An Internet Language Learning Portals Page
1. INTRODUCTION
2. NOTES
3. A DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF WEB PRESENCE
4. POSSIBLE WEB PRESENCE TECHNIQES
5. SOME LINKS
6. ILOVELANGUAGES SITE
7. OBEROI SITE
8. SI SPAIN SITE
9. ANOTHER SITE
10. SPANDICT SITE
11. OTHER SITES
12. TRAVLANG
13. THE BBC LANGUAGE SITE
14. OTHER SITES
15. FRENCH SITES
16. CATALAN SITES
17. GERMAN
This page provides some links to Internet 'Portal' sites dedicated to
language learning. The word portal is used here in the sense of a site
which really is a collection of links to other sites and resources. In this
sense a portal is a kind of hyperlinked encyclopaedia.
This page can also be seen as the documentation of the 'web-promotion' process
which, as I see it, is the process of making other people aware of a resource
on the Internet (presumably one that you yourself have an interest in, or have
created). This is a process which I have very little experience of, but feel is
important.
An interesting example is the site 'matts script archive' (http://www.scriptarchive.com/) which contains
a very limited and non-particularly-great set cgi-scripts but which has (and has had for
about 5 years) a very strong Internet presence. The actual scripts themselves are
not of particularly high quality and there are only about 10 of them and yet all the
search engines (including google) seem to return this site on a search for
'cgi scripts' or 'web scripts' or something similar. The web presence of this
site is so strong that the contributors to CPAN, the major Perl web code repository
have deliberately written replacement scripts for all those obtainable on
Matts script archive so that people will not be so tempted to use them.
By web-presence, I mean the profile and exposure of a web-site or a web application.
This profile can be measured by such things as search engine rankings (and specifically
in this day and age -may 2003- the Google search engine ranking), the ease with which a site is
found through a search engine, as well as the number of distinct users of a web-site/application.
This web-presence can be extremely important from a business point of view, but it
can also be over-rated; some businesses (even software businesses) can function perfectly
well without it (in my opinion).
The discussion below is slightly garbled since many of the ideas occurred to me as I was
writing, and necessarily, the ideas do not have firm 'statistical' or evidencial
bases but are rather suggestions and proposals.
One factor in the 'web-presence' of this site mentioned above (Matts script archive) is probably simply its age, and
the fact that it was one of the first sites to do what it does, and offer something
useful, and its predominance has continued to pervade. This is perhaps the first
law of Internet presence;
1. Internet presence is a quality that must percolate through web-space and real-time in a way that cannot
be described through any analytical formula. The percolation of web presence
it essentially a chaotic and 'entropic' process which relies as much as anything on the
passing of time.
This law is demonstrated by Google itself which is gradually achieving
total dominance, despite having no formal 'advertising' campaign. It is strange to
consider, that Google's dominance has been achieved entirely through a kind of
'word of mouth'. This perhaps leads to the second law of 'web-presence'
2. Web presence cannot be dictated by any one central authority structure. The
percolation of web-presence is completely decentralized (like the Internet itself)
and therefore the traditional capitalist 'marketing' techniques are almost completely
in-effective in obtaining 'web-presence'.
This leads to my other putative principal of web-presence: That the action of quality
and time through the medium of the Internet actually achieves everything that
traditional marketing techniques have achieved in traditional capitalistic markets.
My main evidence for this are the following enterprises. Google, Yahoo and Linux.
While linux is more debatable, both Google and Yahoo offer stable, very high
quality systems which through the action of time and Internet diffusion have become
over-whelmingly dominating in their respective web spheres, despite limited traditional
capitalistic marketing techniques. Also in the case of Yahoo, this may
be debatable, considering the continued predominance of 'Hotmail' in
the collective psyche.
3. This action of time leads to my third principle of web-presence: Continuity and Evolution. Since the
web is such a dynamic and constantly fluxing medium, web users perhaps have a psychological
need to have 'cornerstones' which allow them to orientate themselves.
These cornerstone sites are web-sites/ applications which maintain continuity. It is the
web-sites which can provide this continuity and stability which gradually but surely win the
war of web-presence.
The second part of this principle is 'Evolution'. A web site can harness the dynamism
of the Internet by building an application in a very non-(software)-traditional way. That is:
instead of having fixed, 'discreet' releases of software (or web-pages), the web site
builders, can evolve the web-site/ web-application.
An interesting (to me) example of the evolutionary approach to web-based (or lets say
'distributed' in order to be more general) software, is Google's automatic language
translation engines. These engines for quite some time now, have been really quite
poor. They make lots of obvious mistakes which rival translators dont make.
But this hasn't stopped Google from publishing these web-based translation engines
and providing the service. This is because Google employs an evolutionary approach
and it knows that the low quality of its language translation engines is not going
to in any way destroy peoples affection for their very high quality search engine
service.
This is a simple idea. Because the Google's translation engine service and the search engine
service are completely seperate things (although it would be possible to integrate them)
Google are able to employ an evolutionary approach to the development of their
automatic language translation service. At this time (may 2003) I am beginning to notice
that the Google translation engines are beginning to significantly improve, as I was
sure that they would (not through prescience, but through consistency with the quality of
their other systems). The point is that Google have actually achieved something significant
by publishing their (low quality) translation engines when they were still in a kind
of 'beta' state (which they acknowledge). They have achieved my 3rd principle of
web-presence (and web-advertising) which is Continuity.
Since traditional advertising is not particularly effective on the internet and the target users of
a web-system (or distributed system) are too diverse both geographically and in
'personal profile' to really use normal capitalistic marketing techniques (advertising etc)
, then the only way to notify people of a new feature or system, is
to publish that system and use the natural entropy of the hyperlink to essentially
do your advertising for you. At first most users wont notice the 'Translate this page'
link on the Google search site, but gradually the system will percolate through to
the 'collective consciousness'. It does this via the normal ways that information
has been distributed in a traditional society (ie pre-capitalistic), through individual
to individual communication, whether it is verbal or written, rather than through
centrally dispersed advertising.
In traditional software development this type of evolutionary development has been
frowned apon and regarded as dangerous because of the possibility of introducing 'bugs'
and errors into code that has already been tested.
While this will probably seem a clicke, I feel this web-promotion process
is analagous to casting a fishing net. The net must be
very carefully prepared (all holes mended) but the net must be cast wide and be left for
a significant amount of time. Also it must be expected that only a very small number of
fish are going to be 'caught' for each square metre of net. In the case of web-promotion
I think it is important that the need to cast a wide and comprehensive net does not
tempt the promotor into using insensitive mass marketing techniques.
Because the Internet is 'automatable' is is tempting to automate human
relations and communication on the internet. By automatable, I mean that it is possible to use
software, and develop software to solve problems of web-promotion and
web-advertising. However, in my opinion, it is very important never ever to
delegate the true communication process to software. For example, in some
cases it may be justifiable to send a 'bulk email', that is an email to
multiple recipients, in the style of a traditional 'form letter'. And in some
cases it may even be justifiable to automate this bulk emailing process
(using some kind of scheduling service for example). However, as I see it,
the more comprehensive and powerful the software solution employed is, the
greater the danger that the true communication process will be mangled and
destroyed. One reason for this is that human beings have a natural dislike
and instinctive revulsion to fake communication. This is possibly an
important 'survival instinct'.
My argument is that the genuine communication process is far too important
in the web-promotion process to endanger it by using facile and simplistic
software solutions. In exaggerated terms, to send a bulk email to 5000
people may well have less long term effect than one well written email to
one carefully chosen person.
The posting of your site onto 'portal' type sites. This I suppose is the equivalent of
putting a notice in a shop window. Since most modern and good Search
Engines seem to use the web of hyperlinks in order to index and categorize
the Internet, it seems that one crucial factor in the web-promotion process
is establishing links that point to the desired site. Since it is not
possible to 'force' the owner of another web-site/ server to create links
which point to the desired site, this process is slightly delicate.
The delicate automation of this process of posting onto portal sites is
another possible technique. This could involve
automatically sending update notifications to portal sites.
However this must be done with great care and with a firm eye on
netiquette, since the old abusive techniques of web-promotion have been generally
shown to be fairly counter-productive (I think).
The emailing of selected people who may be genuinely interested in your endevour.
Once again to be used with care.
Traditional mediums of notification, such a post and phone. I believe these are
very under-rated.
Place the google search engine component on the site which you wish to
promote. This may encourage google to index the site (although I am not
sure about this). Since Google appears to work using a 'cached' index and
cached pages, it may be the case that google has to cache the desired site
in order to seach it.
http://www.google.com/faq_freewebsearch.html
This is the FAQ for the google site search functionality
Some kind of database of previous notifications sent via various means (email,
web-posting, snail-mail, etc) must be kept in order to not duplicate notifications,
and in order to be able to maintain some-kind of progress information, such as
Who has replied? What portal sites have put up a link to you?
http://www.free-translator.com/links2.html#cur
some links to on-line language learning courses.
http://www.ilovelanguages.com/
links to language resources, postable. This site also includes some decent
catalan links. This site seems to be updated only infrequently. For
examples it does not seem to have been update in the last 2 months (as of
may 21, 2003)
http://www.ilovelanguages.com/index.php?category=Languages%7CCollections+of+Links
This is the page which links to other portal sites
http://www.ilovelanguages.com/index.php?addsite=yes
The add site form for the above.
POSTED catalan tutor 1may2003
May 21, 2003: Sent a query as to why the site has not been added
[email protected]
http://www.geocities.com/~oberoi/language.html
Another 'collection of links' site. This does not appear to have been
updated since July 2002
Contact: On may 21, 2003 I sent the following email
Result: mail delivery failure
Dear Mr Oberoi,
I am not sure if you still actively maintain
your web page at http://www.geocities.com/~oberoi/language.html
but anyway:
I created a Catalan Audio Language Tutoring program
which is at
http://www.geocities.com/matth3wbishop/
which I believe is quite useful.
Yours sincerely
matth3wbishop
http://www.sispain.org/english/index.html
Contact: [email protected]
This is a portal about all things spanish. It seems quite big and well
established.
Communications: On may 21, 2003 I sent the following email to the
email address above.
http://fp.ehba.org/
[email protected] <[email protected]>
Another spanish/ english portal site.
Comm: 21 may 2003, sent a notification about the audio tutor.
Contact: http://college.hmco.com/cgi-bin/SaCGI.cgi/college/catalog.class?FNC=GoWriteToUs__Fcust_serv_midpage_html
http://college.hmco.com/languages/french/resources/students/links/index.html
A french language learning portal site.
Comm: 21 may 2003, sent a notification about the audio tutor
http://www.spanishdict.com/
contact: [email protected]
contact: [email protected]
This is an online spanish english dictionary which contains sound files of
many of the words. A number of the sound files are not of particularly
good quality.
http://www.yourdictionary.com/grammars.html
Another collection of links to language courses and resources.
http://www.yourdictionary.com/about/contact.html
The contact page for this site.
Contacted: re audio tutor 1 may 2003
I received an emailed reply from this site in early may 2003. The
administrator stated that he would post a link to my site soon
"Brad Ross-MacLeod" <[email protected]>
May 19, 2003: The link still has not been posted
http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/guides.html
Another portal or collection of links. This is the University of Oregon site.
Contains reasonable catalan links.
[email protected]
email address for above site
http://www.word2word.com/course.html
another portal
http://www.word2word.com/contact.html
Their contact webmail form
Their postal address:
Word2Word Language Resources
PO Box 6013
San Jose, California
95150-6013
http://www.worldlanguage.com/Languages/Catalan.htm?CalledFrom=210325
Another type of language portal. This has links to commercial language
learning products. The site appears to be highly 'commercially'
orientated.
http://www.worldlanguage.com/Contact.asp
The contact page for this site
The contact details for the above organization
World Language Resources
2130Sawtelle Blvd.
Suite 304A
Los Angeles, CA 90025
Tel: 310-996-2300
Fax: 310-996-2303
usa
Contact: On may 19, 2003, I sent a email using the contact web-page above
notifying about the audio tutoring program.
http://www.language-learning.net/
A language learning portal site
[email protected]
http://www.lll.uiuc.edu/
The University of Illinois Language Center. This doesn't appear to contain
very many links to on-line learning resources.
http://www.lll.uiuc.edu/resources/dictionary.html
A list of searchable online dictionaries. Many of the links appear
out-of-date
[email protected]
The email address for the above
http://www.berlitz.com/default.htm
The Berlitz site
http://www.fodors.com/language/
The Fodors language tutoring interface for some European Languages.
This seems to be the usual 'point-and-click' interface. The site contains
sound files, WAV format. The sound files are not very numerous (perhaps a
few hundred. The Fodors company also have a series of guide books and
phrase books.
http://www.fodors.com/about/write/index.cgi?editorial=on&cgireferer=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2efodors%2ecom%2f&
The contact page for above.
Contact: may 21, 2003 I used the contact page indicated immediately above
in order to notify the Fodors people
http://www.travlang.com/languages/
This is a site which contains a large number of 'tutoring' pages for
a large number of languages. The sites include sound files which are in
some odd format (I am not sure which). Each language does not contain the
sound files for very many words. Perhaps 100 or so. They appear to be
migrating to a 'real-audio' format.
The design of the site is very cluttered.
[email protected]
http://www.travlang.com/comments/
This is the 'feedback' form for 'travlang'. The site invites comments and
suggestions as to how to improve the site as well as requesting
contributions of new sound files.
Contact: On may 21, 2003 (Wednesday), I sent the following email using the
contact form above
Result: Replied saying that he was interested in a new interface but that
my program does not work on a mac. true.
See the file 'tutor-travlang.txt' for email correspondance with the
maintainers of the travlang site.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/languages/spanish/
The BBC spanish online audio tutoring site. This contains a comprehensive
set of Real Audio Sound Files with transcripts and translations
The interface used in the site is based on 'flash' and is quite effective.
It avoid the usual errors.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/feedback/
The feedback form for the BBC language site
Please see the file 'tutor-bbc.txt' for details of email correspondance with
the maintainers of this BBC language site, in regards to the 'audio tutor'
http://www.ilovelanguages.com/
A large language site portal
http://www.ilovelanguages.com/index.php?addsite=yes
http://www.languagelearn.co.uk/index.htm
A British language teachers association
http://www.languagelearn.co.uk/language_links.htm
Some links
http://home.att.net/~korost/frtutor.htm
A Java Applet French/ Spanish/ Russian Language Tutor which uses sound
files. The french version only appears to contain about 10 words.
And the same with the Spanish version.
http://www.cookwood.com/personal/learncatalan.html
This is Elizabeth Castro's catalan site. This contains virtually
NO content.
[email protected] <[email protected]>
This is a probably out of date email address for Elizabeth Castro
May 19, 2003 Sent an email to this address, notifying Ms Castro
about my catalan site. Saved the email at Yahoo
http://dict.leo.org/?lang=en
A large on-line searchable English/ German dictionary.
Claims to have 350,000 entries