Interlinear books are bilingual translations where the original has a translation right below each word or expression. Try them out on Interlinear Books.
For multilingual verb conjugation, try CoolJugator - a tool that can currently conjugate in dozens of different languages. It also recognizes forms and provides examples for each verb.
Here's something I didn't know about - a county in Georgia has just begun enacting mandatory Mandarin courses from grades 1 to 12. I don't have much to add to the NPR article and podcast on it except that the future of this really depends on the implementation. Having aid from the Confucius Institute should make it a much easier process than otherwise, and the teachers are not expensive to hire.
The superintendent is often asked why he has chosen to make Mandarin mandatory instead of Spanish in a county where the Hispanic population has doubled over the last census period, and his answer I find to be a bit lacking: that the county needs to concentrate on the future, not the past. A better argument: Spanish is the easier language to pick up through local exposure, whereas Mandarin is one that requires more active investment and attention if one wants to bring a full student population to functional fluency. No reason to imply that one language is the language of the past when demographics show that it clearly is not.
The University of Oregon has upgraded its Portuguese language courses due to increasing demand, moving from Portuguese being available as an undergraduate language requirement to Portuguese as a full language program. It is not overly focused on Brazil either:
The core courses will become part of the Portuguese program in Romance Languages beginning fall term, along with a new Portuguese 150 course – “Introduction to the Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) World.” The new offering will be a general education course, taught in English and intended to provide an overview of cultures in the Portuguese-speaking world.
Time to get rid of some open tabs. There's a lot of interesting news to reference today.
First the big news: China has successfully launched the first part of its Tiangong (天宫) space station. We already have a much larger space station in orbit right now (China wasn't invited to participate in the ISS, by the way) so having a space station in orbit is nothing new. However, the ability to launch and maintain a space station is nothing to sneeze at, and China is capable of sending humans to and from a location like that, as is Russia. The US at the moment cannot, and this will be a reminder of that.
I doubt that Tiangong is jarring enough to launch another space race, however. What might be capable of this is Chang'e in 2013: this lunar rover will be the first probe on the surface of the moon since Luna 24 in 1976. It is most likely that no other country will have such a craft on the surface then (just two years from now), so China will be the only country exploring the surface there and that might be unsettling. I hope it is.
Next up is SpaceX's new plan for a fully reusable Falcon 9. It works by...well, by doing what you see in this video. Advantages to reusability are obvious: reduced costs and less time in between launches.
Next is news from WISE: the probably second-most interesting thing about the WISE mission (after discovering brown dwarf stars) is the large number of asteroids it has been able to uncover, and thanks to WISE we now know an estimated 90% of the potentially Earth-threatening (100+ metres) in the inner Solar System. The total number of estimated asteroids has been lowered slightly, but that still leaves tens of thousands left to find.
Chinese news:
An article here on a new Mandarin immersion program in South Orange County, and
an article here in German on how Chinese turns out to be easier for students than they thought. According to the article there are at least 232 schools that offer Chinese, a 45% increase over four years ago.
And finally, a good article here from TIME explaining how Korea's hagwon (cram school) addiction works, and how the government is attempting to fight this. The article lists a number of methods that are being used, and while each of them is an improvement, none of them focus on the main problem: that going to Good University A means a guaranteed awesome career and life, while ending up at Crappy University B more or less spells doom for a person's ambitions in the business world. Almost all of these methods they use can be counteracted, and may only make the planning for entrance to these universities more comprehensive.
They are:
"It is working to improve normal public schools by putting teachers and principals through rigorous evaluations — which include opinion surveys by students, parents and peer teachers — and requiring additional training for low-scoring teachers." -- this and the next are completely positive.
"At the same time, the government hopes to reduce the strain on students. Corporal punishment, an entrenched and formalized ritual in South Korean schools, is now prohibited." -- nothing wrong with that.
"Admissions tests for prestigious, specialized high schools (like foreign-language schools) have been eliminated. Middle schoolers are now judged on the basis of their regular grades and an interview." -- this one is iffy. Judging students on their regular grades is good, but the interview seems like just another test to ace.
And 500 admissions officers have been appointed to the country's universities, to judge applicants not only on their test scores and grades but also other abilities. -- Same here; another test that can be passed.
Read more...
East Armenian National Corpus - perfect for the intermediate-level student. Select a text, begin reading it, and simply click on words you don't know and it'll give the meaning and case/tense/etc. for it.
The Figaro has an article here from yesterday with a short summary of the approach of each EU country (plus Norway) on second-language education. It goes like this:
Norway - starts at age 6, language English
Sweden - starts at age 7 or 10, language English
Finland - starts between 7 and 9, language English
Estonia - starts at 7 or 10, language unspecified
Latvia - starts at age 9, language unspecified
Lithuania - starts at age 10, language unspecified
Poland - starts at age 10, language unspecified
Denmark - starts at age 9, language unspecified
UK - starts at age 11, language unspecified
Ireland - not obligatory
Germany - starts at age 8 or 10, language English
Netherlands - starts at age 10, language English
French Belgium - starts at age 10, language unspecified
German Belgium - starts at age 3, language French
Dutch Belgium - starts at age 10, language French or English
France - starts at age 7 or 8, language unspecified
Spain - starts at age 3 or 8, language unspecified
Portugal - starts at age 8 or 10, language unspecified
Italy - starts at age 6, language English
Czech Republic - starts at age 8, language unspecified
Slovakia - starts at age 10, language unspecified
Austria - starts at age 6, language unspecified
Slovenia - starts at age 9, language unspecified
Hungary - starts at age 9, language unspecified
Romania - starts at age 8, language unspecified
Bulgaria - starts at age 8, language unspecified
Greece - starts at age 8, language English
Malta - starts at age 5, language English
Cyprus - starts at age 9, language French or English
The map there is colour-coded by starting age but since it seems to vary quite a bit it doesn't seem to be a very useful way to divide it up. One interesting trend is that most Germanic countries (Austria is the exception) have English as a mandatory first language, while Romance and Slavic countries don't tend to choose one (except Italy). That may be due to the fact that there is no dominant Romance language in the EU or the world, and while Russian is the largest Slavic language it's not part of the EU so one could easily make the argument that Polish is just as useful a Slavic language for an EU citizen.
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This article is receiving some attention on Meneame today. It seems that students of 15 years of age that spend a lot of time online have greater reading skills than those that don't. I don't have the time to delve into the report myself (you can find it here) but it seems to group nearly all online activity together: reading email with reading news, chatting with participating in group discussions. If so then that would be a pity, as it would be more interesting to compare the reading ability of students (or anybody else) that spend most of their time participating in online discussions and forums compared to those that prefer to chat one on one. I would assume that the former would have a greater reading ability due to the greater number of participants (you never know who is going to respond to what you write in an open forum) and the stronger emphasis on winning people over to your opinion, which often requires more sourcing and the ability to write effectively. There is also the odd grammar nazi that comes along to inform you that it's anyway, not anyways, and how to properly use a semicolon. Doing that while chatting one on one, however, is a quick way to lose a friend.
Some of the article:
Some experts have warned about the dangers of the internet age, how quick and easy access to information in small doses will harm reading ability. The American writer Nicholas G. Carr is one of these.
It is natural that new technologies change use and custom, but recent information from the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) from the OECD seems to indicate that this is not a danger to reading skills.
On the contrary, "students familiar with things like reading email, chat, reading online news, dictionaries and internet encyclopedias, participation in group discussions online and reading information on the internet have in general a greater reading ability", says the report which analyzed students of 15 years of age from 65 countries.
On the other hand, it does note that the percentage of students that read for pleasure has decreased. In 2000 PISA showed that 69% of students said they read a little a day for pleasure; last year this dropped to 64%. In Spain this went from 68% to 60% over the same time period.
I have another excellent site to share today that doesn't have to do with language and/or religion this time (well, a little bit about language - more on that in a bit), this one here called the Khan Academy. This is one example of some of the excellent free and open course material that has been available online in greater and greater volume in the past few years, and the subject matter here is more general than what one usually sees here on Page F30. Subjects such as banking, finance, calculus, and so on. It does have about 40 videos on cosmology and astronomy though, and as with the other subjects it starts from the simplest of introductions and eventually works into more complex subjects. The part on banking for example starts out with the concept of a bank (people make money and hide it in their mattress, somebody has a good idea for a business but doesn't have enough money, the bank finds a way to save the money of group A and lend it out to people in group B that have good enough ideas that they should be able to pay their loans back without defaulting), and then moves on to other subjects. The astronomy section also starts out with something quite basic (size of the Earth, wowzers it takes 17 years to fly around the Sun in a jet), and then moves on to slightly more complex subjects such as parallax, as you can see here.
As for what this has to do with language - some of the videos have an English transcript added, making it good for English L2 speakers as well as anyone who prefers to have a fairly accurate automatic translation below if studying another language. Unfortunately most of the time only the first few videos in a section have a proper transcript, so the rest of the time if you want to see one you'll have to use the automatic transcription service which is much less accurate.
The total number of videos is about 2000, so to watch them all would take about 500 hours. Lots of stuff to learn there if you have the time.
Here's an article on the booming of the newspaper industry in India, a pretty different picture from that seen in other parts of the world where newspapers are struggling overall. The reason for the boom is quite simple:
Each increase of just one percent equals 11 million extra people, a phenomenal number. It would also be interesting to see this graph represented as a total number of literate people as not only the literacy rate but also the population itself continues to increase. I won't draw up a full graph but here are a few numbers:
1951 - literacy 19%, population about 400 million = 80 million or so literate
1971 - literacy 35%, population 570 million = 200 million literate
1991 - literacy 52%, population 870 million = 450 million literate
2001 - literacy 65%, population 1.05 billion = 680 million literate
Read more...
Here's a story worth taking a look at - a school in Ontario has decided to ban homework after noticing that research shows it to be a negative influence in general, and as a result marks have improved. The most noteworthy part of the positive changes is that teachers have much more time to actually pay attention to student achievement instead of spending hours and hours marking and correcting piles of paper on their own.
Since students still have to prepare for and do well on tests, this is a bit reminiscent of the ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment) system, where employees are free to do whatever they want as long as certain results are achieved in the end. If the company needs Project A done by next week for example then the employees are free to do whatever they wish to get it done, and the details about who checks in at what time and whether one's break is for 15 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour is unimportant.
Hm, not too sure what to think about this. It seems that President Obama is interested in looking at extending school hours in order to help American kids learn more and be more competitive.
Finland is often touted as the country with the best school system in the world, and hours there are apparently quite short in comparison to many countries. The idea there is that children are only able to concentrate for a certain number of hours a day, so keep the hours low but up the quality, and teach them as much as possible during the limited time allotted.
Also, Barack Obama often brings up countries like Korea as an example of a place where students work hard for good grades but students here are usually so exhausted that they sleep through school and only fully wake up after school is over and it's time to go to the hagwon (cram school), which is more important careerwise than school anyway because those are the schools that prepare students for getting into prestigious universities. That's why the numbers in the article also need to be taken with a grain of salt, because though it says that many other Asian countries have shorter school hours than the US, this probably doesn't include cram schools in the evening.
But then again Finland is quite homogeneous, making this quite easy. The article makes a good point: that it would be a good idea to have schools stay open late and to let kids in on weekends in order to give them a safe place to go. Having a safe place to be at on the weekend can really make a big difference for many, so I'm definitely in favour of that.
An article here shows a consistent trend in Spain away from hard sciences like physics, chemistry and mathematics. You can see that physics has been hit especially hard, with a loss of 50% over the past 20 years.
Most comments below seem to blame academic inflation, where everyone is expected to get into university and kind of see it as little more than a continuation of high school, so most just choose similar subjects (humanities) and spend four years doing that, hanging out with friends, etc.
I found a list here on the Lithuanian Wikipedia of universities around the world where Lithuanian is taught, so I thought I'd give them here. I'm not certain that each of these are the official names of said universities; they could be University of X instead of X University or the other way around, but that's not a big deal.
Here they are:
Estonia
Tartu University
Italy
University of Florence University of Milano University of Piza
United States
Illinois University, Chicago Pennsylvania State University Washington University, Seattle
Latvia
Latvia University, Riga
Poland
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań Jogaila University, Krakow Warsaw University
Norway
Oslo University
France
National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations, Paris
Russia
Lomonosov State University, Moscow Saint Petersburg State University
Slovakia
Komensky University, Bratislava
Finland
Helsinki University
Sweden
Lund University Stockholm University
Switzerland
University of Bern
Hungary
Central European University, Budapest
Germany
Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University of Greifswald Humboldt University, Berlin University of Munster (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität)
You can read the article here. If you've ever read any of Malcolm Gladwell's recent books you may recognize the theme - people certainly vary in terms of intelligence, but in order to succeed at something it always takes a certain something called grit in this study, which refers to the ability to make a long-term goal and stick with it. In general it's a good article on a subject that deserves more attention, but there is one part you need to pay attention to, and that's this one:
because it's not always the case that sticking with a single goal or subject will lead to success in a field. One example is translation. Very general translation can be done by simply learning another language, learning it well, and then training oneself to translate back and forth between the two until it becomes quite natural (note that simply knowing a language doesn't necessarily imply being able to translate between this one and another you might know), but translation is very often done in specialized fields, where the sharing of knowledge between languages is crucial. This means chemistry, astronomy, religion, archaeology, etc., and those that are capable of translating for these fields are always those that have worked in them for years. You could be perfectly fluent in English for example and not know what a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon is, and if you are tasked with translating a whole paper filled with terms like this without knowing anything about chemistry then you've been given a nearly impossible task.
In a case like this then, the person that dives ahead into Language X and neglects to diversify by doing chemistry and Language X is studying in too narrow a field.
Naturally, flitting from one subject to another (the other extreme) is not a good idea either.
So what is the best way to go about this? Try seeing if you can combine two subjects you are interested in together. If you are studying chemistry and German, then study chemistry in German. If it's music and programming, then work on writing a program that complements this (how about something like this?). In fact, a person who studies music alone and is lacking in computer proficiency is probably at a disadvantage compared to someone that has put in the time to learn both - without the required computer knowledge it's hard to promote oneself. Ken Robinson has also said the following about creativity: "Creativity more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things."
I'll put the talk he gave at Ted below.
So read the article and read about the study, but don't infer that implies a simple formula where specialization in one field alone is the key to success. A certain amount of branching out is also a good thing.
"Unless you're Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy.
This is why universal health care needs to be the norm. After that it can be debated whether a mix of public and private health care is a good idea (and it probably is; if you are a private company capable of providing better service for less then you should be allowed to compete), but due to the nature of disease it's in a country's interest to provide the assurance that health care will always be available.
The same occurs with education, and the logic behind giving the assurance that these can be obtained for free is very simple: the number of years of productivity wasted by individuals that are forced to pay large sums for one or the other. When education reaches tens of thousands of dollars per year this means that students generally only have one shot at it; they either find a way to save up the money beforehand, their parents have to foot the bill, or they get a huge loan to pay for it, and the degree they acquire better be worth the cost because there's no way the student will be able to go back to university soon after graduation and entering the workforce. If the student then wants to get a master's later on that also requires quite a bit of saving up, which generally means wasted years as most people want a master's because they don't like the job they're working in, and thus will be leaving the company as soon as the opportunity strikes. Health care is similar to this except that it strikes unknowingly. One day you have a productive worker at a company with a gradually increasing wealth, and the next day all of a sudden you have someone struck with a huge bill that takes years to pay off, and with that you can say goodbye to the new car/stereo/computer/whatever that person had intended to buy.
Each country needs to provide these services in their own manner so one size doesn't fit all in health and education, but the issue needs to be looked at from the point of view of productivity (where much more common ground can be found) instead of an emotional one - health care is a right, education benefits culture, etc. Depending on how much of a strain on the budget it is, a country might only want to provide free education in areas where labour is most strained, such as math, science, engineering and so on, and perhaps other areas less crucial to industry (philosophy, religion) would remain paid for by the student.
Also don't forget that an investment in those industries then make it less necessary to bring in immigrants to do the job. Not that immigration is bad but it's always easier to find someone within the country to do a job if there's a sufficient amount of people educated in the field.
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Governor Schwarzenegger has directed the Secretary of Education to have open source textbooks for math and science in California ready by the fall, and the article on Ars Technica (the link there) doesn't seem too inclined to believe that this will be possible by that time due to California's stringent textbook standards. I'm not quite so skeptical, as long as those involved in producing the textbooks (can't find any info on that) are sufficiently large in number and well-motivated. Wikibooks has a number of great examples of textbooks of extremely high quality (here's one; here's another) that have been prepared over a fairly short period of time, and the only motivation for these has been the creation of material for anyone to use (and perhaps a bit of fame if the book is featured on the front page later on), whereas this is a statewide initiative with a lot depending on it.
Still not quite certain exactly how the process is going to work - the press release here states that:
At the Governor’s request, Secretary Thomas will work with State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell and State Board of Education President Ted Mitchell to develop a state approved list of standards-aligned, open-source digital textbooks for high school math and science. This list will be compiled after content developers across the country are asked to and have submitted digital material for review.
So it's not very clear just who the developers are and by when they will have submitted the material. Also, the press release doesn't mention exactly how much will be saved with this, but California has a student population of 6.2 million, so perhaps a savings of a few hundred million dollars.
