Support Language

Well I discovered something fun last night: I can change the support language on the Talk Now Estonian program from Eurotalk to German.

This is particularly groovy because the program is very image based, so I don't really need the English words (I already know what to call that banana-looking thing in English: "a banana"), but having the Estonian and the German side-by side is helping to reinforce both (and helping me pick up a bit more German while I'm at it).

It's also making me work a little harder to remember the correct Estonian word, because I now have the distraction of the German word working as a challenge. And it's interesting to see how often the German and Estonian words are actually quite close to each other - often, it's a minor spelling variation echoing a minor difference in pronunciation (eg, "kurk" and "Gurke").

I also appreciate the fact that the Talk Now software includes the definite article with the German words - so many other vocabulary lists seem to think we'll just be able to magically work it out.

Then there's the "phrase" section that I found a bit too intimidating when I first started using the program a couple of years ago. Coming back to it now, the combination of German and Estonian made it more of a game or a puzzle - using what I knew of each language to try to determine exactly what the meaning of the phrase(s) was.

By the way, the Eurotalk Talk Now stuff isn't a bad introduction to a language. I know a lot of these whizz-bang, we-use-innovative-innovations style teach-yourself programmes can be a lot of time-wasting hooey (and I have references from peer reviewed journals to back up that claim), but I appreciated the basic vocabulary grounding this one had. Sure, in terms of learning grammar or sentence structure it is completely useless. For example, in the "food" section it shows you a picture of some pears and offers the word "pirnid" - which is perfectly fine, given that we are looking at multiple pears, and therefore the plural is called for. It doesn't tell you that it is the plural of the word, and that the singular is "pirn" - nor does it ever once explain how to go about recognising or creating plurals.

This could actually be a wise move, as I doubt explaining the whole genitive/partitive word form thing is really part of the "language learning is fun!" vibe the program is going for. Also, if you really are at the complete beginner stage, or using teach-yourself material to try the language on for size, you need a few words under your belt first. Still, I would have thought that a few more of the basics would have been covered. Like the Estonian word for "is", for example, which is there, but not obviously so - or, indeed, verbs in general. The entire program is heavily noun-centric.

So, really, on the one hand, it actually kind of sucks. But one the other hand, I find I lot of the words I can recognise on sight are words I originally encountered through this program. And being able to play with the language is nice.

And now, of course, I'm finding new uses for the thing - and new ways to play. Or maybe I'm just talking myself into being happy about spending a lot of money on getting their whole German package based on the fact that the Estonian disc wasn't horrible. Who knows?