A student in New Zealand may have come up with a way to make learning a language easier.<\/p>\n
Michael Walmsley, a PhD student, is working on a project to allow learners to read texts in a foreign language interspersed with words in their native language. He\u2019s been awarded almost NZ$100,000 to help fund his research into the idea.<\/p>\n
The software engineering student will spend the next three years researching ways to tap into existing online resources, such as Wikipedia<\/a> and the Wiktionary<\/a>, to create suitable reading texts for language learners.<\/p>\n
Both online resources come in around 170 languages.<\/p>\n
Mr Walmsley hopes to develop software to use them to automatically create suitable texts.<\/p>\n
At this stage he is focusing on Japanese and Spanish with the hope to one day bring in te reo.<\/p>\n
“The goal is to make learning a language fit into people’s busy schedules,” he said. (Source: Stuff.co.nz<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The idea is an interesting one, especially as people are increasingly busy with less time to spend on learning a language. It would also take away some of the frustration learners feel when constantly reaching for a dictionary<\/a> whilst reading a text. My concern is that it would create gaps in knowledge, however, and perhaps even create more hybrid languages such as Spanglish<\/a> \u2013 people could end up merely speaking a mix of their native language and target language rather than becoming fluent. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s definitely worth watching out for the results of the project though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A student in New Zealand may have come up with a way to make learning a language easier. Michael Walmsley, a PhD student, is working on a project to allow learners to read texts in a foreign language interspersed with words in their native language. He\u2019s been awarded almost NZ$100,000 to help fund his research […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[420,40,154,327,152,16],"tags":[438,123,437,439,440,16],"class_list":["post-517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japanese","category-language-acquisition","category-research","category-spanish","category-te-reo-maori","category-technology","tag-foreign-language","tag-language-learning","tag-learning-a-language","tag-reading-texts","tag-spanglish","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":518,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions\/518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}