Language learning technology

[Reverend Conehead]

I learned German back in the 80s. The technology that I used was books and cassette tapes. When I started learning French in 2012, I was blown away by the tech improvements out there. The Internet, and Skype in particular, is awesome. It's super easy nowadays to look up any word or verb conjugation that you need. I also Skype once a week with a woman in Québec who helps me with my French and I help her with her English. There's also a web site where you can write something in French, or some other foreign language, and then a native speaker comes along and corrects it. To repay the favor, you find something written in English and correct it for someone. These great pieces of tech make me wonder what's in store for the future of language learning.

I keep checking out articles about scientists who are busy developing androids. I don't mean the smartphones; I mean the androids like Commander Data on Star Trek NG. There could be many useful applications for androids when they start getting good. One that peaks my interest is assistance in learning a foreign language. If the droid's AI is of high quality, you could have it there to practice a foreign language whenever you want to. At this point AI isn't quite there, but it's improving all the time. If you had a foreign language helping android, you could come home from work and flip its on switch, set it to whatever language you're learning, and practice however much you want.

Other technologies like VR could conceivably help with language learning, but an android would have the advantage of not needing to wear a VR headset. Of course, VR would have the advantage of being able to easily put you in different settings. Choose a command and, voilà, you're on a ship at sea learning vocab for that setting. Press another command and you're in outerspace learning astronomy vocab. Press another command and you're at some country's capital building learning about that. Sounds way cool.

Of course there's no substitute for taking doing the work to learn a language. There will probably never be anything that instantly puts the skills into your brain, but anything that makes it fun is a positive step. You use what's available. In the 80s a friend of mine from Switzerland used to send me cassettes he had recorded of radio shows and of him talking, and I returned the favor for him with English tapes. Nowadays, we can turn on Skype and talk.

 

[Reality]

In the not so distant future, machine learning and real-time translations will be readily available and learning additional languages a lot less relevant unless your career or personal life requires it. Devices like smartphones will translate in real-time making talking to someone in a different language quite fluid.

I hope they call it "The Universal Translator"

 

[Ranching]

My oldest brother is fluent in 6 languages, he grew up with two and learned the rest in Europe. He worked as a translator at the Vatican when he was getting his PHDs. I wonder if places like that would ever goes the VR way?

 

[Reality]

My oldest brother is fluent in 6 languages, he grew up with two and learned the rest in Europe. He worked as a translator at the Vatican when he was getting his PHDs. I wonder if places like that would ever goes the VR way?

Places like that would be the last to ever change their long time ways. I also don't think that the need for translators will disappear. That need will just decline over time.

That said, learning two or more languages is still one of the best bits of advice you can give someone young as being bi-lingual or multi-lingual as skill sets can give them access to more jobs, increase their salaries and give them an advantage over competition in the job market. As entrepreneurs, it can make it much easier to expand into non-English markets.

 

[Reverend Conehead]

Even if they come up with translators that are almost as good as Star Trek's universal translator, I will still prefer to speak to people directly in their own language. Learning other languages has done far more for me than simply giving me the ability to communicate with people I otherwise would not have been able to. It's helped me to understand other cultures more than I otherwise could have, and it's helped in family life. Every language has its own feel, it's own personality if you will. When I speak in German, I get the strong sense of how important order and discipline is to the people who speak it. When I speak in French, I get the sense of great creativity and self expression. I even used languages to help me recover from painful experiences. Something traumatic happened to me long ago, and it was impossible for me to even speak about it in English without breaking down. However, talking about it in French gave me enough distance from it to be able to talk about it and start to get over it. I don't know if that makes any sense at all to people, but it worked for me. German also helped me to be closer to family. My grandparents were Swiss immigrants whom I never knew because they died before I was born. Thanks to my German skills, I was able to converse with their siblings and get to know my grandparents indirectly.

I'm not knocking the idea of translating machines or of the benefits of language in career. That stuff is important too. I'm only saying that the importance of other languages goes much, much deeper than that for me.

 

[Reality]

Even if they come up with translators that are almost as good as Star Trek's universal translator, I will still prefer to speak to people directly in their own language. Learning other languages has done far more for me than simply giving me the ability to communicate with people I otherwise would not have been able to. It's helped me to understand other cultures more than I otherwise could have, and it's helped in family life. Every language has its own feel, it's own personality if you will. When I speak in German, I get the strong sense of how important order and discipline is to the people who speak it. When I speak in French, I get the sense of great creativity and self expression. I even used languages to help me recover from painful experiences. Something traumatic happened to me long ago, and it was impossible for me to even speak about it in English without breaking down. However, talking about it in French gave me enough distance from it to be able to talk about it and start to get over it. I don't know if that makes any sense at all to people, but it worked for me. German also helped me to be closer to family. My grandparents were Swiss immigrants whom I never knew because they died before I was born. Thanks to my German skills, I was able to converse with their siblings and get to know my grandparents indirectly.

I'm not knocking the idea of translating machines or of the benefits of language in career. That stuff is important too. I'm only saying that the importance of other languages goes much, much deeper than that for me.

But we are the adult generation of today and less inclined to prefer technology solutions in many cases over what we grew up with. Children growing up with real-time translation devices will likely prefer those over learning multiple languages.

I do think that people who learn multiple languages and can talk directly to people in the future will probably be more respected and appreciated than they are today because fewer people will probably take the effort to learn them.

That said, I think the US will eventually do like Canada and parts of Europe where children are taught two languages in school. It will be English and Spanish here like it is English and French and Canada, but given the population size of China and other growing nations and regions, a third language will be required eventually to set yourself apart from others.

 

[Seven]

Como? Yo no say........did that by myself.

 

[TheKey]

But we are the adult generation of today and less inclined to prefer technology solutions in many cases over what we grew up with. Children growing up with real-time translation devices will likely prefer those over learning multiple languages.

I do think that people who learn multiple languages and can talk directly to people in the future will probably be more respected and appreciated than they are today because fewer people will probably take the effort to learn them.

That said, I think the US will eventually do like Canada and parts of Europe where children are taught two languages in school. It will be English and Spanish here like it is English and French and Canada, but given the population size of China and other growing nations and regions, a third language will be required eventually to set yourself apart from others.

Personally, I do not think it makes sense to teach foreign languages to kids in the USA, and I say that as someone who is fluent in two languages (German and English). As rewarding as it is, it just isn't a good use of our time. We have a tremendous time advantage over almost every other country in the world because they have to spend three hours a week or more for ten years learning English. Rather than wasting that time trying to learn French, for example, we should have our kids in front of computers learning to write code for that amount of time. Fluency in computer languages will be the new bilingulaism of the future and will help keep jobs in the USA much more effectively than learning a European language. I think language learning is fun, but it should be a hobby and not a part of our core curriculum.

 

[TheKey]

My oldest brother is fluent in 6 languages, he grew up with two and learned the rest in Europe. He worked as a translator at the Vatican when he was getting his PHDs. I wonder if places like that would ever goes the VR way?

Growing up with two is the easiest way to learn three, four or five. In my experience, the hardest part wasn't grammar or learning the vocabulary, it was teaching yourself how to shut down the English part of your brain so you didn't try to translate word for word as you went along. That way you can speak in a way that makes sense to the listener, and not just speak English using foreign words.

The problem with people being "fluent" in multiple languages is that everyone has a different definition of what fluent is. To me, being fluent is understanding the finer points of a language and being able to do business, negotiate, joke and be natural in that language. If your brother can do that in six, kudos to him. It's frustrating but I've met a lot of people (particularly) during my time in Europe) who claim to be fluent in a language and are only functional in two or three specific situations. It's a real problem when people claim things on their CV that aren't really true.

I thought it was a big enough problem that I shelled out €300 for a certification test so I wouldn't be in that group!

 

[Longboysfan]

In the not so distant future, machine learning and real-time translations will be readily available and learning additional languages a lot less relevant unless your career or personal life requires it. Devices like smartphones will translate in real-time making talking to someone in a different language quite fluid.

I hope they call it "The Universal Translator"

C3PO

 

[Ranching]

Growing up with two is the easiest way to learn three, four or five. In my experience, the hardest part wasn't grammar or learning the vocabulary, it was teaching yourself how to shut down the English part of your brain so you didn't try to translate word for word as you went along. That way you can speak in a way that makes sense to the listener, and not just speak English using foreign words.

The problem with people being "fluent" in multiple languages is that everyone has a different definition of what fluent is. To me, being fluent is understanding the finer points of a language and being able to do business, negotiate, joke and be natural in that language. If your brother can do that in six, kudos to him. It's frustrating but I've met a lot of people (particularly) during my time in Europe) who claim to be fluent in a language and are only functional in two or three specific situations. It's a real problem when people claim things on their CV that aren't really true.

I thought it was a big enough problem that I shelled out €300 for a certification test so I wouldn't be in that group!

He is a director at the Pontifical university in Rome, he works with st students and priests from all over the world. This has allowed him to practice and learn the conversational aspect of the languages. I get a kick listening to him talk on the phone with his friends oversees when he is here visiting.

 

[TheKey]

He is a director at the Pontifical university in Rome, he works with st students and priests from all over the world. This has allowed him to practice and learn the conversational aspect of the languages. I get a kick listening to him talk on the phone with his friends oversees when he is here visiting.

That's very cool. Is he also a priest?

 

[Ranching]

That's very cool. Is he also a priest?

Yes. He is a Franciscan Friar.

 

[The Fonz]

Como? Yo no say........did that by myself.

Is that Spanglish?

 

[Reality]

Personally, I do not think it makes sense to teach foreign languages to kids in the USA, and I say that as someone who is fluent in two languages (German and English). As rewarding as it is, it just isn't a good use of our time. We have a tremendous time advantage over almost every other country in the world because they have to spend three hours a week or more for ten years learning English. Rather than wasting that time trying to learn French, for example, we should have our kids in front of computers learning to write code for that amount of time. Fluency in computer languages will be the new bilingulaism of the future and will help keep jobs in the USA much more effectively than learning a European language. I think language learning is fun, but it should be a hobby and not a part of our core curriculum.

Actually, I believe learning programming languages will be less important in the future just as learning machine or assembly language is these days, and that's from someone who has been a lifelong developer and has worked with many computer languages over the years.

For example, the reason that low level computer languages like machine and assembly are not widely used in development today is that high level languages such as C-variations, Java, etc. offer much better and easier frameworks and terminology to work with, and their compilers and interpreters convert those languages into machine language for us.

In the future, code will be pieced together like puzzles through modular-based and machine learning development platforms and the interface for that will be less programmatic and more logistical and abstract. While there will always be a need for developers at some level, the massive number of developers world wide will more than cover those positions early on and the youth of today who take on those jobs in the future will be the best and brightest because demand will drop and the skill set requirements for the jobs that exist then will be much higher than most developers of today can provide.

As for spoken languages, I think that both English and Spanish will eventually be taught in schools in the US because of the existing and growing hispanic and other spanish-speaking latino population in the country. I think all additional languages will be optional, and I agree, probably less likely to be learned by most pre-college students.