Learning a new language is difficult, which is why there’s a huge market for tools and apps to help you do it. Some of them are really helpful and help you get up to speed quickly, others are a money sink. This week we’re looking at five of the best, based on your nominations.
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It’s true that American filmmaking inspired a global appreciation of the cinematic art form, but it’s impossible to deny the international influence on film by important auteurs from countries around the globe. With the inclusion of Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Costa-Gavras, François Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa, Pedro Almodóvar, and countless others, this list of essential films from non-English-speaking countries proves that American filmmaking has taken inspiration from countless artists working in many languages. Spotlighting just one film per year in the last half-century, here’s our list of 50 foreign-language films any true movie buff should see.
See the list: 50 Foreign-Language Films Everyone Needs to See, 1963-2013 | Flavorwire.
On the face of it, punctuation is not the most electrifying of subjects. A comma is a comma, a period is a period, and a semicolon is an argument waiting to happen. Look past squabbles over grammar, however, and punctuation’s staid veneer peels back to reveal a seething, Darwinian struggle that has played out over two millennia of the written word.
Though the period can claim an unbroken lineage stretching back to ancient Greece, and the quotation mark may boast of its roots in the early days of printing, for every venerable survivor there are countless other symbols that did not make the grade. The road from the scrolls of the library of Alexandria to today’s books, blog entries, and tweets is littered with the corpses of fallen marks of punctuation.
Read: 8 Punctuation Marks That Are No Longer Used | Keith Houston | HuffPost.
A new patent suggests that Apple may add text-to-speech functionality to its Notes app, specifically for communicating in a different language.
The feature will translate text into a desired language, and then convert that text to speech that can then be read aloud. Any integration with Siri is unclear.
The translation feature will be listed as another option from the pop up menu — along with cut, copy and paste — that currently shows up on the iPhone upon selecting a particular phrase.
Google Translate for the iPhone currently offers a similar functionality. The app reads an English word or phrase in a different language of your choice.
A Notes integration could potentially prove much more useful, with key phrases like “How do I get to the train station?” available in different languages at the ready.
via Apple Patent Hints at Text-to-Speech Translation for Notes | Mashable.
We were able to visualize the percentage of total commits in a given quarter for the top 16 programming languages from 1993 until today. We hope you’ll find this image—a provocative pattern of dips and spikes—to be as interesting as we do. It truly shows how dynamic the world of programming is. We’ve also included a few graphs on other interesting data points: total number of languages by year, average lines of code per commit, and tracking which languages influenced the development of others.
via A Visual History Of The Last 20 Years Of Open Source Code | ReadWrite.
Google is planning to add Somali, Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba and Zulu to its list of language options on Google Translate, the search engine giant’s free automatic translation service.
A post published [on August 27, 2013] on the Google Africa page on Google+ called on users to evaluate the translation quality of the five languages. After assessing passages that are translated into English and vice versa, users can rate them as Excellent, Good, Fair or Poor.
via Google Translate adds African languages | World news | theguardian.com.
From simple alphabets to secret symbolic languages, graphic designer Saki Mafundikwa celebrates the many forms of written communication across the continent of Africa. He highlights the history and legacy that are embodied in written words and symbols, and urges African designers to draw on these graphic forms for fresh inspiration. It’s summed up in his favorite Ghanaian glyph, Sankofa, which means “return and get it” — or “learn from the past.”
via Saki Mafundikwa: Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets | Video on TED.com.
Google today rolled out its Google Translate handwriting feature for the Web, allowing users to draw the phrases or words they need translated when a keyboard can’t do the trick.
Handwriting has been an option on the Google Translate Android app since Jan. 2012, but it is now available via the Google Translate website on the browser.
via Handwriting Feature Added to Google Translate Homepage | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.
An analysis of the most highly contested articles on Wikipedia reveals the controversies that appear invariant across languages and cultures.
See the full article: Edit Wars Reveal The 10 Most Controversial Topics on Wikipedia | MIT Technology Review. The 10 most controversial topics are:
Five [Six] Free Online Tools to Learn Another Language | Gizmodo
See also: LaMP Teaches You a Foreign Language via Movie and YouTube Subtitles | LifeHacker. LaMP can be installed on Windows computers or accessed online.
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