I’ve talked about using iMacros in the past. Basically, you click a button, a dialogue pops up and asks you “Which word do you want to look up?” and in 4 seconds, you have a Google Images link to the word, a Forvo.com recording, a bilingual dictionary entry and a monolingual dictionary entry. Magic. Typically, it’s a bit of a pain to set up, but in preparation for an upcoming workshop, I’ve decided to make it a lot easier.
This is some early bookstore research for a bunch of foreign language dictionary reviews. I went to two large bookstores (The enormous Half Price Books and the equally enormous Barnes & Noble in Dallas) and wrote down the names of pretty-much every dictionary they had in every language they carried, and also noted whether they included pronunciation information (and if so, whether it was IPA, some formal system (pinyin, romaji), some random system they invented, or some terrible English approximation [Bawn-JOOR]). I’ve tried to provide Amazon links to as many dictionaries as possible.
Recently, a reader asked me whether I had heard of the Assimil method, and whether I’d recommend it or not. I had never really looked into them, and now that I’ve done a bit of research, I can comment a bit.
I keep addressing this question in various forum/comment discussions, but I should discuss it here, because it addresses a lot of issues in a lot of languages. The question is:
How do I deal with a language that uses a pictographic alphabet like Chinese?
Resources for learning Japanese have been added, as well as social media buttons (click like! It’s fun!), some cosmetic tweaks and the Italian and French Anki deck links have been fixed (under Languages -> Learn Italian/French/Russian)
I’ve changed the website fonts around to make them more compatible with various browsers; please let me know if you have weird behaviors, images on top of text, whole paragraphs italic, etc (and if so, what computer/browser you’re using!)
Thanks!
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