One of the challenges in learning French (or, probably even worse, English) is that the same combination of letters aren't necessarily pronounced the same way in all words. Spanish, thankfully, is a regular language in that respect, although I think I didn't realized that until several years ago.
The latest inconsistency I stumbled across, in a http://www.dailyfrenchpod.com podcast episode (one of my favored French podcasts), was aiguille (needle). Being already familiar with the sound of the name Guillaume (William) in which the gui portion sounds generally like the English "gee" in "geese", I was surprised that in aiguille it is pronounced "gwee", which I also confirmed with my Larousse English/French dictionary app.
Some words having a similar inconsistency, but which would typically be encountered rather earlier by French learners, are fille (girl), whose ille portion sounds roughly like English "ee", while the ille portion of ville (city) sounds roughly like English "eel".
Showing posts with label Spanish. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spanish. Show all posts
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Radio apps for French and Spanish
The free Radio Française (version 2.4) and Radio Española (version 1.2) apps allow you to listen to a selection of radio stations (some Internet-only) from France and Spain, respectively. They are from the same developer, and share the same interface. The version differences between apps for different countries appear to at least partly be related to changes the developer makes to add or fix radio streams for a given country.
Since I am generally looking for conversation as opposed to music, I "favorite" suitable stations so I can easily find them in the future.
Under Channels, you can select by Name, Location, or Genre. I looked for "News" under Genre to find useful stations. Scrolling down that far lost the Name/Location/Genre headings at the top, so the image below is from the top (where the musical group "Abba" gets its own genre!).
Below are quick favorites I chose for these two apps:
This developer, Fredo, also has similar radio apps for other countries. Below is a sample listing:
Since I am generally looking for conversation as opposed to music, I "favorite" suitable stations so I can easily find them in the future.
Under Channels, you can select by Name, Location, or Genre. I looked for "News" under Genre to find useful stations. Scrolling down that far lost the Name/Location/Genre headings at the top, so the image below is from the top (where the musical group "Abba" gets its own genre!).
Below are quick favorites I chose for these two apps:
This developer, Fredo, also has similar radio apps for other countries. Below is a sample listing:
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Larousse English / French dictionary app
6/12/12: Apple's 6/11/12 keynote address at their World Wide Developer Conference indicates that French, German, and Spanish dictionaries will be built into iOS 6 (on the screen at the 107:05 [minutes:seconds] mark). I imagine those will be more basic dictionaries, and I will continue to prefer using this Larousse dictionary app, but time will tell.
6/15/12: Some embedded single language (e.g., French-only) dictionaries can also be freely downloaded in the free Amazon Kindle app, which I mentioned previously here. Despite having written about them, I still sometimes forget they are there.
Several weeks ago I finally bought myself a combined French-English & English-French dictionary app. I am now no longer surviving on a hodgepodge of free apps which cover an assortment of much more limited/specific aspects of the French language; those apps still have their uses, so perhaps later I will write up a blog entry for them.
Anyway, I chose the Larousse English / French dictionary app (version 2.0.1) because:
Two inconveniences I hope the developers fix in a future version:
Some language errors and/or app oddities/bugs:
1) In this French definition, "it's" should be "its":
2) If you look up "program" in English, you get triple entries for it both as a noun and as a verb:
3) When looking up a phrase in French, if you enter the first word you will be presented by entries for it by itself, plus a limited number of entries of phrases that begin with it. If the number of possible entries is large, you will not see them all, and you will unfortunately have to cycle through all the remaining letters of the alphabet to see all the possibilities. See the following example.
I was trying to find the phrase au dessous (in fact, the phrase is au-dessous with a dash between the two words, but I didn't know/remember that).
Entering "au" gives this list:
That list can be scrolled down only until this point, which has not exhausted all phrase possibilities beginning with "au":
Entering "au d" gives this list:
That list can be scrolled down until this point, which presumably is the last phrase in the dictionary that begins with "au d":
6/15/12: Some embedded single language (e.g., French-only) dictionaries can also be freely downloaded in the free Amazon Kindle app, which I mentioned previously here. Despite having written about them, I still sometimes forget they are there.
Several weeks ago I finally bought myself a combined French-English & English-French dictionary app. I am now no longer surviving on a hodgepodge of free apps which cover an assortment of much more limited/specific aspects of the French language; those apps still have their uses, so perhaps later I will write up a blog entry for them.
Anyway, I chose the Larousse English / French dictionary app (version 2.0.1) because:
- I had some trust in the Larousse brand, having been pleased with their printed French-French nouveau dictionnaire du français contemporain illustré (new illustrated dictionary of contemporary French) which I bought years ago, and still use on occasion.
- It was significantly cheaper than my other main candidate app, which I think was Ultralingua Robert.
- My other main candidate app had some limit (50?) on the number of words it would keep in its history (before it started bouncing out the older ones), a limit which I felt was unreasonably low.
However, to be honest, I don't actually know what Larousse's limit is.8/24/14: Larousse app 2.2.0 history limit is 100.
Two inconveniences I hope the developers fix in a future version:
- Direction of translation always starts English to French; better would be to stay in the direction last used. I more frequently want French to English.
The History entries change their chronological order from descending to ascending, or vice versa, each time the list of entries is viewed (including if, within History, you look for a word's detail, then go back to History). I have difficulty imagining a reason why it would be helpful for it to work this way.(2/26/13: This is fixed in version 2.2.0, such that the History entries now consistently appear top to bottom in the order in which they were searched for. Personally I would have used reverse chronological search order, since I'm usually more interested in quickly seeing the words which I looked up most recently, but at least the order is no longer flipping back and forth.
By the way, the Delete button immediately deletes all History entries. To my regret and contrary to my expectations, it doesn't offer the choice of deleting selected entries, nor does it prompt for confirmation. It would be more helpfully labeled "Delete all" or "Clear history", and it really ought to prompt for confirmation. To delete an individual entry, swipe on it from left to right, and the typical red Delete button appears, which is effectively prompting for confirmation.)
Some language errors and/or app oddities/bugs:
1) In this French definition, "it's" should be "its":
2) If you look up "program" in English, you get triple entries for it both as a noun and as a verb:
3) When looking up a phrase in French, if you enter the first word you will be presented by entries for it by itself, plus a limited number of entries of phrases that begin with it. If the number of possible entries is large, you will not see them all, and you will unfortunately have to cycle through all the remaining letters of the alphabet to see all the possibilities. See the following example.
I was trying to find the phrase au dessous (in fact, the phrase is au-dessous with a dash between the two words, but I didn't know/remember that).
Entering "au" gives this list:
That list can be scrolled down only until this point, which has not exhausted all phrase possibilities beginning with "au":
Entering "au d" gives this list:
That list can be scrolled down until this point, which presumably is the last phrase in the dictionary that begins with "au d":
Monday, December 12, 2011
Gender of nouns in French and Spanish
In French and Spanish, nouns (I'm excluding pronouns here), including inanimate objects, have a gender associated with them, unlike in English. In English one does not say that the chair is feminine or that the pencil is masculine, but one does so in French (la chaise; le crayon) and in Spanish (la silla; el lápiz).
In a French class years ago, one English sentence assigned for translation into French included "casbah". That word had become rather more well-known from the Rock the Casbah song by The Clash. That being pre-World Wide Web times, we students rummaged through assorted paper dictionaries, and it seems that I, along with every other student, came up with nothing. It further seemed that we all followed our instincts (which in retrospect seem to have had no logical underlying rationale), and gave it a masculine gender ("le casbah"), only to all simultaneously groan while correcting each others' translations as the professor told us (with a wry smile of satisfaction?) that it was la casbah (feminine).
In French some word endings normally indicate a particular gender. Words ending in -ette, for instance, are almost always feminine. However, I will never forget that le squelette (skeleton) is masculine, having read in Harper's Grammar of French (a very nice book!) years ago that it is one of the rare exceptions.
In French some nouns have different meanings in a masculine versus a feminine form. Tour can be masculine or feminine. One meaning of le tour is turn; one meaning of la tour is tower. I'm not sure if there are similar such words in Spanish, though I think I will ask a native speaker soon....
In a French class years ago, one English sentence assigned for translation into French included "casbah". That word had become rather more well-known from the Rock the Casbah song by The Clash. That being pre-World Wide Web times, we students rummaged through assorted paper dictionaries, and it seems that I, along with every other student, came up with nothing. It further seemed that we all followed our instincts (which in retrospect seem to have had no logical underlying rationale), and gave it a masculine gender ("le casbah"), only to all simultaneously groan while correcting each others' translations as the professor told us (with a wry smile of satisfaction?) that it was la casbah (feminine).
In French some word endings normally indicate a particular gender. Words ending in -ette, for instance, are almost always feminine. However, I will never forget that le squelette (skeleton) is masculine, having read in Harper's Grammar of French (a very nice book!) years ago that it is one of the rare exceptions.
In French some nouns have different meanings in a masculine versus a feminine form. Tour can be masculine or feminine. One meaning of le tour is turn; one meaning of la tour is tower. I'm not sure if there are similar such words in Spanish, though I think I will ask a native speaker soon....
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Kindle app can download free English(-English), French-French, and Spanish-Spanish dictionaries
The free Amazon Kindle app can download free English(-English), French-French, and Spanish-Spanish dictionaries. While the intention was clearly to enhance the reading experience, you can open the Kindle app, select a word, then click on Full Definition to make general use of any of your downloaded dictionaries as an e-book itself.
The Kindle app is apparently aware of the primary language associated with an e-book; it's likely mandatory, or at least highly advisable, that producers of e-books include that piece of information. If you select a word and have previously downloaded the dictionary matching the e-book's primary language, the Kindle app will show the definition in a pop-up window. It will offer you the chance to download the dictionary if such doesn't exist on your device; click on the i in a circle icon to select from the different dictionaries.
From Amazon, I downloaded the free Voyage au Centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth) as a French language e-book when writing this entry. Perhaps I will even attempt to read it some day (I loved that Saturday morning cartoon), but it can at least serve as an e-book through which to get directly to the French-French dictionary.
I had used my usual Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar to select a Spanish word when writing this entry, but that e-book's primary language is actually English. My Spanish being far less complete than my French, I would need to select some basic Spanish e-book to sustain even a glimmer of a chance that I might someday read it, although any Spanish language e-book would serve to get directly to the Spanish-Spanish dictionary.
As of 11/24/11, the other language dictionaries are:
The Kindle app is apparently aware of the primary language associated with an e-book; it's likely mandatory, or at least highly advisable, that producers of e-books include that piece of information. If you select a word and have previously downloaded the dictionary matching the e-book's primary language, the Kindle app will show the definition in a pop-up window. It will offer you the chance to download the dictionary if such doesn't exist on your device; click on the i in a circle icon to select from the different dictionaries.
From Amazon, I downloaded the free Voyage au Centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth) as a French language e-book when writing this entry. Perhaps I will even attempt to read it some day (I loved that Saturday morning cartoon), but it can at least serve as an e-book through which to get directly to the French-French dictionary.
I had used my usual Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar to select a Spanish word when writing this entry, but that e-book's primary language is actually English. My Spanish being far less complete than my French, I would need to select some basic Spanish e-book to sustain even a glimmer of a chance that I might someday read it, although any Spanish language e-book would serve to get directly to the Spanish-Spanish dictionary.
As of 11/24/11, the other language dictionaries are:
- Deutsch
- English (UK)
- Italiano
- Português
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Word Magic Compact English-Spanish Dictionary app
Parent blog entry: http://kenamored.blogspot.com/2011/04/free-spanish-dictionary-apps.html
3/17/14: Somewhere along the line to its current version 5.4.1, this app switched from being free to being paid. That probably explains why, for an app that I got for free, it's so good.
This free app (version 2.0.2) has a limited subset of the material in the paid version (Word Magic English-Spanish Reference Dictionary, which has a healthy 4.5 / 5 stars from 82 ratings on 10/30/11), and may be adequate for occasional look up of common words. If you need a more complete dictionary, you may need to upgrade to the paid version (which the app makes sure you know is an option!), or find another more complete app. For someone like me, who occasionally listens to Claudia Fernandez' basic Spanish podcasts, it can be helpful as is.
Ads run in the free app.
Search pops up a row of the full range of possible accented letters (áéíóúüñ). iOS natively allows those accented letters to be entered, so that is not necessary, but it can speed up entry of words.
The x at the end of the row is to cease text entry in Search, but it looks quite weird, since it's just another letter, in the same font and size appearance as the other accented ones!
All these accented letter possibilities are enumerated, with useful usage details, in the old but free and still useful Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar, which I mentioned here.
4/2/11 was the last day of a promotional 25% off sale for their $7.99 General Reference product. I think they have run sales more than just that once.
11/26/11: For a free Spanish-Spanish dictionary, see this blog entry.
3/17/14: Somewhere along the line to its current version 5.4.1, this app switched from being free to being paid. That probably explains why, for an app that I got for free, it's so good.
This free app (version 2.0.2) has a limited subset of the material in the paid version (Word Magic English-Spanish Reference Dictionary, which has a healthy 4.5 / 5 stars from 82 ratings on 10/30/11), and may be adequate for occasional look up of common words. If you need a more complete dictionary, you may need to upgrade to the paid version (which the app makes sure you know is an option!), or find another more complete app. For someone like me, who occasionally listens to Claudia Fernandez' basic Spanish podcasts, it can be helpful as is.
Ads run in the free app.
Search pops up a row of the full range of possible accented letters (áéíóúüñ). iOS natively allows those accented letters to be entered, so that is not necessary, but it can speed up entry of words.
The x at the end of the row is to cease text entry in Search, but it looks quite weird, since it's just another letter, in the same font and size appearance as the other accented ones!
All these accented letter possibilities are enumerated, with useful usage details, in the old but free and still useful Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar, which I mentioned here.
4/2/11 was the last day of a promotional 25% off sale for their $7.99 General Reference product. I think they have run sales more than just that once.
11/26/11: For a free Spanish-Spanish dictionary, see this blog entry.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
iOS international keyboards for Latin alphabet languages other than English
Earlier I had noted that, for occasional inclusion of accented characters in, e.g., French or Spanish, there was no need to add the respective iOS virtual international keyboard.
Recently, I was typing in a longer sentence in French. At that time I realized that, for extended writing in a Latin alphabet language other than English, one greatly benefits from switching to the appropriate international keyboard, in order to get proper suggestions for auto-correction, replacement suggestions, etc.
A French teacher long ago had written the following famous phrase on a piece of paper for me:
Ce qui se conçoit bien
s'énonce clairement,
et les mots pour le dire
viennent aisément.
which I subsequently misplaced. The second line eluded my memory for many years, but I recently remembered it, then searched for background on the complete phrase on the mighty Internet.
French Wikipedia says the original is from Nicolas Boileau:
De L'Art poétique (1674)
Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement,
Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément. (Chant I)
(bold emphasis is mine -- see below)
I find it a tad odd that multiple people have rendered his original phrase with slightly different words, even, e.g., on a mousepad.
The meaning of the French phrase hasn't changed in any of the slightly-different renditions I've seen, including in the one I got from my French teacher. On the other hand, the Gettysburg Address certainly wouldn't sound the same if someone started reciting it with "87 years ago...".
English translations of this French phrase feel quite awkward to me compared to the original, and I'm not including one here. Interested readers can copy the text and search on the mighty Internet themselves.
Recently, I was typing in a longer sentence in French. At that time I realized that, for extended writing in a Latin alphabet language other than English, one greatly benefits from switching to the appropriate international keyboard, in order to get proper suggestions for auto-correction, replacement suggestions, etc.
A French teacher long ago had written the following famous phrase on a piece of paper for me:
Ce qui se conçoit bien
s'énonce clairement,
et les mots pour le dire
viennent aisément.
which I subsequently misplaced. The second line eluded my memory for many years, but I recently remembered it, then searched for background on the complete phrase on the mighty Internet.
French Wikipedia says the original is from Nicolas Boileau:
De L'Art poétique (1674)
Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement,
Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément. (Chant I)
(bold emphasis is mine -- see below)
I find it a tad odd that multiple people have rendered his original phrase with slightly different words, even, e.g., on a mousepad.
The meaning of the French phrase hasn't changed in any of the slightly-different renditions I've seen, including in the one I got from my French teacher. On the other hand, the Gettysburg Address certainly wouldn't sound the same if someone started reciting it with "87 years ago...".
English translations of this French phrase feel quite awkward to me compared to the original, and I'm not including one here. Interested readers can copy the text and search on the mighty Internet themselves.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
OverDrive Media Console & other e-book reader apps
11/1/11 WARNING: The 2.3.3 version of OverDrive Media Console apparently introduced a bug that prevents download of e-books to the iPod under iOS 4.3.5 (possibly under all earlier iOS versions as well). It may even wipe out existing e-books, but I cannot confirm that. Stay with version 2.3.2, or hope for a future fix. I ended up upgrading my iPod to iOS 5, and OverDrive 2.3.3 can again download e-books.
11/11/11 WARNING: Version 3.2 of Stanza, available 11/10/11, doesn't work under iOS 4 (according to multiple App Store reviews), although it is needed under iOS 5, which would not run the previous version, 3.1.
The free Overdrive Media Console app allows wireless downloading of assorted electronic media, e.g., books and audiobooks. You can check out such materials from libraries if you have a valid library card. The materials automatically expire at the end of the check out period, "returning" themselves. Beyond the choice of materials at my library, I imagine I could also check such materials out from other libraries in the network, but have yet to investigate. As of December 2011, I haven't downloaded any audiobooks, so cannot comment on them. OverDrive also has personal computer based software as well, which I think you can use to get additional material onto iOS devices, but I have not used it -- the iOS app meets my needs well as is.
In September 2011, OverDrive added Kindle compatibility to libraries in its network, broadening the e-book selection and also increasing the appeal of the Kindle app. I tried it out from my iPad, downloading material both wirelessly and wired, and was interested to see that Amazon later sent me e-mail (first warning that the e-book would expire in 3 days, later to say that the e-book had indeed expired) noting that if I purchase the e-book "from the Kindle Store or borrow it again from [my] local library, all of [my] notes and highlights will be preserved." (see also http://www.amazon.com/help/kindle/publiclibraries). That seems to be a win for consumers, Amazon, OverDrive, and libraries, and a loss for Amazon competitors and privacy advocates.
12/8/11: After noticing that in Safari, Kindle books were showing on library websites only on an iPad and not on an iPod through this process, I contacted a librarian, who subsequently conveyed to me this information from OverDrive:
Some of the following e-book commentary is directed toward public domain material, which is typically formatted rather roughly. Commercial e-books, such as those for sale on Amazon, are normally formatted nicely, so some of the following comments would not apply to them.
There are also older public domain materials which are freely downloadable and which don't expire; my library helps direct you to those as well. While the selection is of course rather "historical", from a quick look I found two eBooks which are sufficiently "timeless" and can be of use for my efforts at strengthening my Spanish:
I also downloaded Chess Fundamentals by J.R. Capablanca, of which I long ago bought a printed copy. However, the chess diagrams are squeezed very thin, so it's necessary to turn the iPod screen to landscape to see them properly. (My blog entry about this e-book under iOS 5)
Probably pure text, with minimal or no diagrams/charts, works best with OverDrive Media Console.
For normal reading, you can choose a sepia background, which I find more pleasant on the eyes, instead of white. OverDrive Media Console also has a Night Mode, to flip text to be white on a black background, plus a brightness control.
9/11/11: Public domain e-books are available through multiple iOS apps, not just OverDrive. For example, Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar mentioned above is additionally available in all of:
11/27/11: Syncing across multiple iOS devices:
Kindle features the best syncing, including for Kindle e-books borrowed from the library. iBooks cannot be used for borrowing library e-books, but otherwise may be close -- I cannot remember if I synced my small library across iPod and iPad manually, but my iPod has Winnie-the-Pooh, which came free at one point (probably when the iBooks app was released), but is currently not free in the iBooks Store, and was not on my iPad until I copied it there manually from PC iTunes as a result of writing this additional note. OverDrive and Stanza e-book access is device-based; you must download each e-book from scratch onto each device.
12/10/11: With OverDrive, log in to your library account on each device onto which you want to download the e-book. For any iOS device after the first, you should be able to (again) download materials that are checked out to your account (I was able to from my local library, anyway).
As a result of this investigation, Stanza is my preferred app for Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar. Kindle is my favorite for reading library e-books, but sometimes a book I want to read is only available in epub format, for which I would happily use OverDrive.
12/12/11: Currently Amazon runs a Kindle Daily Deal, where they have a very favorable discount on a different e-book each day. You may wish to follow that by checking their website each day and/or by signing up for e-mail or Twitter notifications. I learned about this special pricing the day after having sadly missed the chance to get the wonderful Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell e-book for $1.99.
1/3/12: As I write, Amazon is offering the Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell e-book for $2.99! It's great to have a digital copy for convenience of reading, but the charming (or perhaps annoying, depending on the reader) print footnotes have been turned into endnotes. The print version generally (maybe always) has the explanation of a footnote (or at least the start of it) on the same page as the footnote appears. This difference in footnote presentation between print and digital copies would likely be more significant the first time you read the book, but this is my second (or third?) time through. Time will tell how often I turn to the now-endnotes.
Ah, I see Barnes and Noble is also selling the Nook Book version for $2.99. Both companies list the digital version's regular price as $3.99 ("suggested retail price set by the publisher" -Amazon), which I think is a significant drop from mid-December 2011. Competition may have truly been responsible for bringing consumers a lower price on digital copies of this book.
11/11/11 WARNING: Version 3.2 of Stanza, available 11/10/11, doesn't work under iOS 4 (according to multiple App Store reviews), although it is needed under iOS 5, which would not run the previous version, 3.1.
The free Overdrive Media Console app allows wireless downloading of assorted electronic media, e.g., books and audiobooks. You can check out such materials from libraries if you have a valid library card. The materials automatically expire at the end of the check out period, "returning" themselves. Beyond the choice of materials at my library, I imagine I could also check such materials out from other libraries in the network, but have yet to investigate. As of December 2011, I haven't downloaded any audiobooks, so cannot comment on them. OverDrive also has personal computer based software as well, which I think you can use to get additional material onto iOS devices, but I have not used it -- the iOS app meets my needs well as is.
In September 2011, OverDrive added Kindle compatibility to libraries in its network, broadening the e-book selection and also increasing the appeal of the Kindle app. I tried it out from my iPad, downloading material both wirelessly and wired, and was interested to see that Amazon later sent me e-mail (first warning that the e-book would expire in 3 days, later to say that the e-book had indeed expired) noting that if I purchase the e-book "from the Kindle Store or borrow it again from [my] local library, all of [my] notes and highlights will be preserved." (see also http://www.amazon.com/help/kindle/publiclibraries). That seems to be a win for consumers, Amazon, OverDrive, and libraries, and a loss for Amazon competitors and privacy advocates.
12/8/11: After noticing that in Safari, Kindle books were showing on library websites only on an iPad and not on an iPod through this process, I contacted a librarian, who subsequently conveyed to me this information from OverDrive:
Please note that Kindle devices, Smartphones, and other small screen devices that operate a mobile versus a standard browser are not currently supported for direct checkout and download for Kindle Books. At this time, Kindle Books can only be delivered to a Kindle or free Kindle apps from a PC, Mac, or tablet. We hope to expand mobile access in the future.Mercury Web Browser Lite (version 5.1 and 5.2, but not 5.2.1) and Mercury Web Browser Pro can identify themselves to websites as other browsers. OverDrive starts up Safari, but you can copy the URL, paste it into Mercury, set Mercury to identify itself as Mobile Safari(iPad), refresh the browser if needed, and you will be able to access the Kindle e-books on an iPod (at least I could through my local library). (6/2012: For one Adobe EPUB format e-book, I could not download directly through Mercury Web Browser Pro, but could through Safari. I usually get Kindle format e-books, so maybe this has always been the case but I have only discovered it now.)
Please ask your patron to contact Amazon to find out when they will be adding this capability. Amazon can be contacted by clicking on the 'Contact Us' button at the following link:
http://www.amazon.com/help/kindle/publiclibraries
Some of the following e-book commentary is directed toward public domain material, which is typically formatted rather roughly. Commercial e-books, such as those for sale on Amazon, are normally formatted nicely, so some of the following comments would not apply to them.
There are also older public domain materials which are freely downloadable and which don't expire; my library helps direct you to those as well. While the selection is of course rather "historical", from a quick look I found two eBooks which are sufficiently "timeless" and can be of use for my efforts at strengthening my Spanish:
- Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar by C.A. Toledano (1917). Basic grammar rules presumably haven't changed much, if at all. I like to learn/relearn this stuff, although many would find it tedious and boring, e.g., how to conjugate regular verbs or spelling rules like "The diaresis [two dots] is placed over u in 'güe' and 'güi' when the u is to be sounded.", as a friend and I had similarly discussed some months ago, touching on the Spanish word for penguin, pingüino.
- An Elementary Spanish Reader by Earl Stanley Harrison (1912).
I also downloaded Chess Fundamentals by J.R. Capablanca, of which I long ago bought a printed copy. However, the chess diagrams are squeezed very thin, so it's necessary to turn the iPod screen to landscape to see them properly. (My blog entry about this e-book under iOS 5)
Probably pure text, with minimal or no diagrams/charts, works best with OverDrive Media Console.
For normal reading, you can choose a sepia background, which I find more pleasant on the eyes, instead of white. OverDrive Media Console also has a Night Mode, to flip text to be white on a black background, plus a brightness control.
9/11/11: Public domain e-books are available through multiple iOS apps, not just OverDrive. For example, Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar mentioned above is additionally available in all of:
- iBooks
- Kindle (which, unlike the 3 other apps, lacks direct access to the Table of Contents)
- Stanza (from Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15127.epub.noimages on 12/21/11)
11/27/11: Syncing across multiple iOS devices:
Kindle features the best syncing, including for Kindle e-books borrowed from the library. iBooks cannot be used for borrowing library e-books, but otherwise may be close -- I cannot remember if I synced my small library across iPod and iPad manually, but my iPod has Winnie-the-Pooh, which came free at one point (probably when the iBooks app was released), but is currently not free in the iBooks Store, and was not on my iPad until I copied it there manually from PC iTunes as a result of writing this additional note. OverDrive and Stanza e-book access is device-based; you must download each e-book from scratch onto each device.
12/10/11: With OverDrive, log in to your library account on each device onto which you want to download the e-book. For any iOS device after the first, you should be able to (again) download materials that are checked out to your account (I was able to from my local library, anyway).
As a result of this investigation, Stanza is my preferred app for Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar. Kindle is my favorite for reading library e-books, but sometimes a book I want to read is only available in epub format, for which I would happily use OverDrive.
12/12/11: Currently Amazon runs a Kindle Daily Deal, where they have a very favorable discount on a different e-book each day. You may wish to follow that by checking their website each day and/or by signing up for e-mail or Twitter notifications. I learned about this special pricing the day after having sadly missed the chance to get the wonderful Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell e-book for $1.99.
1/3/12: As I write, Amazon is offering the Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell e-book for $2.99! It's great to have a digital copy for convenience of reading, but the charming (or perhaps annoying, depending on the reader) print footnotes have been turned into endnotes. The print version generally (maybe always) has the explanation of a footnote (or at least the start of it) on the same page as the footnote appears. This difference in footnote presentation between print and digital copies would likely be more significant the first time you read the book, but this is my second (or third?) time through. Time will tell how often I turn to the now-endnotes.
Ah, I see Barnes and Noble is also selling the Nook Book version for $2.99. Both companies list the digital version's regular price as $3.99 ("suggested retail price set by the publisher" -Amazon), which I think is a significant drop from mid-December 2011. Competition may have truly been responsible for bringing consumers a lower price on digital copies of this book.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Podcasts for beginner-intermediate Spanish lessons
In high school, I was fortunate to have a Spanish teacher who seemed to know that I had some proclivity for foreign languages. I had once done a small bit of supplemental work (reading Le Petit Prince [The Little Prince]) beyond the French I took each year, of which she may have been aware, being the Department Chair.
This Miss York (Thank you!!) suggested that I skip 2nd year Spanish, so I ended up taking 1st and 3rd year. I had to hustle to get up to speed in the 3rd year, not having been exposed to the 2nd year material, but it was well worth it to develop a Spanish language foundation that would encourage me in future years to keep at it.
For some time, I've thought that if I again had my high school Spanish textbooks (which were loaned to students each year by the school, as I presume is the norm in U.S. public schools), I should be able to, reasonably quickly, refresh some of the grammatical knowledge I once had. However, podcasts remain rather more convenient, and I found one which feels pretty good for my level, although to date I've only listened to a small portion of its content.
iTunes U, DePaul College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Basic Spanish, by Claudia Fernandez, is my choice. Eventually I hope to again be able to compose meaningful new sentences on my own (too bad you can't split infinitives in Spanish, I'd obviously love to do so). For too long I've been living off of random sentences like:
This Miss York (Thank you!!) suggested that I skip 2nd year Spanish, so I ended up taking 1st and 3rd year. I had to hustle to get up to speed in the 3rd year, not having been exposed to the 2nd year material, but it was well worth it to develop a Spanish language foundation that would encourage me in future years to keep at it.
For some time, I've thought that if I again had my high school Spanish textbooks (which were loaned to students each year by the school, as I presume is the norm in U.S. public schools), I should be able to, reasonably quickly, refresh some of the grammatical knowledge I once had. However, podcasts remain rather more convenient, and I found one which feels pretty good for my level, although to date I've only listened to a small portion of its content.
iTunes U, DePaul College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Basic Spanish, by Claudia Fernandez, is my choice. Eventually I hope to again be able to compose meaningful new sentences on my own (too bad you can't split infinitives in Spanish, I'd obviously love to do so). For too long I've been living off of random sentences like:
- El mago hace muchos trucos de mágia. (The magician does many magic tricks. ["does", not "makes", Google Translate!]), and
- Las ardillas buscan nueces en los árboles. (The squirrels look for nuts in the trees. [not "The squirrels in the trees looking for nuts", Google Translate!])
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Brought to you by the letter R
I find it interesting that the general sound associated with the letter R in English, when present in any of the languages which I've studied, is qualitatively different from the English sound.
- Chinese: Something of a cross between R and a very light G as in rouge (a word which itself has French origins), an example being 日 (rì; sun, day). The sole exception I know of is when the R is followed by UI (Pinyin) in, e.g., 瑞 (ruì; lucky, auspicious), when there is no very light rouge-G sound; in this specific Pinyin context only, it seems very much like an English R to me.
- French: Comes with an "airy" H sound, i.e., R is aspirated, as in rural (rural), one of the French words I find most difficult to pronounce smoothly (though the U doesn't make it any easier!). When double-checking on "aspirated", I saw that P in pie is given as an example of an aspirated letter; I wasn't particularly aware of that aspiration as a native speaker.
- Japanese: A cross between an R and an L, e.g., in this romaji (Roman letter) rendering: arigato (thank you).
- Spanish: R is "rolling" (along the tongue), and there is also RR, which is even more rolling, as in borrador (chalkboard eraser). Keep those two sounds straight for pero (but) and perro (dog)....
- Taiwanese: There is no R-type sound, as my former Taiwanese teacher confirmed. (A Cantonese-speaking friend also said Cantonese has no R-type sound.)
Monday, April 11, 2011
Special characters in French and Spanish
When I was in college, one of my roommates had one of those newfangled (at the time) Apple Macintosh computers. He let me use it for a French paper, and I was ecstatic that I could enter accented characters like é simply by pressing a key combination, a feat totally outside the capabilities of the typewriter I'd been using for papers. Apple got it way back then, and they still got it.
I previously wrote on my first (much less active) blog about how OpenOffice 3.1 [is] markedly less convenient than Microsoft Word 2007 for common accent marks in French. Microsoft got it, too. OpenOffice...not so much.
It is even easier to input special characters in French and Spanish in iOS. Instead of just tapping a letter (or character), tap-and-hold, then slide your finger to select from any alternate choices that appear, and "let go" (lift your finger from the screen). You can even get œ (tap-and-hold o), which is not in the "Western European Latin Alphabet #1", as I'd previously written. For Spanish, it is also possible to get the upside down question mark (¿) and exclamation point (¡).
If you're working primarily in English with a dab of French or Spanish here and there, there's no need to add the French or Spanish virtual keyboards, just tap-and-hold and choose the character variant as described above.
I previously wrote on my first (much less active) blog about how OpenOffice 3.1 [is] markedly less convenient than Microsoft Word 2007 for common accent marks in French. Microsoft got it, too. OpenOffice...not so much.
It is even easier to input special characters in French and Spanish in iOS. Instead of just tapping a letter (or character), tap-and-hold, then slide your finger to select from any alternate choices that appear, and "let go" (lift your finger from the screen). You can even get œ (tap-and-hold o), which is not in the "Western European Latin Alphabet #1", as I'd previously written. For Spanish, it is also possible to get the upside down question mark (¿) and exclamation point (¡).
If you're working primarily in English with a dab of French or Spanish here and there, there's no need to add the French or Spanish virtual keyboards, just tap-and-hold and choose the character variant as described above.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Free Spanish dictionary apps: Span¡shD¡Ct
Parent blog entry: http://kenamored.blogspot.com/2011/04/free-spanish-dictionary-apps.html
PROS:
11/26/11: For a free Spanish-Spanish dictionary, see this blog entry.
PROS:
- Word Game is fun for someone with my level of Spanish knowledge (I have to make educated guesses relatively often). A Spanish word is presented (with definite article if a noun) along with audio pronunciation, and you choose between 4 English translation choices. The exercises get harder if you get more correct answers, and easier if you make mistakes.
- Word Game: English misspellings (e.g., fourty instead of forty, lightening instead of lightning).
- Word Game: Spanish word(s?) inadvertently included in English translation choices (mapa).
- Ads.
11/26/11: For a free Spanish-Spanish dictionary, see this blog entry.
Free Spanish dictionary apps
Below are the free Spanish-English dictionary apps I'm trying out. Each one also gets its own separate blog entry, into which incremental updates will flow over time. If I ever feel those entries are sufficiently mature, I may make a chart comparing all of these apps.
One or more (all?) of these apps have more powerful paid versions, but for now I don't have a need for capabilities beyond what I've found in the free versions.
11/26/11: For a free Spanish-Spanish dictionary, see this blog entry.
One or more (all?) of these apps have more powerful paid versions, but for now I don't have a need for capabilities beyond what I've found in the free versions.
11/26/11: For a free Spanish-Spanish dictionary, see this blog entry.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
The significance of diacritical marks and special characters
A friend from San Francisco once told me the tale of a person having received a Worker of the Year award. The award was in Spanish, and there was one minor problem...the printed award lacked the tilde (~) over the n in the Spanish word for year (año). The award thus read, "Trabajador del Ano" -- Worker of the Anus.
(Actually, I think my friend told me "Trabajador de Ano", but I think the middle word was probably "del" [of the], instead of just "de" [of].)
That's the most extreme case I've heard of where the lack of a diacritical mark makes a big difference.
On a more technical, but less disturbing, note, I recently learned a little tidbit about the eight-bit ISO 8859-15 (Western European Latin Alphabet #9) character set, which includes the Euro symbol along with some characters from the French and Finnish languages, characters which are missing from the more heavily used ISO 8859-1 (Western European Latin Alphabet #1) character set. Despite good intentions, ISO 8859-15 was apparently unable to overcome the popularity of ISO 8859-1.
The ISO 8859-15 bonus characters for French are œ, Œ, and Ÿ (replacing ½, ¼, and ¾, respectively). I had never heard of French words that had Ÿ in them, so I found it interesting that such a character existed in the French alphabet.
A French Wikipedia page, which I can't find at the moment, mentioned that when the working group met to decide what characters would go into ISO 8859-1, one member said there were no contexts in which œ would be confused with oe (hmm, for words that have oe, I can only think of Noël and Citroën off the top of my head, and that e is different). Another member of that working group worked for a printer company, and said that they didn't even have Ÿ available on their printers. This was the mid-1980's, it seems, so those may have been daisy-wheel and dot matrix printers.
Oof, I see 8859-15 also kicked out ¦ ("pipe"), replacing it with a Finnish character, a dreadful decision for technical computer usage.
French Wikipedia page on ISO 8859-15
(Actually, I think my friend told me "Trabajador de Ano", but I think the middle word was probably "del" [of the], instead of just "de" [of].)
That's the most extreme case I've heard of where the lack of a diacritical mark makes a big difference.
On a more technical, but less disturbing, note, I recently learned a little tidbit about the eight-bit ISO 8859-15 (Western European Latin Alphabet #9) character set, which includes the Euro symbol along with some characters from the French and Finnish languages, characters which are missing from the more heavily used ISO 8859-1 (Western European Latin Alphabet #1) character set. Despite good intentions, ISO 8859-15 was apparently unable to overcome the popularity of ISO 8859-1.
The ISO 8859-15 bonus characters for French are œ, Œ, and Ÿ (replacing ½, ¼, and ¾, respectively). I had never heard of French words that had Ÿ in them, so I found it interesting that such a character existed in the French alphabet.
A French Wikipedia page, which I can't find at the moment, mentioned that when the working group met to decide what characters would go into ISO 8859-1, one member said there were no contexts in which œ would be confused with oe (hmm, for words that have oe, I can only think of Noël and Citroën off the top of my head, and that e is different). Another member of that working group worked for a printer company, and said that they didn't even have Ÿ available on their printers. This was the mid-1980's, it seems, so those may have been daisy-wheel and dot matrix printers.
Oof, I see 8859-15 also kicked out ¦ ("pipe"), replacing it with a Finnish character, a dreadful decision for technical computer usage.
French Wikipedia page on ISO 8859-15
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