Problems
Tinycards and Pronunciation
I just started trying to say hello in 50 languages, suggested by Duolingo's Tinycards. I had been using Duolingo's free ap to learn Spanish and decided to use the free Tinycards ap on Spanish fruits. The two systems are differnt. Duolingo gives you short sentences. So you learn to speak. The Tinycards are handy if you have a short attention span, it's late at night, and you want a few words of one type such as foods such as fruit to read a menu or labels in a supermarket.
Dulingo and Sounds
I have started learning twelve different languages, at first just three, Spanish, Italian and German, Welsh for a weekend in Wales, the Russian, Greek and Hebrew languages because lesson one is the alphabet and I know two or three letters from each alphabet and would like to know the whole alphabet, and others such as Portuguese, to see how it differs, and Romanian because I was hiking there. The Duolingo main system gives recordings most of the way through.
Tinycards Without Sounds
The tiny cards don't have recordings, just one word on each side of the card, often with a picture. You click to reverse the card two or three times and then answer the question.
Learning Words For Hello In Fifty Languages
I was doing all right on the French word bonjour, which I would normally translate literally as good morning. But when I got to the second set of cards the words were Polish, cseść for hello; and Lithuanian sveiki. Firstly, no point in learning to say the wrong thing. Secondly I was stumped as to how to say it.
Accented letters
I tried Google translate which gave me the Polish.
ś=sh The accent is like adding another letter, turning the s into a sh.
ć=ch
cz is ch as in the Czech word for Czechoslovakia.
i=sounds like yeh (e as in bed not ay as in bay)
Lithuanian
But the Lithuanian isn't there. I presume no Lithuanians have yet volunteered to help.
I didn't know how the recordings were done. In a forum on one of the languages, I leanred that words have an occasional blip because in on-line dictionairies you don't have a native speaker reading every word.
Earworms
You do have a native speaker saying every word, a native speaker who is introduced and who gets the credit on the CD cover, in systems such as Earworms. That is the short version of Berlitz with background music which does all sorts of magic things, simultaneously keeping you focused whilst helping you relax. About 200 first easy words for conversation on the plane and conversating with the flight attendant, the person sitting next to you, asking for directions, and asking the price or thanking the taxi driver.
Commputer generated voices work best when there's only one way to pronounce a word.
Let's come back to my problem, the Lithuanian and Polish prounciation.
To find the Lithuanian, I did another Google search.
YouTube
First I found a Youtube video.
Omniglot
Then I found omniglot which has a slide bar you click on to hear sounds.
Berlitz
Berlitz has schools in many countries where you can sign up for lessons.
MONEY OFF
I just went to one of their websites and they offered 30% off if I signed up by the end of this month (October 2017).
If you don't want to sign up for a course with a human teacher, you can buy their books and discs.
http://www.berlitz.de
www.earwormslearning.com
https://www.duolingo.com
https://www.tinycards.duolingo.com
https://www.omniglot.com/soundfiles/lithuanian/hello3_lt.mp3
https://www.googletranslate.com
You can also learn English and other languages from films with subtitles or set the TV to show subtitles.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-41516251 Can you learn English from Eastenders? (How one boy did so).
Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and phtographer, author and speaker.
No comments:
Post a Comment