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Archive for the ‘Vocabulary’ Category

German Frame Semantic Online Lexicon

“The German Frame-based Dictionary is an attempt to apply the linguistic theory of Frame Semantics to the language classroom”, and is “based on the German FrameNet at the University of Texas at Austin, a digital archive of how German words are used in real life contexts”. How to Use the German Frame-based Dictionary.

Example Frame pagE:

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The Frames available are limited, but instructive samples which can help the naïve user with dictionary use: imageimage

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There are also some Arbeitsblätter, but only a few: image

(On the occasion of Charles Fillmore’s death).

Google etymology feature

  1. Etymology information has been added to Google end of August, still need to review this more closely (other languages supported?), but for now:
  2. Type “etymology” followed by the English word to get the Etymology (and unfold the arrow below to get additional dictionary information, including historical frequency)
  3. image
  4. Of course this feature cannot replace a historical legal dictionary, but I what I was looking for was the juxtaposition with “freeman” in English feudal history, which I would have liked to find a reference here to also
  5. Etymology does not seem to be supported if I type “Etymology Schmetterling” (or “Etymologie Schmetterling”), the feature does not come up. It does if I type “etymology butterfly", however: Is this right?! The next thing which is missing (and this reminds me too much of how our students use Google translate) is the admission of that these explanations are theories which are contentious, and should be debated: image

Corpora, Treebanks, Word-Lists. A List.

How to workaround AntWordProfiler error “Cannot open the file”

  1. Seems a little bug in this otherwise great program. I started getting this on Windows 7 64-bit with
  2. clip_image003for all files, no matter which size.
  3.   It occurred to me to go to menu: Settings/ global settings / file settings / show full pathnames
  4. Here is what you see: Note the duplicate path to the file.
  5. clip_image001
  6. How did I get there? Seems like you cannot take my usual preferred shortcut and paste the full file path into the browse dialogue.
  7. If I browse to the file and select, the same botched up double path does not appear:
  8. clip_image002
  9. I can then process the file fine. image

Search Rhapsodie, a syntactic and prosodic Treebank of spoken French

  1. The Rhapsodie Treebank is made up of  “57 short samples of spoken French (5 minutes long on average, amounting to 3 hours of speech and a 33 000 word corpus)” endowed with an orthographical phoneme-aligned transcription”.
  2. Rhapsodie can be searched at http://www.projet-rhapsodie.fr/queryql.html:rhapsodie-speech-corpus-treebank-search
  3. View list,  read (1) text or (2”phonetic transcription, click (3) and (4) to listen  to found segmentrhapsodie-speech-corpus-treebank
  4. You can also search for text and download: image
  5. The best is obviously the markup and query language – and hence has a learning curve.
Categories: corpora, French, Listening, Speaking, websites Tags:

Japanese Language Tools (Proofing, dictionary, furigana) in the LRC MS-Office 2010 installation

  1. Even if not showing in MS-Word’s Language selector),
    1. image
    2. clip_image002
  2. Even though there is no Japanese Thesaurus: clip_image003
  3. There are these tools:
    1. In the Research pane, "English Assistance: Japanese"  (in the ribbon / "Review" tab, Proofing section, press the clip_image004 , then  ALT-Click a character to start a lookup: 
    2. clip_image005
    3. a Japanese  Consistency Checker:clip_image006
    4. Furigana:
      1. To enable: clip_image007
      2. Result (in view / Web layout):  clip_image008
      3. Incidentally, my blog has not quite made it into the TOP 5 of MSW-Office help content: clip_image009
  4. In addition, for Office, but also beyond, there are the tools of the MS-Office Input method editor (which include dictionary help when you write): clip_image010

Making computerized vocabulary quizzes for use in the LRC from Prof. Koralova’s Friendly Russian textbook

You can browse on the Group room PC to this folder with the

source files (read acces), you just need to look at the Word versions:  S:\COAS\LCS\LRC\sanako\student\friendly-russian-docx-student-copy

 

In the source files, new  vocabulary that the students have to learn, appears  in 2 forms

1.       Either under the heading “new words”, mostly with English meaning in a sparate column

2.       Or in the running text, colored in red (and with no entirely obvious English translation  for me who I do not speak Russian, but likely for you).

 

The target file is here  (in most browsers other than Internet Explorer 64-bit, you should be able to open this in EXCEL for easier editing).

 

We need Russian and English in 2 columns. The computer program we are going to feed these flash cards into is quite simple in its automatic evaluation. That’s why we need to enable students to guess exactly the Russian from the English flash card side (and vice versa). Hence we may need to simplify the entries in both.

 

To give a few examples: 

          Complicated lists of variants (inflected forms, similar phrases etc.) need to be broken up into separate rows

          linguistic metadata (like gender “fem.”– but maybe not articles: “la maison – das Haus” -, irregular verb) in a separate column, per language.

 

I included an example (from chapter 4, section 6) what I think the end result is supposed to look like:

 

Source example:

ти́хо (adv.) – quiet(ly); тишина́ (n.) – stillness; quiet
никогда́ – never;  ти́хо, как никогда́ – quiet as never (before); когда́ – when
В чём де́ло? – idiom: What’s the matter?
ах да – oh yes
матч – match; game
почти́ – almost
ка́ждый – each; every
ме́сяц – month
всё в поря́дке  (idiom)– everything is OK (lit.: everything is in order)
что ещё на́до? – what else (does one) need?

Target example:

russian

metadata

english

metadata2

Ти́хо

quiet

тишина́

stillness

тишина́

quiet

никогда́

never

ти́хо, как никогда́

quiet as never before

когда́

when

В чём де́ло?

What’s the matter?

ах да

oh yes

матч

match

матч

game

почти́

almost

ка́ждый

each

ка́ждый

every

ме́сяц

month

всё в поря́дке

everything is OK

что ещё на́до?

what else does one need?

 

Hint: the easiest way to get the vocabulary charts Russian – English from Word into 2 columns in Excel:  CTRL+H, “find:” space-space, “Replace”:^t (for tab), then copy/pasting the result makes 2 columns for Russian/English.

 

Creating site-specifically useful learning content for the Sanako Study 1200 vocabulary testing

  1. The usefulness of the Sanako Study 1200 new (from ver 6) vocabulary test activity hinges on the availability of site-specific vocabulary lists.
  2. Sanako UK
    1. seems aware of this and publishes vocabulary collections for textbooks and assessments commonly used in UK secondary education.
    2. Sanako favors using the built-in format and saving it on the network share that is required  for the Sanako study 1200.
    3. Vocabulary tests are organized and can be discovered and browsed by file name only.
  3. TBA: How could something similar be done in a US HE context? One would need:
    1. establish which textbooks are (and will remain) in use?
    2. are they e-books or would the material need digitization?
    3. is the chapter vocabulary easily accessible as a list? Appendix glossaries encompass usually much more than the vocabulary required to study, so testing on these would quickly become frustrating
    4. how best to reformat the materials (from turning into a table to handling linguistic metadata) for easy use with the Sanako vocabulary test?
    5. how best to publish the  material?
      1. to make it manageable for the updaters: crowdsourcing? copyright issuew?
      2. to make it easily selectable for the teacher: filter by integrated linguistic and course metadata?
    6. Last not least: How to do all this economically? Taking into consideration teacher preference, enrollment, preexisting materials…?
      1. cost lowered if tabular lists of vocabulary already exists
      2. benefit is lowered if online flash card applications already exist.