Using music to improve a language that you're not currently focusing on

The main thing that has always made me reluctant to add another language to those I've already started is that, with work, a brood of rambunctious offspring, etc., the amount of time I have to throw at language learning tends to be limited. Well, what with me getting all gung-ho on Korean lately…

I thought it was time that I came up with some kind of systematic way to continue growing my vocab in the languages that I'm not really focusing on at the moment. Given my time restrictions, the system would have to work with a minimum amount of time but pack the strongest punch possible in that time.

I know that Susanna Zaraysky would approve when I decided that music was the answer.

The value of oral translation into English

The following is one of a series of guest posts by Mike Shelby. Mike is a former ESL teacher who has been quietly (i.e., without his own blog) disseminating his thoughts on language learning around the internet for quite some time.

Have you noticed that interpreters have to possess the most thorough knowledge of a foreign language, especially of conversation, vocabulary and grammar? Perhaps foreign learners of English can achieve fluency in English also through oral translation from their native language into English. It is possible to check oneself this way when practicing speaking in English every sentence in ready-made materials with both native-language and English versions. I also believe that the value of oral translation from a native language into English with self-check is underestimated by English teaching specialists for self-study and self-practice of English conversation, vocabulary and grammar. Oral translation practice should cover English grammar, conversation, and vocabulary. Thematic dialogues, questions and answers on conversation topics, thematic texts (informative texts and narrative stories), grammatical usage sentences, and sentences with difficult vocabulary on various topics, especially with fixed phrases and idioms, can be used in practicing English through oral translation from one's native language into English.

How to type in Korean on a Mac

한글

Given how much digging I had to do to get to the bottom of how to type in Korean (i.e., in "hangul") on a Mac, I thought I'd make a quick summary of how to do it. This'll run you through the basics and a few slightly trickier questions:

• How do you set up Korean typing?
• How do you type Korean double letters?
• When one syllable has no final consonant but the next syllable has an initial consonant, how do you prevent the initial consonant of the second syllable from being treated as the final consonant of the first syllable?
• How do you turn Korean writing into the corresponding Chinese characters?

Forget less of your target language with better kinds of exposure

I recently stumbled across some pretty interesting data on how quickly we forget things depending on how we were exposed to those things. From a post by AJ Kumar called "You Forget 80% of What You Learn Every Day!":

We learn:

• 10% What we READ
• 20% What we HEAR
• 30% What we SEE
• 50% What we SEE and HEAR
• 70% What we DISCUSSED with OTHERS
• 80% What we EXPERIENCED PERSONALLY
• 95% What we TEACH TO SOMEONE ELSE

So how do the four core skills of the language-learning trade—reading, writing, listening, and speaking—fare in the above?

How to automatically add foreign-language audio to Anki

A few weeks back I explained how to get MP3 audio recordings of your target language from Google Translate. My goal was to add those to Anki so that I could hear the foreign-language pronunciation while reviewing words. I did it, but it was a pain. And I thought to myself, "There's got to be a better way to get audio into Anki…".

Well, wouldn't ya know it? There is. It's in a little Anki plugin called AwesomeTTS, which I concur is a pretty awesome add-on for adding text-to-speech audio to Anki.

Getting reading materials in English

The following is one of a series of guest posts by Mike Shelby. Mike is a former ESL teacher who has been quietly (i.e., without his own blog) disseminating his thoughts on language learning around the internet for quite some time.

Extensive reading in English with the help of a good English dictionary on a variety of real life topics is one of the ways to learn English vocabulary. Since there is an enormous amount of reading material in English, a learner of English has to prioritize reading in subjects according to the learner's needs for using English to encompass first the most necessary, relevant and frequently used vocabulary. Day-to-day topics ought to come first in reading.

Top executives agree: You should be learning foreign languages

Cass Business School of City University London just put out an interesting report called After the Baby Boomers—The Next Generation of Leadership. As explained on Cass Business School's website:

To create this report, we spoke to 100 senior managers of global companies. Their responses provide an in-depth understanding of how companies see their marketplaces and workforces changing over the next two decades, and how ready they are to embrace these changes.

Would you be surprised if I told you they put a high value on language?

How to get MP3 audio recordings of your target language from Google Translate

The following instructions are a manual process to add audio from Google Translate, but you can also accomplish the same automatically for multiple cards at the same time using AwesomeTTS.

So I've been dabbling in Korean a bit and stumbled across a helpful suggestion on How to Study Korean: if you want to hear a word in your target language pronounced, you can go to Google Translate, copy and paste the word in, make sure your target language is selected, and then press the listen button to hear it.

While that has its uses, what I really wanted was a way to get an MP3 of that audio so I could add it to Anki for the Korean flashcards I'm making. Sure enough, there's a way to do that too.

Personal English-learning materials

The following is one of a series of guest posts by Mike Shelby. Mike is a former ESL teacher who has been quietly (i.e., without his own blog) disseminating his thoughts on language learning around the internet for quite some time.

I’ve always supported learning and practicing set phrases in context. In my opinion vocabulary should be learned and practiced first through input (listening and reading), and then used through output (speaking and writing) on each real life topic. But vocabulary is a broad concept; it includes not only phrases, but also separate words, idioms, proverbs, sayings, etc.

My idea below may be important to you to improve your English materials.

Language Bridge review: Like the multifaceted exposure, the mandated texts not so much

Last week I wrote about Arkady Zilberman's pessimistic evaluation of language learners and what how he thinks that can be overcome. But Arkady hardly stopped at theories; he has made a product based on his take on language learning called Language Bridge.

This is what I'll call a "mini review" of Language Bridge. I'll call it that because I haven't actually purchased the product (it ain't cheap, at $149 a pop) but I think the information available online is enough for me to understand how the product works and to put my two cents forward.

Is subconsciously translating from your native language to your target language hindering you? I doubt it

I'll get to that chart in a bit, but first let me relate a little anecdote. A while back a Japanese friend of mine had me give a speech at his wedding. He wanted me to do it both in Japanese and then in English; the vast majority of his guests were Japanese speakers, but there were a handful who only spoke English and I was the only speaker who they'd be able to understand. So I was giving the exact same speech in Japanese and then in English.

My usual method for giving a speech is having a list of points I want to cover and then just making sure I hit them as I speak; the purpose of the list is only to remind me of what I want to say and not to provide me with the actual words. As this speech was going to be in both Japanese and then in English, I was language agnostic when preparing the list and it ended up being a hodgepodge of both languages. Here's a sample:

① same high school, 教科書に載ってない言葉

② invited me to his house

③ vegetarian: 食べれる大盛りのパスタ

Even if you speak Japanese, that will probably only make vague sense to you, but for me it directed me right to what I was going to cover in the speech.

After giving the speech, a few people who spoke both Japanese and English enough to understand what I had said in both came up to me and asked me how I had managed to make the speeches so similar in both languages—nuances, jokes, etc., were all exactly spot on in each language (a wholly separate matter is how some jokes worked better in one language than the other, but I digress). Their assumption was that I had translated it word for word and committed it to memory. In fact, I had used my little list to simply point my memory to a concept and then just expressed that concept however it should be expressed in the appropriate language.

And that gets me to Arkady Zilberman and his concept that "we think in a code language of images and associations".

Methods for mastering English conversation and vocabulary

The following is one of a series of guest posts by Mike Shelby. Mike is a former ESL teacher who has been quietly (i.e., without his own blog) disseminating his thoughts on language learning around the internet for quite some time.

I have developed my own unique suggestions on mastering English conversation and vocabulary. They are based on my experience and knowledge, and my tips and advice may be valuable for all students of English. I hope that they will become a short but indispensable guide for many learners of English. I have thoroughly read on the issue of effective methods and aids for learning English. Those aids include audio, video, websites, study books, etc. I want to share with you that information for English language learners.

How to use Furigana Inserter in Chrome and Firefox to add furigana to any Japanese webpage

振り仮名（ふりがな）Furigana is a Japanese reading aid, consisting of small phonetic characters printed above a word with Chinese characters to indicate the characters' pronunciation (as seen to the right). It's used in materials for native-Japanese kids who are still learning the characters and in materials for native-Japanese adults for very difficult characters, but it also has obvious uses for language learners.

Furigana Inserter is an extension for Chrome and for Firefox that will let you add furigana to any open webpage. With Furigana Inserter, you can turn this:

into this:

So as you can see, it's a pretty useful extension for a Japanese learner. Once convenient use for this is adding pronunciation info to dictionaries that don't have them out of the box (ALC, I'm looking at you).

The following instructions lay out the simple steps to get it up and running in Chrome and the not-so-simple steps to get it up and running in Firefox on a Mac.

How to practice English listening comprehension and speaking skills

The following is one of a series of guest posts by Mike Shelby. Mike is a former ESL teacher who has been quietly (i.e., without his own blog) disseminating his thoughts on language learning around the internet for quite some time.

In order to have good skills in listening comprehension in English and to speak it fluently, a learner should practice listening to audio and video aids in English (dialogues, thematic texts and narrative stories) with subsequent speaking. It is preferable to have English transcripts of audio and video material. I suggest that learners practice listening comprehension with subsequent speaking on a variety of topics and with materials for all levels on a regular long-term basis in the following sequence:

Latin, Greek, and Russian characters in a Venn diagram

Above is my take on this Wikimedia commons Venn diagram showing Russian, Greek, and Latin characters. Basically I grabbed the three alphabets off of Wikipedia, matched characters used in multiple alphabets in a spreadsheet, sorted, and stuck them in the diagram. The only substantive difference between mine and the Wikimedia one is that I alphabetized the characters (by Latin first, then by Greek, and then by Russian), which makes it a bit easier to read.

So what's this got to do with language learning? Well, if you already know a language that uses one of those alphabets and you're learning one that uses another (or, better yet, you're learning multiple languages and need to learn both of the other two), then obviously this has some utility for you. But, more generally, this is a great example of using diagrams and similar visual representations of data (like these tables for Japanese kana) to make things easier to remember.

How many words do you need to know in a foreign language?

When looking into what seems to be the never-ending abyss of learning a language, it's nice to have an idea of where your finish line might be. Most of the individual pieces of language data that you'll be storing in your head consist of vocabulary, so knowing how much vocab you'll need to reach the vaunted native level is a pretty good indicator of where your finish line is.

So how many words does an average native speaker know? Good numbers are pretty hard to come by and the jury still seems to be largely out on any conclusive numbers, but there does seem to be a rough consensus that with 20,000 or so words you'll pretty much be covered in anything you want to use the language for.

How to make the most of listening to target language music

If you like music (and science tells me that you do), then you'll like listening to music in your target language. And if you like doing something in your target language, do it.

That just leaves us with figuring out how to milk every drop of language-learning goodness out of music.

How to get the text of the lyrics to your target language music (including copy-protected Japanese lyrics)

For the most part, getting the lyrics for your foreign-language music is a cakewalk: just search for the translation of the English word "lyrics" in your target language, the name of the artist (in quotes if more than one word), and the song title (again, in quotes if more than one word).

To take an example, if you want to find the lyrics to the song En el muelle de San Blás by the Spanish-language band Maná, Googling:

letra maná "en el muelle de san blás"

will get you the lyrics in the first search result, which you can then copy and paste wherever you like.

Japanese lyrics, however, are a bit more complicated, and perhaps surprisingly it's for reasons that have nothing to do with the language itself.

Using Learning with Texts with Anki 2, part 5: How to import LWT terms into Anki using your own custom set-up

So we've now covered how to export from LWT and how to import into Anki as simple two-sided flashcards and using LWT's fill-in-the-blank review template.

And that's all fine and good if one of those methods is how you want to learn your LWT terms. If that's not the case, then we'll need to get into the weeds a bit more and create a customized set-up.

Using Learning with Texts with Anki 2, part 4: How to import LWT terms into Anki using LWT's fill-in-the-blank Anki template

The default Anki template from LWT sets up cloze deletion flashcards for you, or, more simply put, fill-in-the-blank flashcards. The prompt will be the source sentence with the term blanked out together with the meaning of the term, and the answer will be the term itself and its pronunciation, if any.