
Learn 101: Learn Languages - snake117
http://learn101.org/
======
Hasknewbie
"Learn cantonese". Let's see how that one goes. Click.

"I would like to welcome you to the Cantonese lessons. I'm here to help you
(bold)learn Cantonese(/bold)". Hello there, content-farm-robot-pretending-to-
be-a-person.

Lesson 1: "Cantonese Alphabet". There is no alphabet in Cantonese, it's a
Chinese language. Click.

"Today I will teach you the (bold)Cantonese alphabet(/bold). If (...more
filler...). Cantonese contains more than 9900 letters". Hu, OK, let's stop
here for the 'alphabet'. A quick look at the other 'lessons' shows what is
obviously missing but would be in any true '101' Cantonese course: it's a
tonal language, so you'd have to explain the tones first.

If you skim through multiple languages you will see a 'Translation' service
(with a paid option, but it's the same page as the free one) that always point
to the same (stock photo) translator. Not sure what that website is for, but
it's not for learning any language.

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JimXugle
I clicked on Cantonese as well. Their "alphabet" is just a bunch of Hanzi with
_Mandarin_ Pronunciations next to them.

~~~
Hasknewbie
It looks like they have switched the Cantonese and Chinese content, the
"Chinese" vocabulary is Cantonese written in Yale romanization (edited to add:
I assume, being a non-speaker. On second look I'm not so sure of myself).

Since there is not a lot of learning material for it online, I find Cantonese
to be a good 'BS-meter' for language websites (in that it's not too hard to
see if they got the basics wrong or not).

~~~
DonaldFisk
Chinese is Mandarin and uses Pinyin. There are one or two mistakes.

Re Cantonese:

There are numerous mistakes - the romanizations don't always correspond to the
Chinese characters, and many of the phrases are Mandarin idiom, which is
different from Cantonese. So I can't recommend it.

I think it's Jyutping romanization. I wish it did use Yale, which I prefer,
mainly because of how the tones are represented. Cantonese has several
competing romanizations.

This site's better:
[http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/](http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/)

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hackerboos
Tons of errors in the Thai section. I'm checking the gender vocab:

คน - Man - should be ผู้ชาย

มารดา/บิดา - Mother/Father - way too formal - should be แม่/พ่อ

Be very skeptical of language sites that have tons of languages from different
families. You're better off on speciality sites/subreddits.

~~~
eatbitseveryday
The German pronunciation guide also suggests ü sounds like the 'u' in 'ultra',
but in reality it is more similar to Hubert[1] in English. Also 'z' is
pronounced as 'ts' (not the suggested 'sea'), and 'y' is not similar to 'tea'
(the Y in 'Yacht' is like the y in 'yes').

[1]
[http://inogolo.com/pronunciation/Hubert](http://inogolo.com/pronunciation/Hubert)

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wenderen
What is going on here?

[http://learn101.org/marathi_alphabet.php](http://learn101.org/marathi_alphabet.php)

This is not the Marathi alphabet. It's the Telugu alphabet.

~~~
wsxcde
Yup. There are loads of errors. They're also showing Telugu letters instead of
Kannada and Urdu instead of Pashto. Another error I noticed was that the
letter (ழ்) in Tamil is shown as [ḻ] like"rag" \-- I don't know what rag is
doing here, ழ் is the retroflex approximant typically transliterated as zha.

I looked at the Kannada page in some more detail. Good news is that the
phrases are in fact in Kannada (unlike the alphabet). But even here some of
the translations are slightly off. The one for "he visits many countries" uses
"urugalu" (places/towns) instead of "deshagalu" (countries).

I don't get the impression that this is a reliable site.

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glandium
Clicked on japanese.

"Japanese contains 26 letters (consonants and vowels)."

Then goes on with a table of 48 characters representing syllables. (including
the 2 very rarely used ゐ(wi) and ゑ(we)). They happily skip the part where
there are 2 such syllabary systems, plus the Chinese characters.

Then there are pages about "Japanese Plural" and "Japanese Gender" (Japanese
doesn't have such things), and one about "Japanese Numbers" not explaining a
thing about counter words.

This all looks like templated information that is the same for all languages.
You're apparently expected to just translate from English word for word and
hope for the best.

Edit: Oh, and it's funny that they only introduce hiragana, but also use
katakana and kanjis for all words and example phrases.

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lochland
There are some basic errors, too, which are in the overarching structure of
linguistic categories. For instance, 'and' is _not_ a preposition, as it
states that it is in the language grammar sections.

Perhaps this is a curmudgeonly and pedantic observation, but linguists be
linguists.

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jdeisenberg
Admirable idea, but not sufficiently complete. For example, the Korean
alphabet section shows you the letters, but not how they are combined into
syllables. The Russian grammar section doesn't address the concept of
declension, as far as I can tell.

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D-Coder
The Esperanto part seems pretty good. There is one section with consistent
errors, "Mi vizitis francio" does need a -n ending (francion). And again,
"and" is not a preposition. But that's all I noticed in a quick skim.

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xoiqqq
The Khmer section has quite a few errors too. I was actually expecting them to
have stolen / reused the audio files that my wife and I recorded for a Khmer
learning web app a few years back (since that's happened on numerous occasions
before) but there isn't any audio at all, or IPA, so this would be quite
useless for someone learning Khmer.

