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Archive for the ‘Vocabulary’ Category

How to use Google translate for writing Cyrillic letters with a western keyboard, pronunciation help, and text-to-speech

2012/02/16 Leave a comment

Go to  Google translate and do like so. Useful for learning, as well as typing when teaching.

Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, Dictionaries, e-languages, Intermediate, Listening, Reading, Russian, service-is-evaluating-learning-tools, Speaking, Writing Tags: , ,

Jim Breen (Monash) Japanese-English Dictionary

2012/02/08 Leave a comment

jim-breen-monash-japanese-english-dictionary

Categories: audience-is-students, Dictionaries, Japanese, websites Tags:

Collections of online dictionaries

2012/01/30 Leave a comment
  1. Here you can haz dictionaries. And if you use them in the Language Resource Center, you even have the chance to  run into someone who can show you how to use them well.
  2. http://linguistlist.org/sp/GetWRListings.cfm?WRAbbrev=Dict
  3. http://lexicall.widged.com/repository/listing.php?category=words
Categories: all-languages, Arabic, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (ancient), Greek (modern), Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Vocabulary, websites, Yoruba Tags: ,

Treffpunkt Deutsch Companion Website with Online Exercises

2012/01/11 Leave a comment
  1. This first-year German textbook comes with a Companion Website with free online exercises, organized by chapter, on the publisher’s website (different from the Quia.com –based workbook and lab manual exercises).
  2. From the instructor guide: “The Companion Website is a robust online resource designed to give students a chance to practice and further explore the vocabulary, structures, and cultural themes introduced in the text. For each chapter, students will find self-grading practice exercises on vocabulary and grammar topics as well as Web-based reading and writing activities. Web links to carefully selected sites in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, and South Tyrol (Italy), accompanied by interesting activities, provide additional interaction with the cultures of these German-speaking areas of Europe. Also available on the Website are the audio components of the Student Text and the SAM, as well as an interactive vocabulary flashcards tool. ”
  3. These exercises include vocabulary practice, even flash cards.
  4. The auto-correction feature provides:
    1. some useful feedback for further study, feedback1
    2. summary grades feedback0
    3. and an email to teacher function that should facilitate Syllabus integration of this useful resource: feedback2
Categories: Absolute-Beginner, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, German, learning-materials, Listening, Reading, service-is-evaluating-learning-tools, textbooks, Vocabulary, websites, Writing Tags: ,

Memrise: Another flashcard site for vocabulary learning

2011/11/21 Leave a comment
  1. Yet another attempt to tackle foreign language vocabulary learning with a crowd-sourced flashcard site: What is different this time, other than the layout?
  2. The site works with a seed/greenhouse/garden metaphor for spaced repetition (how intelligent is the underlying algorithm for that?) and processing/short/long term memorymemrise-seed
  3. You can have the word pronounced (is this Text-to-speech? does not sound like it. So will it scale?) The focus on non-target language “ponies” seems not fruitful. Actual target language context should be under “Samples”, but seems widely missing. Communicative motivation also. Multiple meanings and grammatical information seem to be missing from the lemmata. .single-word
  5.  memrise-emmnotic
  6. Looks like a long list of flashcard lists, but note that the number of included words is descending quickly, hardly one of the many textbooks
  7. German flashcards list - Memrise
  8. The site allows you to download the word lists as Excel files: download-wordlist-xls
Categories: all-languages, e-languages, Vocabulary, websites 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: , , , ,

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: ,

Learn Chinese character stroke-order with slowed-down animated GIFs

2011/10/10 Leave a comment

Further to our prior tips on learning Chinese stroke order, now you can take your time, in the LRC: To facilitate your practicing of Chinese character stroke-order, we have used the most helpful site (also available by direct download) created by Tim Xie for the California State University, Long Beach, to create 100 different speed versions, and one comic strip like static image, for each of the several hundred of animated GIFs demonstrating Chinese character writing, and made them available on the LRC computers under Internet Explorer Favorites – Example:

a1f5_strip

You can access the files with the stroke order speed of your preference from the LRCCOED434 student computers, like so:

chinese-stroke-order-animated-html

(Many thanks also to the authors of programmable ImageMagick image editor and corresponding Unix shell scripts that we could use in the production of the slowed down animated GIFs. To create your own version of these slowed down animated GIFs, or others similar websites, feel free to pick up and/or adapt our shell script here).

Categories: animated-GIFs, audience-is-students, Beginner, e-languages, Intermediate, Japanese, Korean, learning-materials, Mandarin, Media, Reading, Student-Computers, Vocabulary, websites, Writing Tags: , ,