My aim has been to achieve basic proficiency in the German language through whatever online tools I might find available. Below, in sequence, is my survey of the platforms I used.<\/p>\n
Although Rosetta Stone has been around for much longer, Duolingo is probably the most popular language learning software. My first impression of Duolingo is the design is fantastic. I find it really represents the very forefront of design trends, using flat design and a very minimalist space. Combined with their use gamification and spaced repetition, it makes the platform very engaging, and a fun way to quickly acquire basic language skills. The system is also well organized, providing lessons grouped according to of instruction, such a adjectives, adverbs, noun groupings and verb tenses.<\/p>\n
However, Duolingo does not provide any instruction to accompany lessons. Particularly with German, one is expected to learn grammatical rules through memorization, not an understanding of their logic or patterns of use. Finally, while the platform steadily introduces additional vocabulary, and a certain degree of complex sentence structure, instead of building on the combined vocabulary, lessons tend to be composed of new words with the same basic vocabulary. It means that there\u2019s basically no way to advance to more complex sentence structures.<\/p>\n
For that reason, I decided to try Rosetta Stone. Most of the reviews that I have read claim that Duolingo is good for beginners, but that Rosetta Stone is better suited for advanced learners. I\u2019ve never tried the offline version of Rosetta Stone, but my impression is they are trying to ride the spaced-repetition and gamification bandwagon popularized by Duolingo, but they don\u2019t do so with as much success. Rosetta Stone is based on Flash, which is not only archaic, but every slow to load. The advantage of Duolingo is that their site is very quick to load, making use of their spaced-repetition method worthwhile. Ultimately, Rosetta Stone offered little more advanced instruction than Duolingo.<\/p>\n
The best system I found, better than both Duolingo and Rosetta Stone, for basic language instruction was the language learning section of the website of Deutsche Welle, Germany’s public international broadcaster. Lessons are divided into 4 categories following the Common European Reference Framework<\/em>, including A1, A2, two tiers of B1. Each tier is divided into several groupings with a number of lessons each. Each lesson begins with a short video from a series that follows the entire length of the course. And each grouping deals with a particular topic of the language.\u00a0 And while not as quick to work through as Duolingo, I thought that DW\u2019s gamified lessons had a broader variety of types, which were more instructive. Especially useful were paragraphs of text or audio recording accompanied by questions to test comprehension.<\/p>\n However, DW ends at B1, which is merely a minimum level of proficiency in German. Through my reading for this course, I discovered Krashen\u2019s (1989) recommendation for Extensive Reading. I could see from my own experience that I would fluid exposure to the language, at my language level so that I could see repeated uses of the words I was learning. Given my experience with the several platforms, I took the time to think about what would be the best tool. I decided that the optimal system would be one where there would be long paragraphs of text, and where words could be hyperlinked to detailed explanations.<\/p>\n It turns out that system already exists, and it\u2019s better than I envisioned, because it comes with video. Yabla comes with a video library, and an interactive player. Each video is divided up into small segments according to each sentence spoken, with navigation tools that allow one to easily stop the scene, or return to the previous or advance to the next. Each video is accompanied by subtitles and accompanying translation. Every word in the subtitles is hyperlinked, just as I had envisioned it, providing not only their meaning, but their use-cases, such as verb tense, declination, and so on.<\/p>\n I think that language learning is a particularly interesting use-case, because it provides a unique window into the possibilities for self-directed learning in a digital environment. What\u2019s interesting is that the value of each platform is in an inverse relationship to its popularity. My guess is that Google massive financial resources had a lot to do with Duolingo\u2019s popularity, for the purposes of attracting users to support Google research into AI. Deutsche Welle is excellent as well. But clearly Yabla has not benefit from the type of venture capital that has propelled either Duolingo or Rosetta Stone. Though, it brilliantly illustrates how to maximize the affordances of the web to create not only an engaging user-experience, but an effective one as well.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n References<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Krashen, S. (1989), We Acquire Vocabulary and Spelling by Reading: Additional Evidence for the Input Hypothesis.\u00a0The Modern Language Journal<\/em>,\u00a073<\/em>\u00a0(4), pp.\u00a0440\u2013464,<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My aim has been to achieve basic proficiency in the German language through whatever online tools I might find available. Below, in sequence, is my survey of the platforms I used.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lrnt526"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0067\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0067\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0067\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0067\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/112"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0067\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0067\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":431,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0067\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions\/431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0067\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0067\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0067\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Yabla<\/a><\/h2>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n