New iPad/iPhone app is out - Portuguese through Spanish

After a lot of work, our newest app is finally out. This one is a language learning app in contrast to others I've made the content so far that have been about history, space and other such subjects. The name of the app is Portuguese through Spanish, and looks like this:



A book for people who know Spanish (either fully or partially) and now want to learn Portuguese. Considering the similarities between the two though (about 90% lexical similarity and much the same grammar) for a lot of people it would be better to begin by converting the Spanish they already know into Portuguese whenever possible instead of starting entirely anew on the assumption that they know English and nothing else.

You'll notice that it says it's been created by the US government and that's because it comes from here, and I chose it to convert into an app as one of the most interesting FSI courses out there. As for the question of why one would choose to pay for an app when the FSI course can be downloaded for free - it's the same as why someone would pay for Sherlock Holmes or a Charles Dickens book at the bookstore when these books are now free of copyright as well. Nobody is stopping a person from going to Project Gutenberg and reading them there, but sometimes it feels better to read it as a book. In the same manner this app has been created for someone who is soon going to Brazil for whatever reason (or even at the airport waiting for a flight) and suddenly realizes that they speak Portuguese over there and wants to learn some before going. For someone like this the quickest way is to download an app and learn from that.

This doesn't mean that one can just speak Portuguese by converting Spanish, but when beginning to learn it it's best to start by finding out what can be converted, where the two languages are the same and where they differ. You'll notice notes on not just vocabulary transfer but also subtle differences in the way ser and estar are used, how Portuguese allows you to add suffixes to the infinitive where Spanish does not, and so on.

As it has just been released I have a number of promo codes, and I'll give Page F30 readers first crack at them if they want, so send me an email if you'd like one. After that I'll give the rest of them away somewhere else in a day or two.

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My (okay, our) new iPad/iPhone app - 150 Years of World History

I haven't mentioned this here before, but a few months ago I began creating iPad/iPhone apps with a few friends of mine. What's interesting about it is that I have never had an iPhone and have no plans to get one at the moment, but creating apps is turning out to be quite enjoyable considering the variety of apps that can be made. For the apps that I am a part of I then create the content, send it to them and they turn it into a shiny app that then gets approved a while later.

The latest one is called 150 Years of World History, and goes over one event per year from 1861 to 2010 (=150 years) in order to show how humanity has progressed, and sometimes regressed, during that time. About half of the events are what one might expect (beginning of World War I, D-Day, fall of the Berlin Wall etc.) while others are perhaps less known but still important. One of my favorites was probably the 1920 New York Times editorial that trashed Goddard (the father of American rocketry) for his idea that rockets could maneuver in space - according to the article at the time, since there's nothing in space there's nothing to push against, and thus any rocket after it left the atmosphere would careen endlessly in the same trajectory and so the only way to reach the Moon would be to aim it directly for it after which it would hit it at high velocity and explode. The New York Times issued a correction 40+ years later when the Apollo 11 mission was on its way to the Moon. Ha!

The app feels like a bit like a coffee table book, and is the kind of app one would want to download and read not only if interested in history but also before going to meet someone that you know is a history buff and you don't want to appear like you've never given the subject a second thought. Esperanto and Ido also get a mention in there too - Esperanto when it was invented as its creation and longevity is certainly worth a place in the history books, and Ido as its creation happened at a time when IALs received a lot of attention, and for all we know if the Esperantist community at the time had managed to avoid splitting (either through staying the course with Esperanto or the majority deciding to go with Ido) we would all be speaking a universal second language right now.

By the way, who can identify the second man in the first image? The other two faces are obvious (Einstein and George Bush) but I'm curious how many recognize the other guy's face.

Also if anyone wants to try to identify everything in the image just below here (in spite of the tiny size), be my guest. Clicking on the image will make it a bit easier to see.

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