DuoLingo.com
AMI...@aol.com
I am trying my hand at Spanish using www.duolingo.com after watching an inspiring TED talk on it. It’s only in beta, and also free, and only offering German and Spanish for now but wants to go viral and offer many more languages. Esperanto may be one of them in time.
Duolingo is not just language teaching. It’s inspired by and developed by the folk behind Captcha which is that little word recognition widget so many web sites use. To prove you're human you type two words in an image. One is a known word and used to test that you’re able to read the wavy image, the other is a word from a text that has been digitized (scanned) and the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools have failed to identify the word. Libraries across the globe (apparently) use software while digitizing works, that farms out these unrecognized words to Captcha which presents them to people and they use peoples readings of those words to arrive as a most common interpretation and lock that in as the result for their client, the library.
Duolingo goes deeper and further. They walk you through language lessons and then as you go you can try your hand at real translations. Again these are nabbed from websites that are not translated but wish to be. Translation is expensive, but duolingo hopes to offer it essentially for free, as Captcha does, the work done by many many hands globally. On such a session I’m given some sentences and their context (a picture generall y) to translate and I then get to see what other people have translated it as, rate one that’s presented to me re: my perceptions of quality and update mine from what I’ve learned before I lock it in as my contribution.
In this manner duolingo hopes to inspire millions to learn a language and get free translation energy in return.
Anyhow, I have a feeling this is going to be big. It turns learning into a game much as KhanAcademy have done, with levels unlocked as you advance, and points to be collected by gaining proficiency and exercises chunked down to small enough steps that progress is felt slowly but surely, and t he student is overwhelmed.
It could be really big for Esperanto given progress could be even faster. In fact one day it’s easy to see Esperanto recommended as the first language to try, to cut your teeth at language learning, for the same reasons we’re pushing the primary school agenda today.
Anyhow, just sharing a recent experience. As I’m enjoying the experience so far.
Cheers,
Bernd.