Out of Many / Many More

NYT on Language Learning Websites

January 30th, 2010 | Category: interaction design, languages, web
You are learning Spanish and you want to use the web to teach you.  The New York Times broke it down for you on January 27, 2010.  The Web Way to Learn a Language by Eric Taub tells you there are free and expensive options.  There are social networks and black-box software available.  Do you want to hear paid actors speak textbook Spanish or do you want to interact with fellow students stutter in their strained accents.  It’s all there.
Actually not all of it is there.  Something is missing from the article.  And it’s important.
You want to learn Spanish.  How do you do it?  It’s very easy series of difficult steps.
1. Fill your empty brain with Spanish vocabulary.
2. Speak Spanish badly.
3. Repeat #2 every day in every way for as long as it takes until you are watching Predator re-runs on Telemundo on a Wednesday night while every other idiot is tolerating CSI Miami.
Rosetta Stone and LiveMocha exist to complete step #1.  Your brain is empty and they know how to fill it with Spanish.  They offer variations of the same theme: turn a Flash application into an interactive vocabulary quiz.  The dings and buzzers tell you when you’re right and wrong.  The progress bar tells you how far you’ve come.  Eventually, your line will tell you and everyone else that you know how to ask for the bathroom in Barcelona.
The web is bigger than #1.  Rosetta Stone and LiveMocha are small enough to handle that because that’s the easy part.  Let’s try something else.  Let’s try to make #3 meaningful and engaging and interactive.  The web is waiting for an application that makes that possible.  This is what needs to happen.
There is a feeling every new language student shares.  Every student is overcome with this feeling the moment they are about to speak Spanish to a stranger.  It is a mixture of dread and shame and embarassment and frustration.  Overcoming this fear is essential to making #3 happen.  Recreating this feeling in a language website is possible and absolutley essential to building a truly innovative interactive experience.  The fear will not be overcome unless it is confronted.
A meaningful online lnaguage tool would make this promise to users: this will make you talk and it will force you to listen.  And you will most likely feel really uncomfortable while you’re doing it.  This is not the online language tool version eating your Spanish vegetables.  This is the online language tool version of your first Spanish date.  A horrible experience that left you with a lifetime worth of lessons.
All of the language websites profiled on the NYT article were fine in their own way.  They should be used along with library books, classrooms, and private tutors to support all the students in the middle of the #1 phase of their lessons.  This new tool described here would compliment any and all lesson plans with engaging practice tools.  In other words: the world wide web needs a language lab.

rosettastone-logo

You are learning Spanish and you want to use the web to teach you.  The New York Times broke it down for you on January 27, 2010.  The Web Way to Learn a Language by Eric Taub tells you there are free and expensive options.  There are social networks and black-box software available.  Do you want to hear paid actors speak textbook Spanish or do you want to interact with fellow students stutter in their strained accents.  It’s all there.

Actually not all of it is there.  Something is missing from the article.  And it’s important.

You want to learn Spanish.  How do you do it?  It’s a very easy series of difficult steps.

1. Fill your empty brain with Spanish vocabulary.

2. Speak Spanish badly.

3. Repeat #2 every day in every way for as long as it takes until you are watching Predator re-runs on Telemundo on a Wednesday night while every other idiot is tolerating CSI Miami.

Rosetta Stone and LiveMocha exist to complete step #1.  Your brain is empty and they know how to fill it with Spanish.  They offer variations of the same theme: turn a Flash application into an interactive vocabulary quiz.  The dings and buzzers tell you when you’re right and wrong.  The progress bar tells you how far you’ve come.  Eventually, your line will tell you and everyone else that you know how to ask for the bathroom in Barcelona.

The web is bigger than #1.  Rosetta Stone and LiveMocha are small enough to handle that because that’s the easy part.  Let’s try something else.  Let’s try to make #3 meaningful and engaging and interactive.  The web is waiting for an application that makes that possible.  This is what needs to happen.

There is a feeling every new language student shares.  Every student is overcome with this feeling the moment they are about to speak Spanish to a stranger.  It is a mixture of dread and shame and embarassment and frustration.  Overcoming this fear is essential to making #3 happen.  Recreating this feeling in a language website is possible and absolutley essential to building a truly innovative interactive experience.  The fear will not be overcome unless it is confronted.

A meaningful online lnaguage tool would make this promise to users: this will make you talk and it will force you to listen.  And you will most likely feel really uncomfortable while you’re doing it.  This is not the online language tool version eating your Spanish vegetables.  This is the online language tool version of your first Spanish date.  A horrible experience that left you with a lifetime worth of lessons.

All of the language websites profiled on the NYT article were fine in their own way.  They should be used along with library books, classrooms, and private tutors to support all the students in the middle of the #1 phase of their lessons.  This new tool described here would compliment any and all lesson plans with engaging practice tools.  In other words: the world wide web needs a language lab.

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