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An Internet company that offers to acquire a second language by translating web content highlights the complexity of effective teaching

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In Germany, popular tradition speaks of the funnel of Nuremberg, a device used to pay for language skills in the student's head, with little or no effort by the teacher or student.

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the hitchhiker in the galaxy, the novel by science fiction satirist Douglas Adams, Arthur Dent space tireless traveler was able to understand a foreign language by inserting a Babel Fish in your ear.

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Combining these two concepts and approach to the aspirations of an Internet project called Duolingo recently launched. Described by its creators as "the next chapter of" human calculation, the goal is to translate a lot of web content in a variety of languages, while at the same time, offer free classes for millions of users of the language. The logic is this: Over 1.2 million people learn a foreign language, while large sections of the site exists only in one language, usually English. Why not combine those two activities and create a online courses in which students text translation site as part of the learning experience?

Say you want to learn Spanish. The program gives you a quote from a website and asked to translate. If not, the system helps you understand the difficult elements, giving examples of "education" or translations of individual words. Then submit your translation and additional information with their peer group.

According to the inventors, a group of only 100,000 people could translate the whole Wikipedia in Spanish in five weeks and the final goal is to attract over 100 million users.

If this all sounds too good to be true, it is because it is.

developers believe they have addressed the crucial question of how students can produce publication-ready translations to work in a language with little or no knowledge. Inexperienced translators can see how other students have a particular text and evaluate the work of another, creating a translation powered by sheer force of numbers.

It is a technique known as "crowdsourcing," a term recently defined by the Web strategist Henk van Ess as "channeling the desire of experts to solve a problem and then freely share response with all the world. " In fact, this is not a new idea. In pre-Internet days, the Oxford English Dictionary has openly called for volunteers to index all the words in the English language and has received about six million shipments during a period of 70 years. Internet crowdsourcing also has a role to play in language teaching, as it is activated every time a part of teachers or students of a problem with other students or teachers through blogs or social networking sites. In the field of translation, these existing projects, too. Over the past 18 months or more since its international launch, Linguee, a bilingual dictionary and search engine of translation has accumulated over 100 million pairs of sentences in different languages. Unfortunately, the wealth does not guarantee the quality and although Linguee can serve as a reference point, the user rated notes include many questionable as inexperienced translators accidentally repeat the mistakes of others. Room for another term, has crowdcrunched. And I suspect Duolingo suffer the same fate.

Duolingo is a text-based system, it is reasonable to assume that all are available on the practice of vocabulary and make videos to promote the website states that devices such as flash cards will have an important role in the learning process. It's not a bad thing - in fact, there are lots of free vocabulary trainers out there already, including those operated by leo.org crowdsourcing and multilingual dictionaries as dict.cc -. It is not enough

translation may play an important role in language learning, but a methodology specifically built around students in translation extracts decontextualized, reveals a vision of language learning, it is simplistic to extreme.

developers seem blissfully unaware of the fundamental principles of language teaching communication, second language acquisition and the dangers of adopting their peers instead of a teacher as the main model.

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