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Viewing Unique Ways of Harnessing Technology to Learn a New LanguageUnique Ways of Harnessing Technology to Learn a New Language
By Kathy Steinemann
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Learning a new language can be very enjoyable if you embrace the experience and employ some ingenuity to make it more fun! You obviously have access to a computer - make the most of it. Audio Morphing - Voice Cloaking Voice cloaking technology allows you alter audio in many ways. You can make a female voice sound male and vice versa; you can deepen a voice or elevate it to mezzo-soprano range; or alter it completely so that it sounds like a robot. How does this help you? If you are learning a language that assigns gender to nouns, you could make separate recordings of masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns, changing the 'voice' appropriately. For example, the feminine nouns could be recorded in a feminine voice, the masculine nouns in a male voice, and the neuter nouns in a 'robot' voice. Listening as they playback will imprint the words on your mind, and will make gender associations almost automatic over a period of time. You could apply the same approach to learning cases. For example, you might want to record German verbs followed by dative case in a female voice, and verbs followed by accusative case in a male voice. Do you already have some audio clips that could use a little spice? Utilize your voice cloaking software to alter bits and pieces of the clips. Change that monotone recording into something sparkly with multiple voices and maybe even some sound effects. Many companies produce this type of software. Search for 'voice cloaking software' or 'audio morphing software' on the internet, and you'll find numerous resources. Color - Bold - Italics Do you own a color printer? Let it become a magic learning tool for you. Add some color to specific words or phrases in your typed vocabulary lists. You could type feminine nouns in red, masculine nouns in blue, and neuter nouns in grey. If you have a list of verbs with a few irregular conjugations, alter the color of the irregular verbs or change them to bold type. You can also vary size or font and add italics. Your imagination is the limit. Online Resources There are numerous online dictionaries for most languages. Spend some time searching, and bookmark several. Each dictionary will have strengths and weaknesses. Some web dictionaries allow user input. Use care when accessing this type of dictionary. The translations may not always be 100% accurate. Sometimes there will be colloquial or dialect terms that are not marked in an obvious manner. If you like writing poetry, you can even find rhyming dictionaries online. Use your favorite search engine to do searches like 'rhyming dictionary German', 'rhyming dictionary French', 'rhyming dictionary Spanish', etc. When trying to find good sites for help with grammar, attempt to stick with .edu domains. They will generally supply the most accurate information. Let's suppose you need to learn about French verb conjugations. You could try a search like: 'French verb conjugations site:.edu'. (The 'site:.edu' part of the search restricts the results to educational institutions.) As this article is being written, the above search works at Google, Ask.com, Yahoo! and several other engines - although it didn't produce any results at MSN. Video Conferencing and Voice Chat The choices here are endless! Fire up your video-cam, VOIP, Skype - or whatever you have - and talk to friends at opposite ends of the world. The more senses you can stimulate during the learning process, the better (and more permanent) the knowledge becomes. Make language learning fun, and you will stick with it. Turn it into a chore, and you are likely to lose interest. This page has several search engines listed. Give it a try while you perform the above searches. (c) Copyright Kathy Steinemann: This article is free to publish only if this copyright notice, the byline, and the author's note below (with active links) are included. About the Author: Kathy Steinemann is a busy webmaster and author who enjoys writing German-English stories in parallel translation. She works behind the scenes at several websites, including A-Language-Guide dot com. Article Source: A Language Guide - http://www.a-language-guide.com |
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