Author Archives: chasker

Meet Marie and Pierre, your French Learning Guide

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Learn French

French, the “language of love”, is not just for romance. Did you know that French was actually the most spoken language in the world after English? Thanks largely to the expansion of the French empire over the course of history, French has truly established itself as a language known the world over and spoken in countries on every continent. When you learn French it will provide you with countless opportunities to communicate; not just in France but almost anywhere you travel around the globe.

That’s a powerful language tool enabling you to navigate many different situations whether you are traveling in France, Europe or parts unknown.

Travel

Maybe you’re visiting France as a tourist or student studying abroad. If you learn it will make your time traveling around the country an even greater experience. You will be able to read a menu and understand how to order the many different types of French food that are uniquely available to you. Navigating common interactions such as getting directions, shopping and, even in emergencies, getting medical assistance can be immensely valuable when you can speak the native language. Enjoying spending time in social settings and engaging in conversation with other French speakers will allow you to meet more people and make friends you might not have been able to do otherwise.

Business

As stated above, French is the second most commonly spoken language in the world after English. Due to its broad usage, when you learn French it can afford you many advantages in business. Whether you are looking for employment in France itself, or one of the former French colonies that has an emerging economy (such as areas of Northern Africa, India, Indochina, Asia and many others), French is a very strong language skill to possess. There are many business opportunities in France – which is a large exporter of luxury goods, a global research hub, a leader in automotive manufacturing and more. There are also those business opportunities outside of France in French speaking countries, and knowing how to speak the language can be of huge value whether you are a business individual or working on behalf of your employer.

Cultural Understanding

Speaking and reading French enables you to relate to other French speakers and the French culture in ways non-French speakers understand. French is the official language of many global organizations including the United Nations, the International Olympic Committee and the European Community.

French arts, literature and cinema have made substantial contributions to human history. Understanding French allows you to enrich your experience with these contributions. Also, by learning the language, you allow yourself to not only speak to individuals who reside in French speaking countries, but also read French websites and magazines, listen to French-speaking radio; and watch French language television and movies and get a real feel for the cultural heartbeat of a different country.

How to Learn French for Beginners

There are many French words and phrases that are commonly used in English, so odds are that you know loads of French words already and don’t even realize it. Take a look at this list of 10 words and see how many you know.

Adieu, Aperitif, Baguette, Bourgeois, Café, Couture, Eau de Toilette, Entrepreneur, Grand Prix, Impasse

So how did you do on that quick test? Try to think how many other words we use in English that are actually French. When learning French for beginners it is great to understand that there is a base to build on already.

Learn French Online

Lingo Jingo is a web-based learning environment, which means all you need to learn French online is a computer, smartphone, tablet and an internet connection. Lingo Jingo offers French lessons to people of all ages and knowledge levels so that you can learn the language in a self-paced and context driven format. If you would like to learn French, Lingo Jingo has free lessons available to help you with ordering food or eating when traveling and even understanding general French words and phrases.

Top 5 Tips for Learning French

1.)   Go to Lingo Jingo and take the French courses. Each lesson will take no longer than 15 minutes to complete; keep practicing until you get a perfect score

2.)   Listen to French music – this will tune you in to the French culture

3.)   Watch a French movie or two – watch the movie twice; first time while reading the subtitles, second time cover them over.

4.)   Buy a magazine – the pictures will help you understand the stories; flick through the advertisements, can you figure them out?

5.)   Eat at a French restaurant – if you have a traditional French restaurant where you live odds are that a French person owns it. Try to read the menu in your best fake French accent. You’ll surprise yourself by how French you sound.

My Mother Doesn’t Look Like a Sack of Potatoes: challenges for computers trying to understand language

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When I was at the University of Manchester studying linguistics, one of the courses I took examined how stress and intonation could radically change the meaning of sentences. All these years later and I remember the sentence that we had to analyze and write up.

Read the sentence below placing the stress on each of the bolded words and then ask yourself how the implied meaning changes:

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes

So how did you do? Did you hear how the implied meaning changes? Let’s take a look again now with the implied meaning next to each sentence:

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes (your mother does)

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes (my father does)

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes (indignant, responding to an accusation)

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes (she may smell like one)

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes (she is a sack of potatoes)

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes (she looks like lots of sacks of potatoes)

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes (she looks like a box of potatoes)

My mother doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes (maybe she looks like a box of oranges?)

As we think about how placing stress can change meaning quite considerably, now let’s just think about what sort of challenge this puts on students trying to learn English. And then how on earth computers trying to parse language and derive meaning would fare. The Economist recently published a blog entry on language parsing, and this doesn’t even take into consideration the stress problem identified here.

An overview of Lingo Jingo on Windows Azure

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Lingo Jingo is a web-based language learning application designed with one goal in mind – to make it easier for people to learn and teach different languages.

 

Before you create an account on Lingo Jingo this is the homepage welcoming you

If you’ve ever tried to speak a few words of a foreign language when you are on vacation, you’ll know how making a little effort to say “Hello, how are you?” can open up a whole new world of experiences. Then, if you know just 500 words in any language, you’ll be able to understand rudimentary conversations and make yourself understood. Lingo Jingo is designed to help you gain that confidence.

Learning a language is often economically out of reach. Computer-based programs like Rosetta Stone tend to be very expensive, costing $500 or more, and a course of lessons at a school or college can run over $2,000. And that’s just per language. At Lingo Jingo we offer our courses for free and enable learners to pick up multiple languages.

 

The first prototype of Lingo Jingo was built in php/MySQL and hosted in Amazon EC2. We chose this route at the time because finding developers with that skillset was easy and affordable and our lead designer/developer was very familiar with php/MySQL. However, we soon ran into problems as we were trying to create a very rich web-based graphical interface, of the sort you commonly associate with a fat client. The most common problems we faced were with performance and cross-browser compatibility. Our goal had been to build once and run everywhere, but we found that we got bogged down in browser testing and optimizing that we were not able to iterate quickly enough. This became frustrating very quickly as we had so many exciting plans on our roadmap, but just were not able to get to them.

 

Prototype of Lingo Jingo built in Amazon EC2 – php/MySQL

 

Even though we had made some progress on our initial application we knew that we had to make a decision. Should we keep going the way we were, knowing it would be slow, or should we look around for a different platform and architecture?

This is never an easy decision to make and should not be made lightly; you definitely need to weigh the pros and the cons. My co-founder at Lingo Jingo, Douglas Chrystall, and I had discussions about rebuilding the application on Microsoft Azure. We loved the idea of the platform as a service, rather than carrying on renting the infrastructure from Amazon and having to maintain it ourselves. We needed to be on a platform that would allow us to innovate quickly. We did have some quick discussions about Google App Engine as a possibility, but dismissed it as we were fairly familiar with .Net and SQL Server and wanted to get the new application to market as fast as possible.

Although initially we are not charging for Lingo Jingo we do have monetization plans for our application and we were also drawn to Microsoft’s plans around their Azure Marketplace which will enable us to deliver a localized application to 26 countries and will support billing in local currencies.

Brett Epps, our lead designer and developer, quickly picked up .Net skills, and found SQL Azure as easy to work with as SQL Server. Having been freed from the worries of getting bogged down in tuning and browser compatibility we re-imagined the application and started work on redesign. We wanted to really push the envelope of what could be achieved through HTML 5 to provide learners and teachers with a very rich interface.

 

Lingo Jingo consists of two products. The first is the ‘Learn’ experience. This is an immersive approach where learning activities are grouped into courses. The courses are context based so you can choose what you are interested in learning. For example, if you are going to Paris on holiday and want to learn how to order food, drinks and get about you can take a course that teaches you that content. Students match sounds and images together; the sounds play automatically and when you click on a response you see the translation displayed. We also provide the ability to see a phonetic transcription of the word or phrase and a help button in case you get stuck. The application keeps track of everything you are learning, and you can quickly review your progress and see where you need improvement.

Lingo Jingo application homepage

A lesson screen in Lingo Jingo

The second product is the content management system where teachers can rapidly build lessons and courses. We want to make it easy for people to share their language with others. There are very few web-based resources for language teachers; very often they have to resort to building flash cards in PowerPoint. Our goal is to turn users into teachers over time by providing a platform where they can take pictures, record their sound files, upload them, then match them to quickly build screens which can then be compiled as a lesson.

 

Content Management System enables teachers to rapidly build lessons

 

We are currently building a Windows Phone application which will also provide the same functionality as the web application, but also provide an offline mode.

As you can see, we have been able to innovate quickly, thanks to our decision to build our application on Windows Azure.

Our architecture is currently fairly simple. We use Azure web roles and SQL Azure as the backend database; we store our sound files and images in blob storage and rely heavily on the cloud content delivery network. We have found that by moving the content closer to where it is used by utilizing the CDN we have improved the experience and performance considerably for our users.

We have exciting plans around analytics that we will start work on later this year, and so we are very interested in Microsoft’s Hadoop roadmap and at some stage we would love to see them offer an alternative to Azure Table Services; something like Cassandra as a service would be great so we won’t have to worry about SQL Azure scalability as we gain millions of users.

Thanks to the BizSpark program that we are part of we are able to bring these ideas directly to Microsoft, and we feel that we have a partner who has a vested interest in our success.

Great dev team, fun t-shirts

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Douglas, Brett and I have been working with a new dev team for the past couple of months. Our development efforts had been moving too slowly and we were well behind on our roadmap. Douglas got a recommendation through a contact at Microsoft and we gave the new team a test (the phrasebook which is downloadable and printable – very useful when you are traveling). We were very happy with the quality and speed of development.

Brett continues to do overall UI design and I work closely with him on priorities and roadmap, but now it’s great to know that we are the bottleneck!

Here’s a pic of the new team wearing their Lingo Jingo t-shirts.

 

From left to right: Sandeep, Komal, Tanmay, Dhaval, Pragnesh

Great feedback on Lingo Jingo – ‘Don’t copy Rosetta Stone’s pitiful program’

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We got this feedback a few days ago and it raises some good points, so we wanted to share the post and our response. We are very interested in your thoughts.

don’t copy Rosetta Stone’s pitiful program.

5 seconds of a lesson made it obvious that you are trying to use the same penny-pinching over-hyped teaching method as them. Their argument is “it’s the way you learned your native language,” however when we learned our native languages, our brain physiology was significantly different. Just my 2 cents. . .

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AnonymousAnonymous shared this idea  ·  May 25, 2012
Christian commented  ·  Just Now  ·  Delete

Thanks for your comments on the Rosetta Stone approach. The goals of Rosetta Stone and Lingo Jingo are slightly different as is our approach. At Lingo Jingo we have designed our app to make it easy for people to learn what they want to learn. Lessons and courses are context based, rather than following RS’s grammatical approach. It takes a long time before you can say anything useful when you follow the RS courses. We also received a lot of feedback asking for a ‘hint button’ and to display the translation of the words and phrases to help reinforce what you are seeing and learning. We also are opening up our content management system so that teachers can begin to put together lessons on the fly that reinforce what they are teaching in the classroom. This is something we term ‘cognitive immersion’, because you recognize what it is we are reinforcing. Also, regarding ‘penny pinching’ I agree that RS is very expensive for what they offer. Lingo Jingo is free. We will offer subscriptions in the future for managing accounts with multiple people, and for gaining access to your analytics. Lingo Jingo learns how you learn and will be able to show you how you compare with different demographics. Learning can be a lonely endeavor and we like the idea of adding a more fun, competitive spirit. Keep the feedback coming – it is greatly appreciated.

Christian Hasker
Co-Founder
Lingo Jingo

Want to learn a new language? How about 11? Or 60?

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Meet Alex Rawlings, a hyperpolyglot (someone who speaks multiple languages fluently). Watching him switch effortless between 11 languages is mighty impressive.

However, even he has a long way to go to catch 18th Century Cardinal, Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who supposedly spoke 60 languages and dialects.

If you would like to learn more about hyperpolyglots pick up a copy of Babel No More by Michael Erard.

Learn German – An introduction by Gretchen

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Learn German

Hallo, mein Name ist Gretchen

Learning German can be a very rewarding experience. German is the most commonly spoken native language in Europe and the third most popular language taught in the world today, so you will find yourself with plenty of opportunities to practice speaking and reading German. Learning the language will enable you to navigate many different situations whether you are traveling in Germany or many other European countries. In the United States, the states of North Dakota and South Dakota are the only states where German is the most common language spoken at home after English

TRAVEL

Map of Germany's location in central Europe

Maybe you’re visiting Germany as a tourist or student studying abroad. Being able to speak German will enable you to make your time traveling around the country an even greater experience. You will be able to read a menu and understand how to order the many different types of German food that are uniquely available to you – you can even learn more about the many types of German beer there are to try! Navigating common interactions such as getting directions, shopping and even in emergencies getting medical assistance can be immensely valuable when you can speak the native language. Enjoying spending time in social settings and engaging in conversation with other German speakers will allow you to meet more people and make friends you might not have been able to do otherwise.

 

Business

Germany is the largest national economy in Europe and the largest exporter by far. There are many business opportunities in Germany and knowing how to speak the language can be of huge value whether you are a business individual or in Germany on behalf of your employer. Germany (and Switzerland) are countries with many employment options and speaking the native language can provide you with advantages for jobs that are either in a German speaking country, or your current or future job takes you there.

Cultural Understanding

Berlin Film Festival; image credit: Maharepa on Flickr

Speaking and reading German enables you to relate to other German speakers and the German culture in ways non German speakers understand. German arts, literature and cinema contributions in history. Understanding German allows you to enrich your experience with these contributions. Also, by learning the language, you allow yourself to not only speak to individuals who reside in German speaking countries, but also read German websites and magazines, listen to German radio; and watch German language television and movies and get a real feel for the cultural heartbeat of a different country.

Lingo Jingo offers German lessons to people of all ages and knowledge levels to easily learn the language in a self paced and contextual format. If you would like to learn, Lingo Jingo has free German lessons available to help you with common interactions when traveling and even understanding numbers.

Language programs bear brunt of budget cuts

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I came across this blog post recently examining the results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher and it makes for depressing reading. We are increasingly living in a multi-lingual world, but we are doing little to invest in that future. In fact, quite the opposite, we are divesting from the programs we already have in place. At high school level 25% of teachers report cuts or elimination of language programs. 

So what can you do about it? Write to your elected representative and let them know that we’re short-changing our collective future by not investing in our children’s education today. 

Here at Lingo Jingo we want to do our part; we are passionate about making language learning accessible to everyone, and providing a platform that language teachers can use to put together fun, engaging courses. We believe that technology should not replace teachers; we believe that technology should help teachers engage their students and understand how well they are learning. More on what we are doing there in future posts. 

Should you learn Mandarin or Spanish if you are in the US?

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In the past five years jobs requiring Mandarin have grown 75%. Here at Lingo Jingo we see strong demand for Mandarin; nearly 3 times as many people want to learn Mandarin as Spanish.

In Asian countries such as Thailand, Chinese is now nearly as important a second language as English.

Living in the US we think of how important it is to learn Spanish (and it remains very important), but on the international stage over half a decade the need for Spanish for a job has not grown, but for Mandarin it has grown over 75%.

“It is obvious why Chinese is becoming more popular,” said Li Quan, a professor of Chinese at Renmin university in Beijing. “We are now a major economy. The West has started to realise that if you want to get to know China and understand how the country works, it is important to learn Mandarin. And the world now understands that China is going to be a force for a long time, so learning the language is essential”. (quoted from The Telegraph)

The US has thrived and has made English the language of business throughout the world. While its position is not being threatened, Chinese will continue to become ever increasingly important. From an education standpoint Will the US get left behind?

Countries like Australia are proposing mandatory Asian Language Learning, which makes sense given their economic ties to the region. Even the UK is having the debate.

Here in the US Spanish is still the most required non-english language, so don’t throw it out yet. Also, with the rise of Latin America Spanish and Portuguese remain great languages to know.

However, learning some basic Chinese could well open up the door to more employment opportunities.