I got accepted into the Duolingo private beta yesterday, and since my wife might be applying for things in Europe, I figured it might be a good time to give German a shot. It's pretty rad so far. I've never used Rosetta Stone or anything, so I don't know how comparable this is. But hey, it's free, and it uses that "gamification" approach (which I'm not normally a fan of). But unlike things like Fitocracy, it's not just self-reporting. It's basically like an RPG - you gain XP by completing practice, which will usually be enough to get you to the "learned" point for a given skill, but to master it you have to translate real-world examples like Wikipedia excerpts. So far I've been given a blog entry about a bookstore and the German Wikijunior article on Latvia.
Here's my progress screen:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
It was started by the Luis von Ahn, the guy who figured out that you could use captchas to digitize books by tossing unknowns in with knowns and making people type in both. Computers are getting pretty decent at automatic translation, but there's so much variance in how language is used that I can definitely see the utility it comparing computer translations with human ones.
Here's my progress screen:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
It was started by the Luis von Ahn, the guy who figured out that you could use captchas to digitize books by tossing unknowns in with knowns and making people type in both. Computers are getting pretty decent at automatic translation, but there's so much variance in how language is used that I can definitely see the utility it comparing computer translations with human ones.
