lingq

A useful web resource to practice language is Lingq.

Practically speaking, by lingq you can organize your “lessons” that consists only in a target language article, or essay, text, whatever, and, eventually, an audio file.

You can create your lesson by editing them by on line text editor and uploading audio, or you can access to already available lessons, not always free.

The single words of the text can be organized in a list of “lingq”, that are basically the list of the words that you want to memorize.

If you just click on a word or a group of words then you are adding it (them) as a lingq, that thereafter you can memorize with built in flashcards exercises.

Any lingq contains the word/s and the translation to the origin language, resolved by built in vocabulary or external sources, like googletranslator and lingvo, for example.

The single word of the lingq can be pronounced by a high quality speech synthesizer.

It does not focus on grammar rules so probably it is useful as a complementary tool for other traditional “legacy” course.

Free account have with some limitations about the number of current active lingqs and lessons.

Web site: www.lingq.com

Happy learning.

Tony

flashcards ToGo

Hi welcome to this new blog.
I hope I'll have the time to keep it update, and receive feedback.

The first resource I want to link is a flashcard application for android named "flascards ToGo", that is free and can be found on the android market.

If in your new lesson there is a set of new words to memorize, the phone can be really useful because you can memorize and exercize using slack time, i.e. traveling by bus and so on.

Creating flash cards from you p.c./mac and transfer them to the mobile is easy.
You need to:
create a unicode (utf8) semicolon separated text file in a format like the following (for swedish):


passkontrollören ; Immigration officer
god morgon ; good morning
passet ; the passport
tack ; thank you, here, please
varsågod/a ; here you are
vad heter ni ; what's your name
ni ; we
min fru ; my wife




(editor like notepad allows selecting UTF8 as an option on the drop down list close to the "save" button, vim can be set to manage unicode by the option :set encoding=utf8)

Utf8 is essential to support extension to the normal ascii char set, allowing cyrillic, chinese, arabic and so on...

If you save the file with the .csv extension, then you can transfer it to the memory card of the phone (connected via usb), and then create a new set of card and exercize memorizing the words related to the current lesson.

You can also create the cards directly using the phone, adding images using the camera, delete the cards.

There applcation can also access to google translator when creating the cards by the phone.

However there is no audio.


In the next posts I'll write something about free (i.e. released under the free documentation license) dictionaries, and about how to use them to create dictionaries in mobipocket format for ebook readers.

Stay tuned.

Tony

p.s. (edited 1/24/2010): the free edition is limited to maximum 100 flash cards.