Similar to the Ad-hoc Text problem, another technique I use for improving my Norwegian is to start each day by scanning Norsk news headlines. But can I make it even easier to use?
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For years I’ve used an RSS aggregator app to pull all my news, blog, and web sources into a single convenient interface that I can scan each morning, and for a while, I had added a couple of Norsk sources to that, but I’ve discovered a few wrinkles that have made that suboptimal.
Norsk is actually written in two completely different writing/spelling systems, but none of my aggregator tools let me filter out the one I’m not studying.
Having experienced LingQ’s sentence-by-sentence reading mode, I find that I much prefer it for reading norsk.
I want to be able to filter out articles that really don’t interest me - sports, financial, farm reports, fashion, etc. - but my RSS aggregator doesn’t allow for more complex filtering.
Because of this, I wrote my own “headline grabber” script a while back, which I had intended to feed into the ad-hoc document ingester via the clipboard, but then I realized I can go a step further, and actually build the RSS scanner and filter right into Frankie.
Step 1 was to simply use the new Ad-Hoc Note feature, which I’m calling Jot, that can create the note by cutting and pasting from the existing headline grabber. Works a treat. Notice the highlighted document.
But even so, executing it inside Frankie directly, at the touch of a button will be sweeter.
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.