Beginners Travel Phrase Book

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rdearman
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Beginners Travel Phrase Book

Postby rdearman » Wed Aug 05, 2015 3:09 pm

Moses McCormick recently recommened this travel phrase website Loecsen. It allows you to get essential travel phrases in native and target language. Has a downloadable PDF & MP3's for each language set. I bought the entire Chinese/English set for €4,75. I figured it would be useful to create more ANKI cards with native speaking, since I'm trying to work on my speech & comprehension.
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Re: Beginners Travel Phrase Book

Postby arthaey » Wed Aug 05, 2015 9:49 pm

I have this fantasy of learning such a simple "travel phrase book" set of sentences for a bunch of languages that I don't otherwise study. Do report back on your impression of this particular phrase list!
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Re: Beginners Travel Phrase Book

Postby rdearman » Thu Aug 13, 2015 10:27 am

Well as requested I thought I would report back on this simple phrase list set.

Pros:
  1. The price is very cheap/reasonable.
  2. They provide audio versions in both the Native Language and the Target Language for each word or phrase
  3. They provide a well presented PDF with both NL & TL words and phrases.
  4. For Chinese they provide both characters (Simplified) and PinYin translations
  5. It has been fairly straight-forward albeit a little time consuming to create an anki deck from them.
  6. Words and phrases are groups as you'd expect into standard categories common to phrasebooks.
  7. Audio appears to be a human rather than a machine speaking.

Cons:
  1. The set of words and phrases are very basic and there are only 421 in the Chinese version I got. I compared this to a Japanese & Greek phrase book from Lonely Planet and Collins which averaged about 2000+ words & phrases.
  2. A significant amount of these words (101 in fact) are simply the letters from 1-101.
  3. The standard phrasebook sentence for "My name is ..." where the name is left blank for you to fill in has been filled by example names like Julian.

For a true beginner (A1) who wants to memorise some stock phrases and numbers then this is a very useful resource. The audio is clear and you have audio both ways, so if you wanted Audio only Anki cards you could have them. The cost is very reasonable even given the small amount of phrases & words given. I disliked the use of example names in the phrases, because this is typically where I would like a blank space to fill in my own name. Or where it is an introduction, e.g. "This is my wife ..." the name of another person. This was fairly easy for me to correct with Audacity, although others who aren't so computer literate may have struggled, or simply skipped this important phrase for fear of memorising someone elses name!

Generally I think it is a good investment for a beginner or perhaps a holiday traveller, but not much use for people who are more progressed.
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Re: Beginners Travel Phrase Book

Postby Hrhenry » Thu Aug 13, 2015 1:37 pm

Now that we're seriously leaning towards this site becoming permanent, this could be a nice crowd-sourced project for us.

I know at one time Unilang had a phrasebook of sorts, but we could do better, I think. We could start with PDFs and gradually add in audio. I don't know what the storage requirements would be, though.

In any case, it would be a great resource, and a big draw for new users.

What do you think?

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Re: Beginners Travel Phrase Book

Postby rdearman » Thu Aug 13, 2015 2:32 pm

Hrhenry wrote:Now that we're seriously leaning towards this site becoming permanent, this could be a nice crowd-sourced project for us.

I know at one time Unilang had a phrasebook of sorts, but we could do better, I think. We could start with PDFs and gradually add in audio. I don't know what the storage requirements would be, though.

In any case, it would be a great resource, and a big draw for new users.

What do you think?

R.
==

OK, ADMIN HAT OFF. I'M NOT SPEAKING FOR THE MODERATORS, THIS FORUM, ONLY MYSELF! You have been warned.

I think it would be an amazing resource! Especially if we go ahead and create anki decks from the phrases for people to just download. Storage shouldn't be to much of an issue, certainly to start with.

But what we'd need to start is create a common phrasebook set of phrases which can be added too in order to build up a catalogue, and also to categorise them. Then some kind of collaboration system and a project manager. I would envision this working a lot like the Distributed Proofreaders for project gutenberg. Someone volunteers to PM a book, or in our case a set of travelbooks with audio and selects the two languages they'll manage. They ask for volunteers (natives) to record the audio portion and volunteers (natives) to double-check the audio & phrase, then compile and release it. I think it should be released as Anki Deck, PDF & MP3, and possibly as an ISO file.

As more are made, then it becomes easier to make combinations, for example if someone already did EN<->FR, and EN<->DE, then a EN<->DE version is simple. Ideally of course you'd store the phrases, audio in a database and simply generate the combination you want by selecting the two languages.

Personally I've a whole raft of ideas for improvements, but I'm awaiting the outcome with FX before making suggestions. The problem is many of these ideas, like the one above would require someone to do a bit of programming, even if I provided the hosting and DB. The other problem is EMK reading me the riot act for making suggestions which generally tend to whip around and smack him in the face. Or not considering other methods of development rather than just old-fashioned DB & PHP scripts.

I'd love to see this type of thing as a resource, and I'd pay for something like that, in fact, I already have. So if someone with mad programming skills wants to PM me and open a git-hub opensource project, I'd really like to get involved, I'd be happy to do the database work, and the inital pass at phrases, and even record the English phrases. As long as you'd agree to the project being opensourced and all the audio to be in the public domain, like Librivox Audiobooks.

I got some great information from emk recently.

emk wrote:Heroku is free if your app is idle for at least 6 hours per day, and it basically automates everything you might ever do as a sysadmin. Basically, you just commit to a specific branch in version control, and it updates your site automatically. It's very heavily used by startups, including some with 100+ person teams, and it works very well. Their entry level paid plan for 24-hour uptime is $7/month. All plans include a managed PostgreSQL database and automatic backups.


So perhaps if someone wanted to explore the idea of creating something like this, and for the moment being completely independent of ntrHTLAL or HTLAL, I'm totally up for it. And if we manage to get a working version up, then we could always roll it back into whatver community site emerges from the FX talks as a sub-domain or something.
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Re: Beginners Travel Phrase Book

Postby Hrhenry » Thu Aug 13, 2015 4:43 pm

In addition to rdearman's thoughts, I'd like to see a phrasebook broken out into easy to find sections, such as:

Basics
Accommodation
Transportation
Shopping
Food and Drink
Health/Emergencies
SmallTalk
Etc.

and maybe even a small intermediate section at the end.

However it's laid out, once that's in place it'll be easy to find information, as rdearman said.

R.
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Re: Beginners Travel Phrase Book

Postby rdearman » Thu Aug 13, 2015 5:43 pm

Hrhenry wrote:In addition to rdearman's thoughts, I'd like to see a phrasebook broken out into easy to find sections, such as:

Basics
Accommodation
Transportation
Shopping
Food and Drink
Health/Emergencies
SmallTalk
Etc.

and maybe even a small intermediate section at the end.

However it's laid out, once that's in place it'll be easy to find information, as rdearman said.

R.
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Yes this is what I meant by category. Basically this would allow you to stick each phrase in the database under one or more categories and then select for example only one section like Health/Emergencies. These categories are pretty well defined in just about any phrasebook. There is also typically a small translation dictionary at the back. But the advantage of this idea is the audio it would let you memorise stock phrases as spoken by natives.
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Re: Beginners Travel Phrase Book

Postby tommus » Fri Aug 14, 2015 12:05 am

Hrhenry wrote:Etc.

Weather. Everybody talks about the weather.
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Re: Beginners Travel Phrase Book

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Aug 26, 2015 5:17 pm

I'd like to break this down into implementation chunk and requirements:

- creation:
-- list of key phrases
-- class phrases by chapter/sections
-- translated phrases in language xx
-- short mp3 files by author yy in language xx

-- possibility of selecting an author when multiple people have provided L2 files
-- exporting into an ANKI deck
-- exporting into a pdf and files set
-- must sign in/register to download
-- include transliterations in pdf

management:
-- approval steps

-- sound output either:
---- l2 only (anki)
---- l1/l2 (normal)
---- l2/l1/l2slow/l2broken into parts/l2slow/l2normal (extended)


Comments? Feedback?
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Re: Beginners Travel Phrase Book

Postby rdearman » Wed Aug 26, 2015 5:32 pm

zenmonkey wrote:I'd like to break this down into implementation chunk and requirements:

- creation:
-- list of key phrases
-- class phrases by chapter/sections
-- translated phrases in language xx
-- short mp3 files by author yy in language xx

Well, I can generate a list of key phrases based on the 5-10 various phrase books I have from publishers and I can group these into the standard categories used by these publishers and put them into a spreadsheet. (In English BTW)

I could then put these on to a Google Drive or similar and allow people to send me their L2 translation, which I would then feed back into the spreadsheet.

zenmonkey wrote:-- possibility of selecting an author when multiple people have provided L2 files
-- exporting into an ANKI deck
-- exporting into a pdf and files set
-- must sign in/register to download
-- include transliterations in pdf

I've been playing around with the auth system provided by the phpBB system. We could use the forum for auth and registration for download.

zenmonkey wrote:management:
-- approval steps

-- sound output either:
---- l2 only (anki)
---- l1/l2 (normal)
---- l2/l1/l2slow/l2broken into parts/l2slow/l2normal (extended)


Comments? Feedback?


The files generated by the system I critiqued was as follows.
1 PDF with L1 -> L2 with each phrase numbered, and broken into categories. Hotels, Taxi, Getting Help, etc.
1 Top level directory with sub-directories of categories. Sound files are mp3's stored in the category directory and numbered as per the pdf, with _a for L1 recording and _b for L2 recording.
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