My Favourite Language Learning Apps
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann. Um, today I want to talk about language learning apps, language learning tools, the language learning environment that we live in. Uh, remember if you enjoy these videos, please subscribe. You know, you can click on the bell to get notifications. Um, I've been learning languages since, I don't know...
I mean, we had French at school and I got particularly keen as a 17 year old, 18 year old. In Montreal at the McGill university, uh, ultimately went to France, uh, studied Chinese, studied Japanese, or learned it, living in Japan and had learned a bunch of other languages. And that goes back over 50 years, never has it been easier to learn languages.
And part of the reason is because of the variety of call them language apps, uh, language tools. Uh, language services that are available to us today. And I'm only going to touch on a few of them because I can't remember them all, but let's just start with, you know, uh, smartphones. I carry in my iPhone, a language lab, a range of audio and text material that will be the envy of any language lab
50 20, 30, 40 years ago, the range of material that I have, and if my phone gets full, I can park them into my computer and get them later so that, that, and I can listen on my iPhone. I can do LingQ on my iPhone. I can read, I can look things up. I can go to Google Translate on my iPhone or other dictionaries and I'm just touching the surface because other people, I mean, the range of language apps that you can find in the, in the App Store is, is enormous.
It's so many that you, you don't know which ones are going to be useful. Many of them are not very useful, but I think the, the smartphone itself, and of course, you know, similar to the smartphone, you have the iPad, which I tend to use more for language learning, especially if I'm working on LingQ or, uh, the iPod touch, which I use when I go jogging or when I, you know, don't want to take my phone with me cause it's too heavy. Basically
providing the same range of services, including, you know, studying on LingQ. So that's to start with. Uh, MP3 technology of course has made it so much easier to access audio than ever before. You don't have to go buy CDs. You don't have open reel tapes. You don't have, um, you know, cassette tapes. You just have MP3 files, which you send back and forth to your friends, which you can find you can download.
You can subscribe to podcasts. There's another call it service. The range of language podcasts, not only aimed at learners, but what I prefer to use is podcasts aimed at the native speaker on a variety of subjects. Um, you know, YouTube, YouTube has a great variety of, uh, videos, some aimed at the learner,
some not. Very often, subtitles are provided in the target language. Uh, with that, I can import those into LingQ and study them as lessons. So there's an unlimited supply in certain languages, unfortunately, not in all languages. And there are issues, for example, learning in Standard Arabic. There are very few videos with both the audio and the subtitles in standard Arabic.
So there's an issue there, but nevertheless, there's so much there that you can go to now. In order to make sense of what I'm listening to, uh, whether it be podcasts or, or even Netflix, I shouldn't leave out Netflix. We can download series there. We can download the dialogue to LingQ. We can't capture the audio, but I can go through the dialogue and learn the words and phrases.
And of course their online dictionaries become important. Online dictionaries are extremely important to LingQ because even in every language, the learner, depending on their native language can look up with the lang... with the dictionary of their choice. There are certain choice dictionaries that are particularly useful.
I am told that Jisho in Japanese is particularly good. I don't study Japanese, so I have no way of commenting other than apparently it's an excellent dictionary, which provides you with stroke order for characters, different meanings, different phrases, uh, that use the words that you're looking up. Uh, I find Context Reverso to be tremendous.
Gives you a range and this is typical of what the online dictionaries provide now is a range of phrases using the word. Very often they'll give you text to speech. Context Reverso has a conjugating dictionary and there are other conjugating dictionaries so that if you look up a word, you can immediately see
the conjugation or... it's not so common for declensions. Unfortunately, the declensions being, you know, nouns and adjectives, which change form, but for verbs it's quite common to have the ability to go and see sort of the conjugation table, uh, which I never tried to remember, but as I look at it more often, I get closer and closer to a sense of how, how that verb works.
Remembering always that it's going to be a lot of exposure before it starts to click in, but I mentioned text to speech. There's a tremendous resource, text to speech. If I'm reading something in particular, in Arabic, where it's hard to tell just how something is pronounced text to speech tells me how it's pronounced.
Now, I can't listen to a whole lesson in text to speech, but I can listen to words and phrases in text to speech. I still don't have text to speech in Persian, which is very unfortunate, but we haven't been able to find a text to speech service that fits with the other service that we provide at LingQ. Uh, Google Translate what a tremendous service, you know, I, I, uh, have my, uh, Uh, you know, my online sessions with tutors and I struggle to say certain things and even after I'm still struggling.
How do you actually say that? It, because the phrasing is kind of mysterious and, and so I'll go to Google Translate and I type it in, in English. I want to go. I went yesterday. I should go. Anything that, you know, has a verb form or tense, or mood, or some structure that I find difficult to get a hang of in the language that I'm learning.
I just type it in, in English. I get it in the target language. And so I, I often go to Google Translate, not only to look up the meaning of a word in the foreign language that I'm learning, but also to see how I would go about saying something in that target language. So that's a tremendous app. Um, I mentioned podcasts, many podcasts, perhaps most don't have transcripts.
Without the transcript I'm kind of in trouble because, uh, depending on how far along I am in the language, I may only understand 20 or 30% without the transcript. With the transcript I can import it into LingQ, look up the words, learn the words, but without the transcripts, it's very difficult. And it's frustrating to listen to things over and over again that you don't understand.
So automatic transcription services, which I mentioned before, like Happyscribe. Quite, I mean, remarkably accurate and they're all getting more and more accurate. Like all of these apps are getting better and better. I can remember even with LingQ when I was, you know, I was taking three or four seconds to look up a word and, and now it's, it's instant and I don't want to talk too much about LingQ 5.0, because,
because Mark tells me not to talk about it because it's so complex because we are, we are, um, writing code, not me, but the people within our team are writing code for the iOS system for Android and for the, the web application. And so there's the back and that has to be changed. And there's, there's, it just it's taking much longer than we expected, but it is going to be even better.
So, um, just as you know, Google Translate was much worse before. Right now, Google Translate, which is also sort of machine translation AI is remarkably accurate. Uh, automatic transcription is remarkably accurate and all of these things are only going to get better. Similarly with LingQ, I think it's only going to get better, again, an indication of the world we live in.
We have developers working on the LingQ project with my son, Mark. I'm not involved, uh, from, uh, okay ukraine, korea, Portugal, two in Ghana, uh, one in Bolivia. Um, we have, uh, you know, our customer service people in Serbia. It's an absolute, it's an international cooperative venture, uh, which is again, an indication of the world we live in where we are connecting and because we can connect so easily with, with people. And I did mention, I think I mentioned italki, there's another wonderful application. They have such a wide range of tutors, uh, with different price levels and different skill sets. And you can choose the one you want. Uh, we also offer, uh, tutoring at LingQ, but we don't have the range of tutors that they have at italki.
So, you know, and there again, I've only touched on a few things. There are people who use Anki, Memrize. I don't use those, so I don't want to talk too much about them because I'm not that familiar with them. Uh, so this is the world we live in. This is the world we live in so that language learning today, because of this abundance of, of, uh, wonderful functionality that people are creating...
and six months from now, there will be people who will have created other, um, you know, apps that help us learn languages. So whenever I hear people say, well, you know, with AI, we won't need to learn languages because we'll just be able to talk to the machine and then the machine will translate and the conversation will go that way.
I don't believe it for a minute. I think the joy of communicating face-to-face with someone in another language, the joy of discovering their culture, as I have been doing now, talking to my tutors in Iran and discovering that one lives in ... Which is in a, in Golestan in the North. Is that what I, I can't remember anymore.
One lived in Lahijan ... I think. I can't remember. See, that's the other thing you forget everything. But if I got into the conversation, I'd remember. But so you're connecting, you're learning languages. You're connecting with people. Why would people give that up? Just in order to talk to a machine?
I don't see it. The language apps are making the language journey easier, and people are going to be more and more successful. And so I see a very bright future for language learning. So thank you for listening. Bye for now.
