
Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse - alexholehouse
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bedbecnakfcpmkpddjfnfihogkaggkhl
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billpaetzke
Nice idea, but I don't like that's it's not written by a native speaker.
You're bound to learn bad habits. Just spend less time on English sites and
more time on sites in your target language wherever possible.

Two easy ways to immerse yourself with content created by native speakers in
your target language:

1) Listen in your target language whenever possible (via audio books, movies,
tv shows, and podcasts). I like podcasts best.

2) Read in your target language. Major news sites and blogs will most likely
exist in your target language for free. And you maybe be able to buy books
(fiction or non) written by native speakers as well.

You can _supplement_ those two with working through exercises in a grammar
book of your target language.

Obviously, if you have a native speaker to practice speaking with, do so, but
the listening and reading suggestions alone will get you very far. I'm
immersing in Spanish right now, and this is working well for me.

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FelixP
I think this breaks down somewhat for languages that don't use phonetic
characters, such as Mandarin and Japanese. It would take a long period of
dedicated study before the average person could read media in these languages.

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dafunnie
For Mandarin (not sure about Japanese), the plugin would definitely benefit
from pin yin supplementation at the 'novice' level. Non-latin characters are
difficult for people whose primary language is a language of Latin
derivatives. But implement this, they would have to take Google's pre-existing
translation tools and translate the translated text into pinyin using
something like the Ruby on Chinese Pinyin tool
(<http://www.kawa.net/works/cantonese/canton.html>).

But at the moment, the plugin seems to expect people to have prior knowledge
of the language and its so-called immersion revolves around reading and
literacy uptake. Pin yin is more for speaking/oral purposes so translating
articles into phonetic characters is unconventional for languages that are not
meant to be read in such a way.

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snowcandy
Try Zhongwen Chinese-English Popup dictionary chrome extension. Simliar to
Raikaikun for Japanese (above post). I've always found it really helpful :)

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kkmlkkjojmombglmlp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kkmlkkjojmombglmlpbpapmhcaljjkde)

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JamesNelson
I love the idea - I've been looking for ways to try and "immerse" people in a
new language without actually travelling for a while now.

I do have two worries about it, though. The first is that they seem to be
using translations which aren't particularly accurate, which means its
possible that if it works, you'll still end up sounding like a beginner.

The other worry is that the language you are learning is still embedded in
your native language. I'm pretty sure this will not help with learning the
grammar of words, and when you are constantly switching between your language
and another language, it won't be very conducive to memorisation of the new
language (from my own experience learning Japanese).

Its still a really neat idea though, and I wish the best to the creators.

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dmbass
I'm not sure si está working pero it's really entertaining to leer todo sus
comments en espanglés.

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thisisblurry
This looks remarkably similar to Polyglot, which was released over a year ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1669162>

It's interesting how many of the comments here are similar to the ones there.

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alexholehouse
Regarding the comments, as a fluent but somewhat lapsed Norwegian speaker I
don't think this is necessarily a great way to learn sentence structure or
grammar, HOWEVER, it's an amazing way to buff up on vocab.

Maybe "brush up" would be more appropriate than "learn". The main advantages I
see are that;

a) It's pretty passive

b) You're likely to learn vocabulary related to areas of interest, or at least
areas you read about (work related perhaps).

It might benefit from some gameification or stats perhaps (e.g. number of
pages, number of words, range of words)...

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niketdesai
This is beyond awesome for a few reasons. Historically, learning a new
language was hard because it generally wasn't interesting.

This extensions allows you to browse the internet and specifically your
interests while immersing you to a language...uh whoa. Half the reason I
didn't like my language courses was the content and classroom was hardly
stimulating or relevant to my interests; this changes that entirely.

A great model if we could apply it to education more broadly.

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dunham
Back when I was an undergrad we used to play MUDs, which were a player-
extendable cross between a MMORPG and a text adventure. It was a terrible time
sink, but I'd always wondered if it would be a good tool for making foreign
language learning more fun.

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cf
The technique I like to do is read the foreign language Wikipedia. I try to
pick articles that exist in both languages. It helps to know the subject a bit
so you aren't constantly flipping back and forth.

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padobson
_Sorry, your operating system is not supported just yet. The Chrome Web Store
is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. Why don't you send yourself a reminder
to try it out later?_

Silly me for using Chrome on ICS.

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moistgorilla
This is amazing. Perfect way to practice a language and pick one up. Only
problem I can see with it is that it wont have pronunciation. This is a
problem for character languages like Mandarin. I'll be using it regardless
though.

edit: Never mind, you can hear pronunciation as described by the post replying
to me.

I wonder how they will manage to increase the reliability of the translations.
It would also be interesting to be able to practice multiple languages at the
same time.

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benologist
\- Roll-over a translated word to hear it pronounced.

I put it on intermediate spanish, it's interesting but it feels like it's
doing literal, disjointed word translations which gets messed up with the
different sentence structure.

The giant translating box is really annoying, it needs to be something much
more discrete I think.

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twelvechairs
Thanks. Just found that feature. It was off by default for me.

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dafunnie
This is an interesting idea but awkward to use. I am semi-literate in Chinese
so I selected intermediate Chinese immersion. I like that the words can be
reverted to the original language, but having these Chinese words littered
amongst a sea of English words is odd and difficult to process. If you go
through an article and you're met with a Chinese word, your brain can't
immediately process the new language. The constant switching between languages
when it comes to reading is quite cumbersome, even if it is for the sake of
learning. This is particularly so for languages of different forms like
English and Chinese. Words/phrases that are slang cannot be directly
translatable, which is detrimental to beginners who do not know that it has
been incorrectly translated. I think it is mildly useful for intermediate
leaners trying to increase their vocabulary set but not for language immersion
or introduction to a new language.

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waterlesscloud
Turn it up to "fluent" and you'll get entire passages translated, which is
more interesting I think.

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dafunnie
But would you need to use the tool if you could read an entire passage in that
language? If you were literate in that language, you could just go to a native
newspaper website and read those articles (something which I cannot do). And I
think a mildly fluent person would find translated passages hard to read,
which is why I don't translate Chinese websites into English (aka Engrish).
The only advantage the language immersion plugin has is the ability to hover
over the passage if you don't understand what it means, but it's annoying to
do if you just don't understand an individual word/phrase and the whole
passage gets reverted to the original language.

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Rhapso
I am a little annoyed, Esperanto is supported by the google translate API they
cite (and say they support all languages on) yet it is not an option. I would
love an immersion tool to help lean Esperanto (immersion is especially hard
for Esperanto because of the small speaking population) I think I need to
write my own version to spite them.

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colanderman
I'm working on this as a side project right now. I'm actually bypassing Google
Translate and just doing it myself in the hopes of getting better quality
output. Expect a release in a month or so. Ping me at colanderman@gmail.com if
you're interested and I'll keep you in the loop.

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jjcm
I used to speak French. Since I still know the grammatical rules of the
language, but have largely lost any vocabulary I once had, this is perfect.
I've been using it for the last hour or so and words long-since forgotten are
slowly coming back to me. I'll leave it enabled and see how things go.

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frcepeda
Awesome idea, but it doesn't have Japanese. Got me excited for nothing. :/

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WildUtah
English-Japanese machine translation is still very bad. I think a lot of
people have worked on it, but the problem is inherently tough. Also, there is
nothing like the hundreds of millions of words of corpora of example
translations for machine learning that exist for European languages

I think the main problem is that Japanese requires a lot more context to make
meaning clear than most languages. A translation of an English sentence can be
pretty good just based on the context of the sentence itself. Japanese doesn't
even indicate in any way who the subject of a sentence is. Lots of sentences
don't even require a verb.

And it doesn't help that Japanese has a quirky preposition system that doesn't
line up with other languages.

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Margh
If it was limited to adjectives or nouns in Japanese it would still be
incredibly useful (personally that's all I really wanted out of the
extension). As you say, lots of sentences don't even require a verb, a well
placed piece of vocabulary is everything (from my experience living here
anyway).

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benackles
This is a great solution to unobtrusively learn vocabulary while reading the
things we're interested in. As others pointed it's weakness is clearly in how
it handles sentence structure, but it seems reasonable to accept that it's
just going to do one thing really well.

There's only one problem I see with learning vocabulary this way, you need a
way to store what you've learned. I thought of one solution, you could drag
and drop words into a box linked to your Quizlet (or a similar service)
account.

Great Extension. Thanks!

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creamyhorror
I've seen similar extensions for Firefox for years - one or two that replace
words on webpages with Mandarin/Japanese translations (and I think even allows
you to replace only the ones you have on a wordlist - meaning that you can
choose to revise words via browsing). I've always meant to use those
extensions but never got around to.

Guess I won't be using this one since I don't use Chrome (I still find it a
surprise to discover that most web developers actually use Chrome and not
Firefox).

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oskarth
I think it's better to read a broken translation than a broken original
source. That is: go to a foreign language site of your choice, then translate
it into broken english.

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ollysb
I moved to Spain a couple of months ago and currently work for my company in
London from a shared office in Granada. I may well be the perfect user of this
plugin. I've already studied Michelle Thomas' course so I understand grammar
etc. My problem now is purely vocab. I spend my working day on the web,
reading page after page of english. This plugin is perfect! It means I can now
be learning vocab while I'm working.

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sad_panda
I totally had this idea 1 month ago. I was trying to get myself excited enough
to go through with the implementation. And here it is...! A bittersweet moment
indeed. :)

I'm going to keep this on for a while. My inlaws are visiting from abroad, so
I need all the help I can get.

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nXqd
Very nice idea, I'm trying it at the moment but it seems not to speak the
translation. English > Danish, anyone has the same problem and how to fix ?

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eob
I thought Google did away with the Translate API. Are you sneaking around this
by loading it in a background page and simulating user interaction?

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skrebbel
Seriously? Learning a language translated by Google Translate websites to
watch? With ideas like this to run we are all dumber, not smarter.

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melvinram
This is very cool. Definitely giving it a shot.

