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Duolingo creator: ‘I wanted to create a way to learn languages for free’

August 27, 2014/0 Comments/in Language Learning, Technology and Language /by Haran Rasalingam

He’d sold two companies to Google by his mid twenties and now Luis von Ahn has created an app that he hopes will allow anyone with internet access to learn a language for free.

This article is from theguardian.com by Lottie O’Conor.

Luis von Ahn is a man of many titles: computer science professor, entrepreneur, crowdsourcing pioneer to name but a few. He sold two companies to Google while still in his 20s and his latest creation, Duolingo, is well on the way to revolutionising language learning across the world.

“What I wanted to do was create a way to learn languages for free,” says von Ahn. “If you look at language learning in the world, there are 1.2 billion people learning a foreign language and two thirds of those people are learning English so they can get a better job and earn more. The problem is that they don’t have equity and most language courses cost a lot of money.” Read more →

Most Commonly Spoken Language Other than English by London Boroughs

July 24, 2014/0 Comments/in Languages /by Haran Rasalingam

most-commonly-spoken-languages-in-london-other-than-english

http://imgur.com/W19JE6f

As forests are cleared and species vanish, there’s one other loss: a world of languages

June 8, 2014/0 Comments/in Sociolinguistics /by Haran Rasalingam

A new report shows a direct link between disappearing habitats and the loss of languages. One in four of the world’s 7,000 spoken tongues is now at risk of falling silent for ever as the threat to cultural biodiversity grows.

This article is from theguardian.com by John Vidal.

Benny Wenda from the highlands of West Papua speaks only nine languages these days. In his village of Pyramid in the Baliem valley, he converses in Lani, the language of his tribe, as well as Dani, Yali, Mee and Walak. Elsewhere, he speaks Indonesian, Papua New Guinean Pidgin, coastal Bayak and English. Read more →

Language Festival 2014

May 22, 2014/0 Comments/in Language Events, Language Learning /by Haran Rasalingam

The Language Festival is an ongoing campaign to showcase the importance of language learning in the UK.

As part of our ongoing campaign to showcase the importance of language learning in the UK, we will be holding our second joint national Language Festival in partnership with the Guardian during October and November 2014. Read more →

Geek deemed word of the year by the Collins online dictionary

December 16, 2013/0 Comments/in Reference and Language /by Haran Rasalingam

Dictionary changes definition of geek to ‘a person who is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about a specific subject’.

This article is from theguardian.com by Alexandra Topping.

Once a slur reserved for eggheads and an insult aimed at lovers of computer programming, geek has been deemed the word of the year by the Collins online dictionary. Read more →

Using a pen helps us discover thought – but the writing’s on the wall

November 26, 2013/0 Comments/in Psycholinguistics /by Haran Rasalingam

Keyboards are fine for communicating with machines, but handwriting captures the disconnected and chaotic patterns of real thought.

This article is from theguardian.com by Andrew Brown.

Swedish schools are considering whether to abandon the teaching of handwriting. They will continue to teach block capitals, but the subtleties of cursive writing will no longer be transmitted outside the elite. This seems to me to lose one of the most wonderful cognitive tools ever invented. Handwriting helps you think. The physicality of it makes the associated mental processes clearer and more memorable.

This kind of argument is quite wasted on educational bureaucrats, for whom the question is whether children can learn to type faster and more clearly than they can write by hand. After all, there’s no call for handwriting in most jobs today, any more than there is any requirement for independent thought.

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Language boosts invisible objects into visual awareness

August 12, 2013/0 Comments/in Philosophy of Language /by Haran Rasalingam

New research suggests that language can both enhance and diminish the sensitivity of our vision.

This article is from theguardian.com by Mo Costandi.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” meaning that we can only understand the world through the language we use, and that if our language does not include words for some particular idea or concept, then that concept cannot exist for us. The relationship between language and thought is complex, which researchers continue to debate. Some, like Wittgenstein, argue that thought is dependent on language. Others point out that thought can occur in the absence of language, deaf people being an important case in point. Read more →

Be a user, not a consumer: how capitalism has changed our language

August 11, 2013/0 Comments/in Sociolinguistics /by Haran Rasalingam

Capitalism is altering our language – and Raymond Williams saw it coming more than 50 years ago.

This article is from theguardian.com by Owen Hatherley.

According to a report by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles, English has become a peculiarly capitalist language – though they don’t quite put it like that. They used the somewhat blunt instrument of feeding 1.5m English-language books into Ngram Viewer, a tool that catalogues phrase usage, in order to count the frequency that words were used. The results proved that over the last 200 years there has been an ever-increasing use of particularly acquisitive words: “get”, “unique”, “individual”, “self”, “choose”; while over the same period “give” and “obliged” decreased. The pattern was only broken briefly in the relatively egalitarian years between the 40s and 70s. For the researchers, this shows the results of the English-speaking countries moving from “a predominantly rural, low-tech society to a predominantly urban, hi-tech society”. Read more →

Talking robot takes off for International Space Station

August 4, 2013/0 Comments/in Technology and Language /by Haran Rasalingam

Robot known as Kirobo is designed to be companion for astronaut Koichi Wakata.

This article is from theguardian.com by Maev Kennedy.

When the Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata arrives at the International Space Station in November, a companion will be waiting for him whose eyes will light up in recognition – literally.

Kirobo, the world’s first talking humanoid space robot, has already taken off – in the nattiest red Wellingtons since Paddington Bear – and should arrive at the space station by 9 August to await Wakata’s arrival. It knows he is coming: it has been programmed to recognise his face, and greet him warmly in Japanese.

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