the amount of time I spend over my chosen goal, and for being friendly. I can also earn lingots (currency) to buy things at the Duolingo store. Unfortunately, friends come via facebook connection, which I do not have. I cannot really judge the friend part of Duolingo for that reason. I can see discussion threads to add to, but I don't think that is the same as friends.
Speaky: I joined Speaky through Google. I was on Livemocha years ago, which also had a very strong peer-to-peer component like Speaky. I set up my profile, which included stating my own assessment of my level of German, my interests, location, and then tried to find "friends" to talk to. There were many profile pics and 140 character descriptions...Lots of young people and a few people more my age (like the parents of those young people!!!). I have to say that some of the pictures and descriptions looked/sounded more like they were looking for something other than just language. It was a little weird, just like Livemocha was! I was able to set search parameters to look for women around my age. I sent out friend requests, and I got a friend request from a person who, despite his very floral profile picture, turned out to be a Syrian man who lives in Germany and is learning German. His German is better than mine, so we spoke in the IM section for a while. I learned/remembered some words and said tschuss. I do not see any kind of lesson on this site...it looks like it is all peer-to-peer.
As a language teacher myself, I think it is critical to communicate with real people. I am not sure how I would learn a totally new language on Speaky. Without the basics, I don't think I could communicate with anyone in any useful way, and there are no lessons to help. On Duolingo, I do not think translation is the way to learn; the program is a more traditional language-learning program (like Rosetta Stone, for example), but I can't really judge it in its entirety since I cannot add friends. I am going to continue with Speaky for a while to see what happens.
Bis bald,
Tory
I didn't try Speaky, but I have heard great things about it. I definitely feel that peer interaction is a great way to learn the language and I plan on doing research on this. I do fear that this could lead to some weird conversations of people who are looking for something other than practicing a language. I am interested. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteOne aspect I find fascinating is how Doulingo has managed to monetise the learners output is to a sellable product. Essentially, all that translation work is used similar to 'Captcha', each instance is recorded and the result used to feed AI which can help translate webpages and articles (which Duolingo is paid for). For example, a French website would like an article to published to English. They use Doulingo, which uses its crowdsourced translation AI to make the translation.
ReplyDeleteI had no idea! That is a pretty clever (sneaky??) way of getting around the need to hire professional translators.
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