Lang-8: Learning languages the fun (and free) way.
People that have known me for a while know three things. Firstly, they know me (well, duh). Secondly, they know that I know Chinese. Thirdly, they know that I just lied, I know how to pretend I know Chinese – actually I suck pretty darn bad at it. In fact, I suck at the whole pretending business too.
So the other day, I came across the original Chinese hacker dude who created the Shellex-overlay for running Chromium on Gentoo Linux. Unfortunately the blog post was in Chinese. I immediately enrolled myself in a chinese tuition class an-
No, I fired up Google translate and stole my brother’s Chinese girlfriend to properly translate sections that apparently read “building know not updated porridge“.
Well, I don’t really like languages. Not that I don’t think they’re really useful and stuff, I just don’t like them because 1) they suck, and 2) I suck at them. The reasoning I like to use for “they suck” is the theory behind natural languages, then moving on to mathematics and programming languages and showing how “look. 1=1 is 1=1″. However like a friend of mine, one of my pet peeves is people “who wan talk talk leik vely good you know wan liao!“. (a representative sample of the local accent and style of speaking here. (see Wikipedia entry on Manglish – it’s friggin’ made up of English, Malay, Hokkien, Cantonese, Tamil – oh and you’d find “g’day mate” popping up once in a blue moon) – yeah, so I can’t exactly say being decent at a language is unimportant.
In fact language is really important. Especially when maintaining professionalism. You can’t argue – having good language skills are vital for…communicating well? Wow, that sounded bad.
…and for that reason when some Taiwanese guy lurking in the #gentoo-chat channel (sinsun) introduced me to the website Lang-8, I signed up. It’s a website where you can write journal entries (like a mini-blog) in another language, and other users who are native speakers of that language can come along and insult you.
So you know right away, I go allleady what lah and start correct the crap crap english udder people is writing wan.
No. I actually did start jocking up whatever was left of my 汉语 knowledge and now I’m learning that I sucked even worse than I thought I did. Well, it’s still an amazing website, and I’ve not seen one like it before. I would highly recommend it to anybody thinking to brush up on a foreign language. The correction system is pretty nifty (like crossing out stuff and highlighting) and it has one hell of an active community – you’d get responses literally minutes after you post it.
Feel free to add me as a friend, especially if you’re good at Chinese and can teach me how to say “Git repository” in Mandarin. My username there is “Moult”.
Note: I actually really do think having good knowledge of a language is very useful – up to the point where you start thinking “Here is a piece of paper” is some sort of symbolic metaphorical imagery for racism.
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- Free, legal music for all.
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