Thoughts on google translate?

[language2015]

I appreciate you all talking the time to give me your opinion on google translate. Also thanks for the many different online dictionaries. I will have to reconsider my position on google translate but only slightly. I haven't completely seen the light.

I'm going to post a screen cap of some of my translations and if any of you spanish and french speakers notice a problem please tell me. I imagine that 20% to 30% of the translations might be wonky.

This is just a test. My instincts think that for what I am using google for is fine but I can't completely ignore the well informed opinions of you all.

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[rdearman]

Personally I don't think GT will do you any harm. You're unlikely to get much wrong if you are just looking up simple nouns as you say. You've listed your language as A0, so I doubt that you're going to have problems with various nuances of words. Having said that there are different types of doors.

IMHO, what you might be better off doing (and I'm going to get a lot of grief for saying this) is to find your self some common word lists and learn those. EMK has an interesting page on French from Lexique 3 and his well written DB examples: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/emk/lexique-experiments/blob/master/French%20Vocabulary%20Frequency%20with%20Lexique.ipynb

You can find similar databases for various languages. I found one for Italian at an Italian university online and I'm sure you can find one for Spanish.

When using anki you might be better off using sentences you pick up from books in order to get some context. With a little programming experience you could combine these two activities and for example take the top 250 most common words in French. Grep through a French book to find a sentence it is used in, then put the sentence itself into anki as a cloze deletion card. Here you could use GT to get the L1 translation. The added benefit of this is that you'll learn the other words in the sentence at the same time.

[garyb]

It seems like a strange vocabulary learning method. Generally Anki is used for reviewing as opposed to learning; learning single words without context doesn't tend to be too helpful; and at the beginner stage there are far more important things to learn than lists of body parts (which I realise is just an example and I imagine there are other categories too, but still). I don't want to be one of these posters who comes along and preaches their personal favourite methods and resources, as there are several paths to learning, but this just doesn't seem like an efficient or enjoyable one by any standard.

Opinions on the strategy aside, it seems like GT is okay for simple, well-defined and unambiguous nouns. So for the example of body parts it works quite well. Using it for words like "who" and "where" isn't such a great idea, since these words can be quite different depending on whether you're translating the interrogative "who" or the relative pronoun "who"/"whom", etc. I'd say that words like these come under grammar rather than vocabulary.

[language2015]

It seems like a strange vocabulary learning method. Generally Anki is used for reviewing as opposed to learning; learning single words without context doesn't tend to be too helpful; and at the beginner stage there are far more important things to learn than lists of body parts (which I realise is just an example and I imagine there are other categories too, but still). I don't want to be one of these posters who comes along and preaches their personal favourite methods and resources, as there are several paths to learning, but this just doesn't seem like an efficient or enjoyable one by any standard.

Opinions on the strategy aside, it seems like GT is okay for simple, well-defined and unambiguous nouns. So for the example of body parts it works quite well. Using it for words like "who" and "where" isn't such a great idea, since these words can be quite different depending on whether you're translating the interrogative "who" or the relative pronoun "who"/"whom", etc. I'd say that words like these come under grammar rather than vocabulary.

All of these words I translate are either words I see a lot in the spanish and french texts I read or words I expect I will encounter. I once read a wiki article on the human body and needed to learn a lot of words. Currently I am an economic major and I will review econ vocab on spanish and french websites. A lot of the words I expect to encounter while reading about economics are "production" and "demand", so I will look up the words ahead of time to better help me read.

[language2015]

When using anki you might be better off using sentences you pick up from books in order to get some context. With a little programming experience you could combine these two activities and for example take the top 250 most common words in French. Grep through a French book to find a sentence it is used in, then put the sentence itself into anki as a cloze deletion card. Here you could use GT to get the L1 translation. The added benefit of this is that you'll learn the other words in the sentence at the same time.

Right now I am adding sentences I read and also translated sentences I find from learning material in to anki. For every sentence I put into anki I will add the nouns in the sentence to a spreadsheet. Those nouns are typically words I don't know and will translate and study later.

What do you mean by grep?

Also thanks for the advice.

[garyb]

All of these words I translate are either words I see a lot in the spanish and french texts I read or words I expect I will encounter. I once read a wiki article on the human body and needed to learn a lot of words. Currently I am an economic major and I will review econ vocab on spanish and french websites. A lot of the words I expect to encounter while reading about economics are "production" and "demand", so I will look up the words ahead of time to better help me read.

Fair enough; as always, the best strategy to use can depend on your goals. People here can sometimes be guilty of assuming that other people's goals are the same as their own, especially regarding speaking, and I was probably doing that in my reply. If your focus is on reading texts on specific subjects as soon as possible, and speaking is a lower priority, your method is maybe quite sensible. It just seems a bit like trying to learn advanced stuff before the basics though, trying to run before you can walk, but again if your goal is passive skills (reading and listening) you don't need as strong a grasp on the basic structures etc. as you would for speaking and writing.

As for "grep"... another forum habit seems to be assuming a certain level of technical knowledge.

[language2015]

All of these words I translate are either words I see a lot in the spanish and french texts I read or words I expect I will encounter. I once read a wiki article on the human body and needed to learn a lot of words. Currently I am an economic major and I will review econ vocab on spanish and french websites. A lot of the words I expect to encounter while reading about economics are "production" and "demand", so I will look up the words ahead of time to better help me read.

Fair enough; as always, the best strategy to use can depend on your goals. People here can sometimes be guilty of assuming that other people's goals are the same as their own, especially regarding speaking, and I was probably doing that in my reply. If your focus is on reading texts on specific subjects as soon as possible, and speaking is a lower priority, your method is maybe quite sensible. It just seems a bit like trying to learn advanced stuff before the basics though, trying to run before you can walk, but again if your goal is passive skills (reading and listening) you don't need as strong a grasp on the basic structures etc. as you would for speaking and writing.

As for "grep"... another forum habit seems to be assuming a certain level of technical knowledge.

...

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.

[rdearman]

All of these words I translate are either words I see a lot in the spanish and french texts I read or words I expect I will encounter. I once read a wiki article on the human body and needed to learn a lot of words. Currently I am an economic major and I will review econ vocab on spanish and french websites. A lot of the words I expect to encounter while reading about economics are "production" and "demand", so I will look up the words ahead of time to better help me read.

Fair enough; as always, the best strategy to use can depend on your goals. People here can sometimes be guilty of assuming that other people's goals are the same as their own, especially regarding speaking, and I was probably doing that in my reply. If your focus is on reading texts on specific subjects as soon as possible, and speaking is a lower priority, your method is maybe quite sensible. It just seems a bit like trying to learn advanced stuff before the basics though, trying to run before you can walk, but again if your goal is passive skills (reading and listening) you don't need as strong a grasp on the basic structures etc. as you would for speaking and writing.

As for "grep"... another forum habit seems to be assuming a certain level of technical knowledge.

...

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.

Sorry, I do have a tendency to use technical vocabulary, because I'm an IT guy.

grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines matching a regular expression.

Basically grep was a bit of short-hand for finding a matching word in a phrase or sentence and using those. It seem you're already doing a lot of that.

[language2015]

Sorry, I do have a tendency to use technical vocabulary, because I'm an IT guy.

grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines matching a regular expression.

Basically grep was a bit of short-hand for finding a matching word in a phrase or sentence and using those. It seem you're already doing a lot of that.

No problem man.

[garyb]

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.