Miro Guide - Video Podcast Directory Essential phrases in 40 languages DigitaLang I talked to a machine this morning. I actually had quite a nice chat. The machine was a robotic teacher. And I learned some interesting stuff. That is scary. The E-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC has added a teacher-bot this year, whose job it seems to be to fire interesting and provocative quotes out willy-nilly at the MOOC participants. This bot isn’t just an automated sequence of posts and quotes, it’s actually got free rein over the course’s Twitter account and is posting little nuggets of thought-provoking information (seemingly) based on what you actually write in the course’s twitter stream. The “discussion” I had with the bot was on the subject of “post-humanism.” While I was trying to figure out what the hell “post-humanism” means, the teacher bot led me on a merry chase looking up quotes and obscure academic references, which had the interesting side effect of “ambush teaching” me. @EDCMOOC How does the “uncanny valley” effect fit into posthumanism? Snarky of me, I know.
FSI Chinese Buy this domain. fsi-language-courses.com Bougez, vous lisez! - Audible Home Page BBC Languages – Free online lessons to learn and study with Ellclassroom Yingzi Also see the Belorussian translation provided by Fatcow. The English spelling system is such a pain, we'd might as well switch to hanzi-- Chinese characters. How should we go about it? Japanese style One way would be to use hanzi directly, asthe Japanese do. For instance, we'd write "work" as , and "ruler" as . , and "tycoon" as You can already see that this is going to be tricky. two readings, for instance-- /wrk/ and /gûng/-- and two as well-- /rulr/ and /kun/. Proper names will be a problem as well. for the name of the bodaciously cute singer Faye Wong-- but for English names we'd have no better recourse than to spell things out using the nearest Chinese syllables. Chinese style Maybe there's a better approach. The basic principle will be, one yingzi for a syllable with a particular meaning. Does that mean we need a completely separate symbol for each of the thousands of possible English syllables? Little pictures Well, now's the time. woods repeats the yingzi for tree, while Phonetic classes