One technique I often use to improve my Norwegian is to create “study blocks”. From a few sentences to a few paragraphs, each block focuses on a specific aspect of the language I want to explore. For example, I have one that demonstrates a spectrum of common adverbial intensifiers that range from slightly (litt) to extremely (ekstremt). But after comparing the text for such a block, how do I then get it into Frankie?
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In the world of FrankenTongues, each block will be independent of the others, and they’re usually comprised of complete sentences, so it makes sense for them to be ingested as a corpus.
It’s also fairly clear that the cut/paste clipboard is the most logical place to load the text from, rather than having to jump through the hoops of putting it into a text document first. But what room of the castle should they be in? I think maybe the Study.
Here’s what the first implementation looks like running in the TUI. (Clunky, but it actually works. :-)
Language is an extremely flexible tool. You can assemble words into messages that express an unlimited number of thoughts. Anything from “Where food?” to “Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.”
But in everyday speech, we don’t typically use words to communicate. We actually assemble most of our day to day utterances using larger chunks of language. What are those chunks? And why do I think they can be used to supercharge your language studies?
Let’s take a look…
While working on the ear training features for the FrankenTongues app, I stumbled across a reference to the Automatic Language Growth (ALG) model of language learning, and the moment I read it, I had to stop everything I was doing to investigate.
Because it resonates loudly with my own views on how we learn languages.
I’m sitting in the car, waiting to begin another long road trip, and in keeping with recent practice, this will be another chance to test my hands-free learning tools. But in light of my current ALG experiment, there will have to be some changes to the plan.