viernes, 21 de septiembre de 2012

Some news

It has been a while since my last post. I think I was not in the mood for writing. But, now I am, or at least I am writing and I hope I will post it, eventually.
I put English learning aside for a while, and almost everything else. However, I came back stronger than ever (I mean, I came back), and now I continue trying to improve my English, and I started to learn French in a more serious way, studying a bit every day. I will let you know when my writing skills in French are good enough by my standards writing something here.
For now, I am trying to expand my vocabulary, and get used to listen to people speaking French. In order to help me to get my goal, I am using several tools, but the most helpful until now is this website. They use an interesting method to teach languages (Spanish, French, and German at this time). As part of your learning process, you have to make translations of pieces of documents that you can find on the Internet.
The man behind this idea is the same that invented well-known applications captcha and re-captcha. The main idea of this project is quite similar to the one behind re-captcha. A lot of people will help to do a huge job that computers are not able to do by themselves yet. Indeed, translating all the documents on the web to the most extended languages in the world is not easy task. However, this project intends to use millions of people to help to get the job done.
In my opinion, the most clever idea is the way to achieve that that amount of people help with the task for free. And the answer is giving them (or us, because I am a user too) a quality language course in return. Moreover, there are experts that think this could be Google's next big acquisition (for more information, read this article).
Anyway, I think it is a very helpful and amusing project, and I believe it is going to help me learn French and who know what other languages.

P.S. If you are interested in learning or improving a language, I recommend you to try this tool.