Learn a new language – 10 words at a time

by Scott Carmichael on

The joke is that people who speak 2 languages are bilingual, and people who speak one language are American.

Sure, it may not be that bad, but compared to Europe and Asia, the US really does lack bilingual speakers.

There are plenty of ways to pick up a new language, including those expensive courses you see advertised on TV infomercials every night.

Learn10 is a new approach to learning a language – you are presented with blocks of 10 words, and can have them emailed to you each day.

Their site offers a widget with a variety of language tools, including spoken audio and a translator. You can even embed that widget in your own web site.

Your daily list of 10 words can also be accessed through RSS, Twitter and Facebook!

Learn10 offers 24 different languages, including the “popular” ones, and a couple of less popular ones like Welsh and Danish. You probably won’t become a fluent linguist in a new language within a week, but it should provide you with a decent foundation of basic words.

The basic version of Learn10 is free, and includes most of their learn and test features. For $9.95 a month, you can upgrade to the premium version, which comes with a revision tool, a compete feature and a language training screensaver.

This location had absolutely tall!

by Scott Carmichael on

Apologies for the insane article title, it’s one of the results of passing a piece of text through “Blahblahfish“, a fun yet useless re-translator.

The site takes any text you enter, and translates it to one of the 28 languages supported by the translation site, then translates that back to English again.

“This location had absolutely tall” is actually “this site is absolutely fantastic” in English to Croatian and back.

The purpose? None. But it makes for some absolutely hilarious results. The “highest rated” Blahblahfish translation managed to turn “Oh Shit!” into “Human waste of Ohio” when passed through English to Korean and back. Passing “George Bush” through a Latin translator, yields “Agricultural Shrub”.

Of course, if you need a way to justify wasting 10 minutes of your life on creating gobbledygook text, then you could always claim you are doing scientific research on automated translation sites, but the real lesson here is that online translation sites are horrible at doing their job, and that using them for anything serious might be a bad idea.

(Via our friends at Download Squad)