Transcrobes

Preface In this blogpost I outline what I believe to be a novel use of existing technologies to dramatically increase the useful content available to learners of a second language. I introduce myself then follow with an outline of some relevant developmental and educational principles. From there I analyse the system requirements and present the system, and finally take a look at the opportunities for future research and development. For a more detailed look on the philosophical differences between my proposed system and existing tools, see my blogpost here . Introduction For my 40th birthday I decided to take a sabbatical year and tick off one of the big remaining items on my bucket list - learn Chinese. I had started learning Chinese during my Linguistics degree 20 years ago but fate took me to Europe and life as a software engineer, and not only did I not get very far with Chinese, I completely forgot what I had learnt all those years ago. The only character I could actively...

Preface In this post I look at the existing NLP-enabled L2 content tools for learning Chinese referred to in Lee, Lam and Jiang (2016) and evaluate the philosophical differences with the system I propose here . Most of the research I refer to here is referenced in their paper and I discovered it from there. Introduction Learners of a second language are faced with the daunting task of learning the meanings and usage of 10s of thousands of new words and phrases. This requires the learner to be very highly motivated - it takes years and thousands of hours to master a second written language. Understanding how to motivate L2 learners using has been the subject of much research ( for example ), and one of the key findings of this research is that allowing the learners to consume material that aligns with their personal interests greatly improves outcomes. Content vs Learning I think it is intuitively obvious that it is easier to motivate learners when they are able to learn using...