ATALL/Input

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The concept of input is perhaps the single most important concept of second language acquisition. . . . In fact, no model of second language acquisition does not avail itself of input in trying to explain how learners create second language grammars (Gass, 1997, p. 1)
We cannot ignore the fact that learners need access to abundant amounts of comprehensible input in order for acquisition to happen. (Wong, 2005, p. 34)

[edit] Introduction

While there is disagreement among second language acquisition (SLA) researchers and theorists concerning many aspects of SLA, there is quite broad consensus on the obvious importance of input in acquiring a FL. That is, in order for spoken and/or written competence in a FL to be acquired, the language must be encountered in spoken and/or written form.

In addition, there is increasing evidence that the amount of input, that is, the frequency with which various forms of language are encountered is an important determining factor in SLA. Ellis (2002) has reviewed how several aspects of language acquisition, including phonology, orthography, vocabulary, morphology, and syntax, depend on the frequency of exposure. This is also the case for first language acquisition as it has been shown that native English speakers take less time to produce the past tense form of frequent irregular verbs (e.g., went) compared to less frequent irregular verbs (e.g., slung) (Prasada, Pinker, et al., 1990; Seidenberg & Bruck 1990).

Ellis (2002) summarizes the importance of input frequency in language acquisition thus:

For language learners to be accurate and fluent in their generalizations they need to have processed sufficient exemplars that their accidental and finite experience is truly representative of the total population of language of the speech community in terms of its overall content, the relative frequencies of that content, and the mappings of form to functional interpretation. The enormity of the lexical pool, the range of frequencies from 60,000 per million down to 1 per million and below, and the wide range of different linguistic constructions, when considered from the point of view of sampling theory, makes it clear that the necessary representative experience for fluency must be vast indeed. (p. 167)

So the case has been made that language learners need considerable exposure to the target language if they hope to attain any useful degree of fluency in it. And it becomes less of a puzzle to understand why FL learners, particularly those who attempt to acquire a FL in settings lacking extensive exposure to the language, typically fall far short of anything approaching native speaker fluency in their FL. <<add Cummins info here about hours of exposure in traditional and immersion classes>>

If frequent exposure to a FL is necessary for its acquisition, the question then arises as to the kind of input that is best for developing proficiency. One well known and highly influential (and controversial) answer to this question has been provided by Krashen in a series of articles and books on SLA theory and practice (Krashen, 1981, 1982, 1985, 1992, 1994, 1997). Krashen’s theory of SLA consists of five major hypotheses, the one of most relevance here being the Input Hypothesis (Krashen, 1981, p. 100). The Input Hypothesis states that in order for language acquisition to occur, the input must have an appropriate degree of difficulty. The appropriate level of difficulty, according to Krashen, is what he calls level i + 1, that is, just a bit beyond the learner’s current ability (i), but not so difficult to seriously impair comprehension nor so easy that no new language challenges are encountered. By encountering a constant but small proportion of new language forms among familiar ones in a meaningful, communicative context, the learner is able to infer the meaning and function of the new forms using the linguistic and extralinguistic context provided by the situation.

All of Krashen’s hypotheses about SLA have been criticized by other SLA theorists and researchers over the last quarter-century, including his Input Hypothesis. Concerning the latter, it has been noted that there is no clear way to know what i + 1 would be for any particular learner (Gregg, 1984; White, 1987) and no way to make sure a learner is exposed to input at i + 1 rather than i + 0 (too easy) or i + 2 (too hard). But in spite of these problems, it is nonetheless the case that the notion of i + 1 enjoys general acceptance in many fields of learning, such as Ausubel’s (1963) theory of verbal learning and Vygotsky’s (1978) Zone of Proximal Development to account for the development of higher mental skills. The matching of a task’s challenge to the learner’s skill is also an important component of the Flow Theory as developed by Csikszentmihalyi (see Egbert, 2003). Ways of exposing language learners to i + 1 input will be considered later below.

The field of SLA has gone through many changes since sustained scientific study of the acquisition, learning, and teaching of second languages began in the 1950s. While much work still needs to be done in the field and much disagreement remains concerning many key aspects of second language acquisition, learning, and teaching, there appears to be a developing consensus concerning the necessary and optimal conditions for acquiring a second language as an adult. Necessary (if not sufficient) conditions include lots of comprehensible input in aural and/or written form, at least some of which is slightly beyond the linguistic ability of the learner, but still largely comprehensible given the linguistic and extralinguistic context and the learner’s real-world knowledge. We will now explore the ways in which the Internet can be used to provide such input to autonomous second language learners.


[edit] Multimedia

[edit] Multilingual

[edit] Text

Without a doubt, the most important recent technological development for accessing foreign languages in text form is the Internet and World Wide Web. Before the global spread of the Internet, it was difficult or impossible in many places in the world to find interesting reading material in foreign languages. Today, anyone within reach of the Web has quick and easy access to a vast amount of texts in almost all of the world's languages.

In this section an overview of interesting texts in foreign languages available on the Web will be provided as well as ideas for making these texts understandable and accessible.

[edit] Newspapers and News Articles

[edit] Multilingual Directories

  • Google News provides a continuously updated, user-modifiable selection of news articles that can easily be changed from one language to another using a drop-down menu. Articles are provided from various news sources in Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish targeting readers in Austria (German), Argentina (Spanish), Australia (English), Belgium (Flemish & French), Canada (English & French), Chile (Spanish), China (Chinese), Colombia (Spanish), Cuba (Spanish) Germany (German), France (French), Hong Kong (Chinese), India (English), Ireland (English), Israel (Hebrew), Italy (Italian), Korea (Korean), Mexico (Spanish), New Zealand (English), Peru (Spanish), Portugal (Portuguese), Spain (Spanish), Switzerland (French & German), Taiwan (Chinese), the United Kingdom (English) the United States (English & Spanish) and Venezuela (Spanish).
  • AllYouCanRead.com boasts links to “26,500 magazines and newspapers from 200 countries.” While some of the magazines listed do not provide free access to articles and others provide only a sampling of articles published in their print versions, this is nonetheless a good source for finding current texts in both scientific and informally written styles of language in a particular area of interest in the target language. AllYouCanRead.com also allows registered users (no charge) to create a list of their favorite online newspapers and magazines for easy access when returning to the site from any computer.
  • Newseum Includes 362 newspaper front pages from 41 countries presented alphabetically.

[edit] Directories of English-Language Newspapers

  • world-newspapers.com. For the autonomous language learner more interested in reading current texts, the Web provides a wide variety of reading materials in many languages from the world’s newspapers and magazines. For ESL learners, one source of online versions of newspapers and magazines published worldwide in English is [world-newspapers.com world-newspapers.com] which organizes newspapers by country and topic and magazines by subject matter (for example, links to 42 magazines dealing with environmental issues are provided).
  • onlinenewspapers.com. Newspapers in English and many other languages can easily be found via onlinenewspapers.com providing “thousands of world newspapers at your fingertips” categorized into world regions and countries. As an example, a student studying Spanish with a particular interest in Mexico will find links to 74 newspapers from that country, almost all of them in Spanish. Many of these online newspapers also provide links to audio and video resources.
  • The Internet Public Library provides access to world newspapers in many languages and to magazines and journals primarily in English.
  • The Internet TESL Journal offers teachers of ESL articles, research papers, links, activities, classroom handout and more. It also provides students with different kinds of quizzes and crossword puzzles to practice English.

[edit] Directories of Spanish-Language Newspapers

  • Prensa escrita gives you a list of newspapers in Spanish, divided by country.

[edit] English-Language Newspapers

My favorite four on-line e-news websites!

CNN [1]

China Post [2]

The New York Times [3]

Washington Post [4]

Bangkok Post [5]


health news

--Dominique 16:13, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

The following websites also provide lots of e-news online!

Newsweek [6]

NPR [7] you can even download the voice file of each news there!


Three useful and excellent e-news websites.

Original English-language news coverage of Taiwan Taipei Times [8]

A great on-line English newspaper for EFL students (especially for Chinese students) Student Post [9]

A great website for in-depths news reports and news videos Frontline: PBS [10] --Cindy1228 15:19, 7 June 2006 (UTC)


An English-language source of Japanese and international news with text and video. NHK English News [11]

[edit] Spanish

  • National
    • Vida Latina General Online Magazine focusing on Latin American Spanish-Speaking Countries. The entire website is in Spanish and topics include sports, entertainment, Latin American, US, and World news.
  • Argentina
    • Buenos Aires

La Nación [12]This is a newspaper from Buenos Aires

      • Clarin This is a tabloid newspaper from Buenos Aires

La Voz del Interior [13]

  • Guatemala
    • La Hora Guatemalan Newspaper Online
  • Mexico
  • Spain
    • National
      • Online Newspapers This is an extensive list of newspapers online for Spain
      • El Mundo This is a national Spanish newspaper (in the Spanish language) that gives up to date information on the country and its various autonomous regions.
      • Informativos de Telecinco This is a Spanish website that displays politcal, economical, social, and entertainment news and events taking place in Spain and internationally.**Granada
      • Estrella Digital Spanish National Newspaper. Gives cultural, sports, weather, economic, and international news.
      • Hispanidad An online Spanish newpaper. An easy way to get quick national news on Spain.

[edit] German

[edit] Magazines

[edit] French

[edit] Journals (scientific and academic)

[edit] Multilingual

  • Directory of Open Access Journals "covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 3315 journals in the directory. Currently 1114 journals are searchable at article level. As of today 178817 articles are included in the DOAJ service" (from website 2008 April 12). Journals in many languages are available with English being by far the most common language.

[edit] Weblogs (Blogs)

[edit] Arabic

  • aljazeera talk elected as "Best Weblog in Arabic" in 2007 by Deutsche Welle International's Best of the Blogs. "A very ambitious citizen journalism project. The new thing about it is that this is a an organized group effort. It is a serious attempt at creating a web-based alternative media channel that enables a wide network of young correspondents to contribute reports and interviews (which sets it apart from most blogs, which depend mostly on individual opinions and impressions)" (from The BOBs website).

[edit] Chinese

  • The Eighth Continent. Selected as "Best Weblog in English" in 2007 by Deutsche Welle International's Best of the Blogs. "Mr Lian Yue is a very famous columnist. While putting his popular columns onto his blog, he is also an environmentalist advocate. With his and his friends' efforts, people in the city of Xiamen (Amoy) went on street to protest a new chemical factory plan which could be an environmental disaster to the city. It was a 2-day lasting, tens of thousands people involved, very peaceful demonstration" (from The BOBs website).

[edit] English

  • Valour-IT Selected as "Best Weblog in English" in 2007 by Deutsche Welle International's Best of the Blogs. "Inspired by Army Captain Charles “Chuck” Ziegenfuss, a military blogger who was severely wounded in Iraq in 2005, Valour-IT is the blog of Soldier's Angels, a non-profit that has provided over 1600 injured soldiers with voice-controlled software and laptops through donations and grants. These machines allow soldiers the freedom to stay connected through their rehabilitation and beyond"(from The BOBs website).

[edit] French

  • Actualités de la république démocratique du Congo Selected as "Best Weblog in French" in 2007 by Deutsche Welle International's Best of the Blogs. "More than just a diary, cedric.uing.net presents in pictures and a few lines the realities of daily life in he Democratic Republic of Congo. The young journalist denounces the shortcomings of his country in an amused and sometimes acrimonious style"(from The BOBs website).

[edit] German

  • Behindertenparkplatz Selected as "Best Weblog in German" in 2007 by Deutsche Welle International's Best of the Blogs. "A journalist in a wheelchair reports about international travel, her work and the difficulties she faces on a daily basis. The blog also documents her attempts to expose and combat the stereotypes and descrimination faced by people in wheelchairs"(from The BOBs website).

[edit] Persian

  • 35 Grad. Selected as "Best Weblog in Persian" in 2007 by Deutsche Welle International's Best of the Blogs."This blog takes its name from the 35th parallel on which the city of Tehran stands. Some of the topics that the author confronts are the many taboos present in Iranian society including HIV/AIDS, homosexuality and sex education" (from The BOBs website).

[edit] Portuguese

  • Blog do Tas Selected as "Best Weblog in Portuguese" in 2007 by Deutsche Welle International's Best of the Blogs. "Blog do Tas is devoted to understanding Brazilian politics through humor, information and irony. Tas is a TV personality and a Brazilian blog pioneer who uses a mix of "serious" subjects with a clever and funny approach to day-to-day life as seen in the text, photos and videos"(from The BOBs website).

[edit] Russian

  • /dev/karlson/mind.log Selected as "Best Weblog in Russian" in 2007 by Deutsche Welle International's Best of the Blogs. "This blog is published by a russian who lives in Japan. Here you can find a lot of interesting information, exciting observations and original comparisons between the two cultures" (from The BOBs website).

[edit] Spanish

  • A mis 95 años / 95 years old. Selected as "Best Weblog in Spanish" in 2007 by Deutsche Welle International's Best of the Blogs. "Maria Amelia is a certified phenomena in the international blogosphere. With the help of her grandson, this 95-year-old grandmother writes about her long life and tries to break communication barriers that exists between generations"((from The BOBs website).

[edit] RSS Feeds (text)

What is RSS? A good way to read RSS on your computer is to use Netvibes Netvibes can also be used to subscribe to and listen to podcasts (see tutorial and [| example]). Another good feed aggregator that can also play podcasts is the Google Reader.

[edit] Books and Documents

[edit] Multiple Languages

Project Gutenberg [15]. Although we may usually think of the World Wide Web as the largest repository of text-based language materials, the use of the Internet as a means to disseminate texts actually began many years before the Web came into existence. In 1971, Michael Hart began Project Gutenberg in order to make books freely available to the world’s readers. As of August, 2006, Project Gutenberg has made over 19,000 public domain books available to anyone with an Internet connection. Although the majority of these books are in English, 24 other languages are also represented including Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Sanskrit, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Welsh, and Yiddish.

Due to copyright restrictions, Project Gutenberg includes only older books, usually those first published before 1930. Nonetheless, Project Gutenberg is a useful resource for anyone interested in obtaining older and classic books in the languages mentioned above that can be read on a computer monitor or printed out.

Links to electronic texts of books in French, Italian, Spanish and German.

[edit] English

  • DAILYLITwill send you daily successive extracts of books in English via e-mail or RSS. This could be a good way for an English learner to be reminded to do his or her daily reading in English.

[edit] French

[edit] German

[edit] Portuguese

[edit] Spanish

Wikisource [16] is another large and growing source of public domain books and documents is Wikisource. Wikisource provides texts in 47 different languages. An example of some of the interesting documents that can be found in Wikisource is U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's 1917 letter to Congress requesting a declaration of war on Germany.

[edit] Poetry

[edit] English

[edit] French

A portal to several types of literary exercises, including pronunciation of texts, background information on literature, etc.

[edit] German

[edit] Portuguese

  • Rua da Poesia. Poems by Fernando Pessoa, Camões, Bocage, Cesário Verde, Florbela Espanca, Almeida Garrett, Antero de Quental, Castro Alves, Gonçalves Dias, João de Deus, Olavo Bilac, and Tomas Gonzaga.

[edit] Spanish

  • Poesía Castellana
  • Poesía en Espanol
  • Anthology of Spanish Poetry A random collection of poetry by Spanish poets such as Jorge Manrique, Gil Vicente, Juan del Encima, Garcilaso de la Vega, and more.
  • Poesia en Espanol An extensive list of Spanish authors and poems in Spanish. Over 100 poets and over 500 poems. Poets can be found alphabetically, choronologically, according to centuries and relevance today. Poets such as Jorge Debravo, Ruben Dario, San Juan de la Cruz, Luis Cernuda, and Ramon Lopez Velarde.
  • Pablo Neruda A wonderful, comprehensive site of the poet Pablo Neruda. Full of his works, biography, contributions and more. All of it is in Spanish.
  • Jorge Luis Borges A great website, dedicated to Jorge Luis Borges and his works. His poems and biography can be found here. It's all in Spanish.

[edit] Comic strips and comic books

Comic strips and comic books available on the web are variously referred to as webcomics, web comics and online comics. They include both comics available only online as well as web versions of printed and syndicated comics

By pairing text with illustrations and treating varied themes ranging from inane comedy to graphic violence, webcomics provide an valuable if perhaps unused means of developing proficiency in a foreign language and are particularly valuabe to exposing learners to modern, vernacular forms of the language.

English

There are a large number of webcomics in English. Some directories to English-language webcomics are:

Individual Webcomics

Finnish

Finnish Wikipedia's article on Web-sarjakuva

French

German

Wikipedia's article on Webcomic.

German webcomics:

Italian

Japanese

Japanese Wikipedia's article on ウェブコミック

Polish

Polish Wikipedia's article on Komiks internetowy

Portuguese

Comics in Portuguese may be called bandas desenhandas, quadrinhos, histórias em quadrinhos or cartuns.

Portuguese Wikipedia's article on Webcomic

Spanish

  • Spanish Wikipedia's article on ?
  • WEE: Webcomics en Español provides a dropdown list of webcomics in Spanish.
  • Ucomics (see "Nuevo! Comics en Español)
  • Chistes Jokes in Spanish. Some of them are pretty funny. It makes reading and comprehension a little more fun and takes away from formality.
  • My Comics: Espanol Check out the tab on the right entitled Spanish Comics to locate them.
  • [17] Bert in Spanish and Englsh.

Swedish

Swedish Wikipedia's article on Webcomic

[edit] Online Course Material

There is a large and increasing amount of educational material on the Web provided by universities worldwide to support online courses and degree programs. This is an excellent source of material academic reading material in several languages. The Open Courseware Consortium is one source of such materials with consortium members in Austria, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Portugal, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Venezuela and Vietnam. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is at the forefront in providing free online course materials with materials for hundreds of courses and also provides audio and video for many of these courses. MIT is also involved in translating many of these course materials into Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese.

[edit] Encyclopedias

[edit] Multilingual

Wikipedia is the "free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit" with reference articles in over 100 languages. It has over 1,000,000 articles in English and over 50,000 articles in German, French, Japanese, Dutch, Polish and Swedish. For learners of English, there are over 3,000 articles in Simple English. Wikipedia has particularly good coverage of topics relating to information technology.

Because Wikipedia articles exist in many languages and anyone may edit them, language students may do more with the articles than just use them as sources of input. For example, Chinese students studying English reading may find it useful to translate Wikipedia articles that exist in English into Chinese and thereby contribute to the Chinese-language version of the Wikipedia. Or, Chinese students focusing on English writing may choose instead to translate Chinese-language Wikipedia articles into English, or create new articles in the English-language Wikipedia about their city or college or important people in their community and thereby contribute to the Chinese cultural content of the English-language Wikipedia. While Wikipedia editing lends itself easily to group work, by requiring students to logon using their name or ID, teachers can see the contribution of each student as well as see all changes and additions each student has made. That native speakers of the target language may make additional changes is something that the students can watch for (using a "my watchlist") to see how their writing is corrected.

[edit] Spanish

  • Kalipedia Kalipedia is a free, online, Spanish-language encyclopedia oriented toward secondary education begun on 16 October 2007. It is published by Grupo Santillana which is owned by Grupo Prisa. Its content is controlled centrally, but users can make suggestions for corrections.

[edit] Monolingual and Bilingual Dictionaries, Thesauruses, Translators and Concordance Tools

Foreign language readers of texts written for native speakers will surely encounter many words and phrases whose meaning they can only guess. While inferring the meaning of new words and phrases based on context and knowledge of the subject matter is a good skill for foreign language readers to develop, there are times when a reader may want or need to find a definition using either a monolingual dictionary or a FL to L1 translation dictionary. Fortunately, there are many such dictionaries available at no cost on the Web.

[edit] Multilingual

  • The WordTranslator option of the Google Toolbar for the Firefox and Internet Explorer web browsers provides mouse-over translations of English words into Chinese (traditional and simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. No non-English to English-language translations are provided, however, so this feature is useful primarily for readers of English as a second language.
  • For English-speakers reading non-English languages, WordChamp provides a free Web Reader that provides instant mouse-over translations in many different languages (best coverage is provided for French, German, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese, but there is a significant amount of vocabulary in a dozen other languages, and registered users can add their own vocabulary). There are over 60,000 audio recordings of native speakers (in eleven languages), which can be listened to while reading a site. This is a very powerful tool for reading foreign-language texts (WordChamp also includes other tools that are discussed in the Exercise and Assessment sections of this wikibook), although translations for many low-frequency words are not provided, the latest version of WordChamp allows users to add their own translations which in a wiki fashion should dramatically increase the word coverage.
  • Ultralingua [18] also provides translations by clicking on words found on webpages. A few free lookups can be made each day. A subscription of $29.95 per year is required to allow up to 500 lookups per day. Unlike WordChamps web reader, Ultralingua's does not provide pronunciations of any words. It is also limited to translating among English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, but it currently appears to have greater coverage of words in these languages than does WordChamp's web reader (which is free; see above).
  • World2World Language Resource provides links to bilingual translation dictionaries involving 192 languages (from Abadani to Zarma), including many specialized dictionaries, e.g., computer culture and technology.
  • English speakers learning Spanish, French or Italian, or speakers of any of the latter languages learning English will find the online versions of Collins translation dictionaries provided by WordReference.com useful. As noted on their website, their English-Spanish dictionary alone contains more than 160,000 words and more than 230,000 translations and would take up 1290 pages of paper to print. Particularly handy is that WordReference can be used as a browser add-on tool which allows the user to quickly translate any word found in any Web page using Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator on a Windows computer.
  • Another useful online word resource is the OneLook Dictionary Search, a “search engine for words” with links to 5 million words in over 90 online dictionaries. Freedict provides two-way bilingual dictionaries online that link English to 16 other languages.
  • LiveDictionary provides mouse-over, pop-up monolingual and bilingual dictionary support for Macintosh Safari 1 users under Panther (OS 10.3). (The Macintosh Tiger 10.4 OS includes pop-up dictionary support for Safari 2.)
  • LEO, (for "Link Everything Online") is an impressive resource for language learners needing bilingual, bidirectional German-English (410,686 entries) and German-French (139,073 entries) dictionaries. LEO provides not only definitions but also grammatical information, usage examples, idioms, and pronunciation (including audio) for any English or German word entered. For example, entering the words “eye” produced not only five German translations of “eye,” but also 28 verbs and verb phrases containing eye (e.g., “to catch someone’s eye”), 22 phrases and collocations (e.g., “in the twinkling of an eye”) and more than 50 composed entries (e.g., “eagle eye”). In addition, every word that appears as part of a definition or example is linked to a definition and other entries of its own.
  • The Visual Thesaurus is a subscription-based ($2.95/month) visual thesaurus in English (version 3), Dutch, French, German and Spanish (beta version).
  • The Compleat Lexical Tutor developed by Tom Cobb provides some useful and unique vocabulary resources for learners of English and French. Among these resources are the Hypertext Builders that allow a teacher or student to submit a text in English or French and have it automatically posted on the Web with each word linked to concordances (to see how each word is typically used) and to a French-English or English-French dictionary.
  • For language learners wanting assistance in translating more than words and phrases, many free translation services can also be found on the Web.
    • A directory of 13 free Web-translation services providing translations involving at least 38 different languages can be found at Babelfish. While machine translation is still no match for skilled human translators, language learners may nonetheless find such services occasionally useful (readers knowing French may find it amusing that Babel Fish Translation translated the word “match” in the preceding sentence using the French word “allumette”).
    • Another online translation service is offered by Google, providing translations from about eight languages into English and vice versa.
    • Systran Language Translation Technologies provides web-based translation services for English and 12 other languages. Systran also provides the Translation widget that comes with Macintosh OS 10.4 ("Tiger") that can be placed on the Dashboard.
  • The Tiger operating system for Macintosh includes the Oxford American English dictionary that can be accessed in three different ways: (a) as a stand-alone application, (b) as a control-click (or right-lick) tool that can be used to find a definition of any word selected in the Safari web browser, and (c) as a widget on the Dashboard. A Spanish dictionary is also available as a widget and others may be available now or soon (search for widgets).
  • A version of The Dictionary Assistant to include Japanese. Currently still under construction, it includes an option that allows either English to Japanese or Japanese to English lookup in Jim Breen's EDICT. Comments and suggestions are welcome: Carly Born
  • The News in Chinese provides mouse-over translation and pinyin for the latest news in Chinese (using adsotrans).
  • Rikaichan a downloadable pop-up dictionary extension for Firefox and Thunderbird that translates Japanese characters and words into English, German, French, and Russian by simply rolling over the words.
  • POPjisyo Popjisyo is a free web based dictionary for Korean, Chinese, Janpanese, and other languages. If you type an address of a certain webpage, it will help you to understand each word in that webpage by showing definition of words.

[edit] English

  • Yahoo Mini Dictionary provides a useful mini dictionary for Korean learners of English. After installing “Yahoo mini” for free, you will have a small pen on your window. Click the small pen on any word on screen, and it will automatically open up a small on-line dictionary window with huge contents.It works for English to Korean, Korean to English, English to English, providing examples,pronunciation, Encyclopedia, and collocations. You can save the words in your Yahoo Korea account for future practice.

[edit] Other dictionaries (to organize)

[edit] PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants)

While the availability of interesting multilingual texts and language tools on the Internet gives language learners access to a wide range of second reading material that could not be obtained otherwise, using a desktop or laptop computer is not always the most convenient means for reading them. Printouts, of course, can be made, but printing takes time, consumes paper and ink, and produces output that can be inconvenient to carry around. An alternative that combines the accessibility of the Internet with the portability of a palm-sized device involves using a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to store and display FL texts. While reading a book, magazine or newspaper article from a PDA requires the reader to put up with small type on a small screen, this may be compensated by the advantage of having foreign-language reading material always available and accessible at any time, such as while commuting in a bus or train or waiting in line at a bank or ticket office. The most popular PDAs are those that use the Palm or Pocket PC operating system and the least expensive PDA with enough memory to be used for such a system is currently the Palm Zire 21 which has 8MB of memory and a monochrome screen for $99.

[edit] Feeds (RSS)

See:

[edit] Connecting PDAs to the Internet

There are two ways to put Web content on a PDA such as those produced by Palm or PalmOne, Pocket PC, or Zaurus. The first is to connect the PDA directly to the Internet for web browsing. This requires that the PDA be connected to the Internet using a wired connection (which limits its mobility) or a wireless connection (which requires a more expensive PDA and a wireless Internet subscription service or public WiFi access point). The second way involves using a desktop or laptop to obtain web content and then transferring the content from personal computer to PDA. Do to its significantly lower cost and the wide availability of personal computers, this latter method is recommended.

  • Manybooks.net claims to have "10,425 eBooks formatted for reading on your Palm, PocketPC, Zaurus, Rocketbook, or Symbian cellphone" obtained from Project Gutenberg and other sources formatted for downloading to and reading on a PDA. In addition to English which represents the majority of books, texts are also available in Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Russian, Sanskrit, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh.
  • gut is a free program that can convert any plain-text file into Plucker format (see below) for downloading to a Palm PDA. gut is particularly useful for converting the many Project Gutenberg etexts that have not already been converted for use on a PDA and are therefore not available on Manybooks.net.