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Archive for the ‘Advanced’ Category

How to use the online Spanish pronunciation help to generate phonetic alphabet transcriptions and text-to-speech

2011/11/18 Leave a comment
  1. Go to http://showroom.daedalus.es/es/tecnologias-de-la-lengua/phonetictrans/phonetictrans.php, enter your text, select your phonetic symbol set:
  2. spanish-text2phonetic-alphabet-daedalus
  3. Unlike with the Portuguese help, there is no text-to-speech option here.
Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, Intermediate, learning-materials, Spanish, Speaking, websites Tags: , ,

Web-based romanized letters to Cyrillic transliteration tool.

2011/11/16 Leave a comment
  1. Our Russian tutor uses this transliteration tool HTTP://TRANSLIT.RU which allows for phonetic input on a keyboard that does not have Cyrillic letters and seems popular with native speakers of languages written in Cyrillic.
  2. As so often, that implies: not designed for language learners. The explanation attests to that: translit_info
Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, Intermediate, Russian, websites, Writing Tags: ,

Microsoft Contextual Translator

2011/11/14 Leave a comment

Certainly an advance over the MS-Word thesaurus (unlike the MS-Word 2007 and up spell check, still not contextual). Does this work at least well enough to serve as a fruitful pedagogical exercise: “Which phrase does not belong in the group?”

contextual-thesaurus

Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, English, Intermediate, Speaking, websites, Writing Tags: ,

MS Universal Language Input Tool offers correction and transliteration on any web page

2011/11/10 Leave a comment

Using the UIME, you can “type any language with any keyboard on any web page, using only the Roman characters present on every keyboard.”

ms-universal-Language-Input-Tool

And you can install your favorite input language in your web browser, like so:

ms-uime-add-japanese-ie8 ms-uime-add-japanese-ie8-test

Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Advanced, Arabic, Beginner, e-languages, English, French, Greek (modern), Intermediate, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, software, websites, Writing Tags: ,

MS-Engkoo glossing of Chinese newspaper text

2011/10/28 Leave a comment
  1. Learners of Mandarin can increase not only their cross-cultural knowledge, when using the English versions of two of the biggest Chinese newspapers: “China Daily has adopted Engkoo’s “hover translation” feature—hover your cursor over an English word or phrase and get an inline Chinese translation— on its China-facing website” and the People’s Daily, the largest official newspaper in China, uses the same feature in its English website”
  2. Make sure you are on the right version (English version for Chinese user) of the site (china daily versionare the choices you want to see on top) and “Enable Bing Dictionary”in lower right corner: china daily engkoo enable_thumb[1]
  3. Then hover: china daily engkoo example_thumb[1].
Categories: Advanced, Beginner, e-languages, Intermediate, Mandarin, Media, Reading, Vocabulary, websites Tags: , , , ,

Chinese newspapers

2011/10/28 Leave a comment
  1. China Daily is the largest Chinese newspaper available in English. It has a variety of versions: here is the version for the US, for cross-cultural learning, while the English version for speakers of Chinese is valuable both for learners of Mandarin and English.
  2. The government-run newspaper People’s Daily has an English version, also with language learner glossing.
Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Advanced, Beginner, English, Intermediate, Mandarin, Media, Near-Native, Reading, websites Tags:

MS-Bing Dictionary for Chinese learners of English–and vice versa?

2011/10/28 Leave a comment
  1. Link: http://dict.bing.com.cn/?ulang=EN-US&tlang=ZH-CN#%3Ahome, powered by Engkoo:
  2. This looks like a pretty evolved learning tool: It has instant suggestions that include usage information and translations.engkoo-bing-china-dictionary-learn
  3. Rich results that include contextual, parallel web-as-corpus matches in text and text-to-speech (that, on spot-checking, seems barely noticeably computer-generated). engkoo-bing-dictionary
Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Advanced, Beginner, corpora, Dictionaries, English, Intermediate, Listening, Mandarin, Reading, Vocabulary, websites Tags: ,

Film-and-media-collection.xlsx online database under construction

2011/10/13 1 comment

Sneak preview (larger view here) of the searchable online database with internet background information lookup (Note: work in progress, hard-“head” area!):

Friends of the UNCC-LRC can open this link in Excel-web-app (in your web browser, internet explorer or Firefox): https://skydrive.live.com/edit.aspx?cid=0025C841818181C2&resid=25C841818181C2%21164

More than one LRC assistant can edit the sheet at the same time, just not the same cell. so: if there is more than 1 lab assistant on duty, the one whose first name is closer to the end of the alphabet starts from the bottom row of the spreadsheet and works her way up

Click on the link “try UPC lookup”,

On the page that opens, if there is a picture of the movie with “buy from amazon”, right click on the link to amazon.com, select “copy shortcut”, and paste the shortcut into the column “buy from amazon”

Find the original movie title on the page, copy it into spreadsheet  column “UPC title original”,

If there is title English translation, copy it into “UPC title English translation”

Click on link “try worldcat”,  do the same as above with the spreadsheet columns “ISBN title original” and “translation”,

Categories: Advanced, all-languages, audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, Film-studies, Intermediate, Interpreting, learning-materials, Listening, Media, Near-Native, Screencasts, service-is-library, Translation Tags: , , , ,