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The wonders of technology
20/3/14 20:11In college I had good intentions about making flash cards for vocabulary learning, but mostly I didn't. A few years ago I got a lot of use out of Anki, which puts the flash cards on the computer and optimizes the intervals so that you see the words you don't know more often, and the words you know better less often, but I still had to input all the words and definitions myself. (There are pre-built decks, but they have lower utility as you get into the advanced levels).
Inputting the words and definitions isn't exactly a huge hurdle, but it can be a hassle in a language that's not written alphabetically, where it's occasionally tedious to look up the correct reading.
Now, having bought optical character recognition for my tablet's Chinese dictionary, this is what I can do:
-Take a picture of a page of text
-Have the dictionary automatically recognize most of the characters and compounds
-Just tick the "+" button next to any words I want to add to my flash cards
-At an appropriate stopping point, export the whole bundle to DropBox, and drag it to Skritter, the flash card program that I'm using.
My high school self with the looseleaf paper filled with handwritten kanji would be amazed.
(The OCR doesn't always work perfectly, especially at the edges of pages, but... Chinese OCR is a challenge, and I'm surprised it works as well as it does.)
-
Mandarin class this week was on St. Patrick's Day. In a neighborhood with a profusion of bad fake Irish pubs, alas. (My train home was delayed so that the station cops could remove the person who was passed out on the subway floor.) The new guy in our class is one of those people who wants to ask "But whyyyyy is is this way?" about everything, which annoys me; I feel that often the best answer for anyone who's not a syntax nerd is "language is an emergent property of brains, brains are weird, hence language is weird." And especially at a private language school, you're going to have teachers who aren't experts on the linguistics of the target language, and people who can't let anything go at "that's just the way it is" are going to get frustrated.
I don't know if it's weird that, having studied syntax at least superficially, I'm pretty inclined to be like "Meh, that's just the way they say it." Maybe it's because I know how technical it can get if you really get into it, and you COULD spend half a semester talking about islands and constraints but it doesn't really help you speak the language that much (or I would be able to speak Somali and Inuktitut.)
Inputting the words and definitions isn't exactly a huge hurdle, but it can be a hassle in a language that's not written alphabetically, where it's occasionally tedious to look up the correct reading.
Now, having bought optical character recognition for my tablet's Chinese dictionary, this is what I can do:
-Take a picture of a page of text
-Have the dictionary automatically recognize most of the characters and compounds
-Just tick the "+" button next to any words I want to add to my flash cards
-At an appropriate stopping point, export the whole bundle to DropBox, and drag it to Skritter, the flash card program that I'm using.
My high school self with the looseleaf paper filled with handwritten kanji would be amazed.
(The OCR doesn't always work perfectly, especially at the edges of pages, but... Chinese OCR is a challenge, and I'm surprised it works as well as it does.)
-
Mandarin class this week was on St. Patrick's Day. In a neighborhood with a profusion of bad fake Irish pubs, alas. (My train home was delayed so that the station cops could remove the person who was passed out on the subway floor.) The new guy in our class is one of those people who wants to ask "But whyyyyy is is this way?" about everything, which annoys me; I feel that often the best answer for anyone who's not a syntax nerd is "language is an emergent property of brains, brains are weird, hence language is weird." And especially at a private language school, you're going to have teachers who aren't experts on the linguistics of the target language, and people who can't let anything go at "that's just the way it is" are going to get frustrated.
I don't know if it's weird that, having studied syntax at least superficially, I'm pretty inclined to be like "Meh, that's just the way they say it." Maybe it's because I know how technical it can get if you really get into it, and you COULD spend half a semester talking about islands and constraints but it doesn't really help you speak the language that much (or I would be able to speak Somali and Inuktitut.)