Thoughts on google translate?

[sfuqua]

I absolutely ache for grep, sed, and awk when I am on a system that doesn't have them. They are all text manipulation programs, which I got used to using on Unix systems.

I have used google translate to make many, many books and articles in parallel text. If you are at the parallel text stage of learning, it can be really nice. Google translate will produce some howlingly bad translations sometimes, but if you are going from L2-L1, you can recognize what it was supposed to be. In some ways, google translate translations are better for doing Listening-Reading. The google translate translations, for all their problems, tend to follow the word order of the L2 more closely.

I would never use google translate to go from English to Target language.

[MorkTheFiddle]

In effect, you have asked a very difficult question: how to learn a foreign language. You have come to the right place, though. Every time I visit I am humbled by the knowledge and experience of the other members.

1. If you want to go down the road you have chosen, I suggest with rdearman you find a ready-made list of basic vocabulary items and use that, not your own generated with Google Translate. However, I agree with rdearman that Google Translate will not hurt you much since you are just beginning.

Here is a list of the 1000 most common French words: French 1000
And Spanish: Spanish 1000

No doubt other lists exist on the Internet. Their contents will probably vary depending on their sources, but only a bit.

If you are using ANKI, I know you can find some lists already created by other users.

2. What are your time constraints? How much time can you devote to language study / reading every day, and what is the drop-dead date for you to learn one of the two languages you study?

The Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State estimates that it will take an English-speaker 575-600 hours to learn either French or Spanish. FSI

Not all experts agree with these numbers, which are not set in stone in any case. But they give you a ballpark figure. Plus, knowing one Romance language gives you a leg up on learning another (but not necessarily by very much, IMHO).

3. Members of this site's "parent site" have discussed the benefits of reading on the acquisition of vocabulary frequently. This is one of their threads: Reading to Gain Vocabulary.

I recommend you read it (not every member agrees that reading is the answer, BTW).

Most of them agree you need the "basics" before you begin a reading program. There are several popular and relatively inexpensive ways to to this, but this is a topic for another thread.

4. For the reading method itself, I suggest you get hold of some parallel texts (which by and large used to be called bilingual texts) of works you have enjoyed in English. This works better for works of fiction. Parallel texts of nonfiction are harder to find.

The post above by SFuqua about creating parallel texts gives a good way to make good use of Google Translate.

[language2015]

Personally I just don't think that reading is very useful for a beginner, because you come across tons of vocabulary and at that stage it's very difficult to tell which of that vocabulary is common and worth studying and which is unusual, literary, journalistic, or simply not important yet. Unless reading is your main goal, like I assumed. You can fall into a trap of trying to learn every single word instead of doing more productive things. I'd say it's more useful at intermediate to advanced level once you already know the basics and you can judge that better.

I think the best way to learn the basics is with a course designed for that; popular ones are Michel Thomas, Assimil, Pimsleur. After that, native materials become more useful and fun. People have different opinions though, that's just mine.

Ok. I understand you a lot better now.

My problem is that I find Michel Thomas, Assimil and Pimsleur to be super boring. Most beginner programs I find boring or are to slow for me to make the language gains I want. So I have turn to reading although I am a beginner.

[neofight78]

I would add myself to the list of people cautioning against the use of google translate as a dictionary, it's just too unreliable. Personally I only really use it for checking my own writing. I write something in Russian, and then I run it through Google Translate. If anything looks a bit funky in the translation to English I'll double check to see if I made a mistake or if it's just Google Translate being goofy. Most often, I'll pick up on a few typos. If speed of look up is important, I would go for an actual dictionary application rather than a website. It'll give you the quickest speed as you avoid the lag of hitting the web.

[Serpent]

Reading can be useful in the beginning but you need to look at the various strategies, and it's important to get comprehensible input (cheat if needed). For example, I'm currently learning Swedish. I'm really bored by most coursebooks, so I read parallel texts, children's books, whatever touristy information I find when visiting Finland (generally I'm able to get the same pamphlets in Finnish and German); I translate songs, watch football and occasionally try movies too. I'm also a linguist with a knowledge of English and okay'ish German; I was learning Danish for a few years before I started Swedish, and I've had exposure to all three Scandinavian languages (Norwegian too), as well as Dutch.
You can avoid textbooks, and that's fun, but there's no magical shortcut. (be sure to check this article. I highly recommend especially GLOSS and lyricstraining )

Also, I often criticize s_allard but you may be interested in these posts (probably only the first few pages in each thread, they become unproductive after that). I've always said that I respect s_allard and I really do, he's an experienced teacher. He's known many learners who love amassing the vocabulary and learning all sorts of "interesting" words, which can be enjoyable but not particularly useful, especially for speaking.

And honestly, medical words are some of the easiest ones (in Romance languages). English has words like cordial, cerebral, sanguine and whatnot. For reading comprehension, you don't need to know which kind of accent mark corazón has (though if you know how the word is pronounced, it will be obvious), nor the exact spelling. These are exactly the kind of words you can pick up while reading, even if you might not learn them properly until you've encountered them many times. Focus on the words that are *not* transparent, and consider using something like Spanish vocabulary: an etymological approach for the easy ones. (It also has some lists of non-transparent words and in general it's not as academic as it may sound)

[tommus]

I have search shortcuts setup in my browser for all my languages, so for instance I enter "tf un mot" in the address bar to get a google translation from french of "un mot". In chrome you can easily set this up by going to settings->"manage search engines" and using the url "https://translate.google.com/#fr/en/%s", changing "#fr" to whatever language code you want.

Very useful! It took me a while to figure out just how to do this, but it was worth the effort. Here is my set-up in "manage search engines" to bring up a Dutch > English Google Translate window and do the translation. Put something like this in the three boxes on the blank line under "Other search engines" and click "Finished":

"https://translate.google.com" nl "https://translate.google.com/#nl/en/%s"

Then in the normal Chrome search area, type nl (plus a space) and then the word or phrase you wish to translate. Hit "enter" and there it is. You can put in any number of variations of such search engines with different keywords. You can go in the reverse direction of course, such as #en/nl.

Thanks for that, AlexTG!

[garyb]

My problem is that I find Michel Thomas, Assimil and Pimsleur to be super boring. Most beginner programs I find boring or are to slow for me to make the language gains I want. So I have turn to reading although I am a beginner.

I think that "gains" can be misleading: for speaking, having a good grip on the basics can be more important than knowing a large number of words. Obviously you eventually want both, but at the early stages I think being able to express yourself is more important than knowing thousands of words, and even a lot of more advanced learners struggle with simple stuff despite knowing a bunch of semi-obscure words. The wiki post Serpent linked to discusses this. If courses like these are a bit slow and repetitive, it's for a reason. However, if you find them boring that's different and there's no point in doing something that you don't at all enjoy. I've done a few Pimsleur courses now and to be honest I'm sick of them and I don't want to ever hear that narrator's voice again, no matter how useful it is!

Serpent's post has some good ideas for a learner who doesn't like courses. I'm not a big fan of Gloss, LyricsTraining, LR method, etc. but some people love them, and it's all about finding something that works for you and that you enjoy.

[Serpent]

Is there anything specific you don't like about these methods btw?

[language2015]

Is there anything specific you don't like about these methods btw?

No not really.

[emk]

I am so confused. I have read a lot on techniques for beginner language learners and a lot of what I read encouraged me to start reading as soon as possible. Given that I don't know a lot of words reading can be difficult if not impossible. So I have to study vocabulary to better understand what I'm reading. I thought this was a good way for a beginner to start learning a language. I do want to learn how to speak spanish and french.

My problem is that I find Michel Thomas, Assimil and Pimsleur to be super boring. Most beginner programs I find boring or are to slow for me to make the language gains I want. So I have turn to reading although I am a beginner.

Lots of native input (reading, TV, music, etc.) is great, but it only really works if (1) you can more or less understand it, and (2) you read or watch a lot on a regular basis.

If you're just starting out, it's hard to use native materials, because they're totally incomprehensible, and there are no "hooks" to allow you to learn by osmosis. The linguist Dr. Stephen Krashen expressed this idea when he said, "We acquire language by understanding messages." If you can't understand anything, you will learn the language very slowly.

Courses like Assimil attempt to bridge this gap, by providing you with short, daily texts, with audio recordings and translations. The idea is that you can understand from the very beginning. Alternatively, you could use a regular course or a textbook to get up to roughly an A2 level, at which point it's usually possible to find some comprehensible and enjoyable native materials.

Iguanamon describes the multitrack approach, which combines courses with small amounts of native materials on a regular basis. I've seen this work very well for people here on the forum—the courses give them enough knowledge to get started, and the native materials provide an excellent incentive and a grounding in how the language is really used.

There are other techniques for working primarily with native materials in the very beginning, including Listening/Reading and subs2srs, but these probably work better for experienced language learners, who can realize when something isn't working right, and who can adjust things accordingly.

And whatever methods you choose, the most important thing is to keep doing something almost every day, and to continue doing so for four to six months even for a language that's relatively close to your own. Even terrible language learning methods will often succeed if you're persistent, but the best methods in the world will fail if you give up after week.