If there is one thing you take away from this article, its ‘don’t be afraid of the terminal’. One of the main reasons for me is the power I have through the terminal command line in manipulating language and text to help me learn languages.
#Anki app audio mac osx#
I used to be an ardent Windows user for many years, but since I switched over to Mac OSX a few years back, I can’t see myself going back to Windows voluntarily anytime soon. If you want to get an edge in your language learning strategy, I highly recommend starting a love affair with the terminal on your computer. While I use all of the above mentioned techniques to help me learn language, today I would like to share with you one technique that I have been using lately that for me is a real game changer. I can speak with people from every country on the planet and learn from them just as easily as calling my next door neighbour. I can use Google’s translate app that even lets me point my camera at signs and see the translated text appear on signs which I can then take screen shots of and store in my ‘sign’ database. I can see pitch contours and voice prints of my voice and take videos of native speakers speaking. I can use voice to text recognition software. With my phone alone I can record people’s voices including my own and then play it back at normal or slower speed rates to analyse and learn. Right now we have technological tools that would have really blown anyone from just twenty years ago away. One thing that I have learnt over the years is that it is in the creating and building process that most of the learning happens. If it didn’t exist, then I could build my own. I didn’t have to depend on what already existed out there. I learnt that through developing some degree of skill in using and manipulating technology gave me a big advantage when it came to language learning.
#Anki app audio code#
He never stopped learning about new technology however, teaching himself to code BASIC and Assembly Language on his Commodore 64 and other early computing devices in the 80’s and 90’s, and continued to learn right up until his passing in 1997. His expertise in radio and electronics was a legacy of his job during World War II. In order to be able to learn the way he learnt, he had to develop a certain level of technical expertise. If my grandfather was alive today, I can imagine how much fun he would have putting all the tools that we have now to good use. Now he could (and would) record radio broadcasts and native speakers of languages speaking as well as himself speaking all in the name of improving his own ability in the languages that he spoke. For him, the advent of the cassette recorder was a game changer. Shortwave radio was one of the most powerful tools that he had used over the years to help him become fluent in over eleven languages. We would even listen to foreign broadcasts in Morse code. He would tune into languages both that he knew and that he didn’t know and we would talk about the accents and words we heard and he would show me the connections to words, sounds and phrases that I already knew. When I was about five years old, I used to sit for hours in awe with my grandfather tuning into shortwave radio broadcasts from all over the world.
Use All the Tools You Can Lay Your Hands on To Learn I would advise reading this whole article first, then watching how I implement it in the video. While the video focuses on Thai, the principles that I talk about and show you in this article and in the video can be done for any language – Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Spanish, Russian. You can watch my Webinar tutorial above, where I present this article's information.
By the end of this article, you will have all the tools available to automatically generate your own customised multi-lingual audio, spaced-repetition vocabulary learning training files as well as physical flash cards to help you increase your vocabulary in the language that you are learning and develop a much more natural level of fluency speaking the language.
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