language learning

Polish Television

Last night I spent a couple hours watching Polish television on Onet.tv Platforma.  They have mostly clips on specific themes or topics but a few full shows.  I particularly like the "Podróże" section ("Travels").  There was a full episode of Podróże.tv (a travel channel) about Egypt and another showing a Klub Podróżnika ("Traveler's Club") in Kraków, where a guy was giving a presentation about his time in Kurdystan in Iraq.  Very, very interesting!  You can also find shows/clips on news, weather, cooking, film, music, games, etc..

Until now I've had a lot of trouble finding Polish television online.  A friend of my pointed me to wwiTV.com, where you can watch streaming live television from around the world, but I didn't have much success.  Many of the channels don't work and I just couldn't find a time when anything good is on!  By the time I'm home from work, its really late in Poland and there is mainly "adult programming."  I watched news on the religious channel for a bit, but that was pretty much all.

While I mainly like to listen to audio books, there are people who swear by the tv method of language learning.  Maybe it will help, maybe not.  But it is fun!  And on the occasion I feel like watching television, why not do it in Polish?

YouTube!

Inspired primarily by The Linguist Blogger's YouTube videos where he demonstrates his Spanish and Portuguese abilities, I created a short video on YouTube, where I speak in Polish. I've never put anything on YouTube before and, honestly, in the sea of videos to be found there, I didn't expect anyone to notice it until I linked to it.

However, within an hour of posting it I was getting messages from other users and later comments! YouTube is awesome! I met a bunch of really nice people. So, I think I may post more videos, maybe even do a "video blog" in Polish for the practice.

Anyway, the video follows. Its not terribly interesting, I didn't really plan what I was going to say before I did it. But it at least "proves" that I speak Polish and gives me something to gauge my progress against. I imagine that in a year I'll listen to it and laugh at how bad my Polish used to be. ;-)

Another Harry Potter bites the dust!

On Friday, while walking home from work, I finished listening to Harry Potter i Więzień Azkabanu (the 3rd Harry Potter book in Polish). This is the first one where I had both the text and the audio. I tried doing a couple of things with this:

  1. Simultaneous reading and listening.
  2. Listening then later reading.
  3. Switching off, doing which ever one I feel like at the time.

#1 turned out to be waaay harder than I thought. I read at a different speed than the actor read the text. I kept wanting to pause the audio so I could catch-up. This turned out to not be very enjoyable for me. #2 worked great, although it was a little boring at reading time. There would sometimes be a word or two that I failed to catch in the listening that the later reading would clarify, but nothing that ever changed my understanding of the text.

Polish Update

I meant to write about this weeks ago! But it slipped my mind. Anyway, I finished reading the first Harry Potter book. I didn't reach my goal of pages to translate, but that never mattered anyway. I reached page 223 and I was shooting for page 250.

I've already started reading the 2nd book, but the audio book which I ordered from Empik hasn't arrived in the mail yet and I'm worried it may have gotten lost. Usually, I buy all my Polsh books/audio-books from one of the great Polish bookstores in Chicago (Polonia, Quo Vadis), which is how I got the paper book right away. Anyway, for some reason I can't find a local bookstore that has the audiobook for the 2nd one, even though they've got the 1st, 3rd, 4th, etc... So I had to order that from Poland.

Language Learning without Grammar

I just read a post on Steve Kaufmann's blog about language learning and Web 2.0, which included a link to this YouTube video he made on the same topic. As a guy experimenting with creating Web 2.0 language learning applications, I feel like this message is aimed directly at people like myself.

I completely agree with the general message of the video: Focusing on grammar in language learning is detrimental and yields very little in the way of actual proficiency in using the language. But its the specifics I keep getting hung up on.

In the works…

I've had a number of language learning software projects in the works for a long time. Unfortunately, given my limited time, I've been struggling to get them "out of the works" in into a place where other people can use them. But until that time, I'd just like to describe what they are - or really what they will be!

Memorati™

Memorati™ is my main focus right now. It is an online flash card system based on spaced-repetition. It is designed to be rich and flexible using modern Web 2.0 techniques and easily embeddable inside of other applications. In fact, when you go to www.Memorati.org, you are actually seeing Memorati (the application) embedded into Memorati (the website).

There are still many features missing from Memorati and at this point should be considered Beta. In the future, I plan to include:

  • Plugins for domain specific cards, ie. geography cards could include maps.
  • Media! With a player for audio and video files.
  • Offline support, so you don't always need an internet connection.

Knowledge Ain’t Nothing

I've been studying Russian and Polish language for about four years now. It has been a great experience for me. I discovered that not only do I love learning languages, but I seem to be pretty OK at it. During that time, my thoughts on how one should learn a foreign language have been constantly evolving.

In the beginning, I was largely focused on grammar. This was primarily because the class I was taking focused on grammar. This agrees with a general trend in modern American education, which emphasizes understanding the ideas rather than memorizing the facts. In general, this is good thing. Language courses of the past focused on memorizing vocabulary. Now understanding grammar is the main focus.

Also grammar was easily interesting to me in its own right. Its like math with words. My programmer brain liked it. And it was comfortable. I didn't have to go out on a limb and risk personal embarrassment like with speaking.

Morning Rain

As I biked into work today at the usual 6.30am, I was listening to this wonderful pod-post on my iRiver. I know, biking and listening to head phones might not be the safest thing, not to mention, in the rain!

But inspired by the blog and book by Steve Kaufmann of The Linguist, I decided that I need to fill every spare moment with Polish language input if I ever hoped to become truly fluent. And I spend a TON of time biking from place to place.

I just came accross Steve's work yesterday, and I plan to discuss some of his ideas in later posts, but let me just say now that what he says strongly reflects my experience of language learning and the evolution of my thoughts about it.

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