Our own Sarah Allen, Mightyverse CTO and co-founder, was recognized today in onlinemba.com, listing Mightyverse as one of the top 15 startups founded by women. The 15 include some of our favorites: LoveWithFood, 23andme and TaskRabbit. Go check them all out, they are all standout companies, doing really cool stuff.
It’s a great group of people to be recognized with, and as always, we’re crazy proud to be working with Sarah Allen!!

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman includes a wide collection of thought-provoking research on children and learning. The last chapter focuses on language, with some of its lessons applicable to both early language acquisition by babies and later language learning as well.

Babies learn to decipher speech partly by lip-reading: they watch how people move their lips and mouths to produce sounds. One of the first things that babies must learn—before they can comprehend any word meanings—is when one word ends and another begins. Without segmentation, an adult’s words probably sound about the same to an infant as does his own babbling. At 7.5 months, babies can segment the speech of people they see speaking. However, if the babies hear speech while looking at an abstract shape, instead of a face, they can’t segment the sounds: the speech once again is just endless gibberish. (Even for adults, seeing someone’s lips as he speaks is the equivalent of a 20-decibel increase in volume.)


When a child sees someone speak and hears his voice, there are two sensory draws—two simultaneous events both telling the child to pay attention to this single object of interest—this moment of human interaction. The result is that the infant is more focused, remembers the event, and learns more.
–pp. 203-204).

In addition to reporting that multisensory input helps, the authors include research from University of Iowa (p. 217-218) that hearing language from multiple speakers accelerates learning.

This supports our anecdotal evidence that hearing slight variations in accent help people in learning new phrases. When we acquire a new language, we are not only acquiring vocabulary, but learning to differentiate phonemes and process new sounds.

Grammar teaches Vocabulary

Bronson and Merryman also discuss the value of variation sets where children learn vocabulary where words are repeated in varying contexts. Initially a noun is easily recognized when it follows a “word frame” such as “Look at the ___.” Then using some repetition to highlight variation helps with learning. They point out that “grammar teaches vocabulary.”

For instance, a variation set would thus be: “Rachel, bring the book to Daddy. Bring him the book. Give it to Daddy. Thank you, Rachel—you gave Daddy the book.”
– p. 219

This is exactly how I like to learn a new language, learning vocabulary and grammar together in context. I am often frustrated that such variation sets are hard to assemble in typical language workbooks. I think this could inform how we create “phrase lists” in Mightyverse and I can’t wait until we make the tools a little easier so we can let other folks experiment with lists of their own making.

We’ve been working on a very cool web recording feature for Mightyverse. One of the reasons that it is not quite ready for prime time is a bug in the Flash Player where sometimes you can’t click the “Allow” button in the microphone/camera privacy dialog. (It happens when the SWF is not aligned to a pixel boundary, which happens quite frequently in normal CSS/HTML layout.)

Flash Player 10.3 was released on Friday, which is supposed to fix the issue. You can download it here, or you may follow the detailed steps below to workaround the bug.

Right-click (or control-click on the mac) and a menu like the one below will appear:

Choose “Global Settings…” and the Flash Player system preferences will open (sometimes this takes 10-15 seconds). Then select the “Camera and Mic” panel (1) and click “Camera and Microphone Settings by Site…” (2).

A panel will drop down displaying the sites that have asked you for camera or microphone permissions. Click the [+] button in the lower left corner:

Next type the full hostname “www.mightyverse.com” as the site domain and select “Allow” from the popup and click “Add.”

Click “Close” (and optionally close the system preferences window) and then refresh the browser page. Now the privacy dialog should not appear and the site will have access to your camera and microphone. Whew!

In doing some research into localized SEO this weekend, I found an awesome blog post that well describes the difference between localization and SEO translation.

As an example of localization challenges, it reports “an Iranian soap product line is called ‘Barf‘, which actually means ‘snow’ in Farsi, but becomes ‘vomiting’ in English.” I tweeted this excellent example, and learned from @adamwride that Argentina actually has a line of hamburger patties named “Barfy”!

Using our fun, new not-yet-publicly released web recording interface, I recorded some English phrases for the occasion:

• “Barf” is an inapprorpriate brand name for an English-speaking market.
• Barf
• snow

On July 30th, 2011 we will meet at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, where volunteers will record the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in their native language(s). Mightyverse volunteers will assist recording at several recording stations. Each station will be equiped with a video camera, monitor, lighting, microphone and Mightyverse PhraseFarm teleprompter system to enable the capture of spoken language. These high quality recordings of native speakers will be made available at archive.org under a Creative Commons license.

Mightyverse is excited to support the Long Now Foundation’s 300 languages project in its July 30th 2011 record-a-thon. The goal of the 300 languages project is to record spoken language that has parallel translations in at least 300 languages. Towards that effort, Laura Welcher and her team at The Rosetta Project (an ongoing effort by The Long Now Foundation) have identified texts that already exist in parallel translations. Of those texts, we at Mightyverse were especially excited by the UDHR.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is the most translated document in the world and has over 400 translations. It was ratified by the United Nations in 1948. The UDHR was the first international recognition that all human beings have fundamental rights and freedoms and it continues to be a relevant document today over 60 years later. The UDHR continues to be a very important inspiration for millions of people, and through our efforts with The Long Now Foundation, The Internet Archives and Mightyverse, our hope is to create a lasting archive of language that extends the mission that was set forth over 60 years ago.

We believe that language is the key to cultural understanding, our ability to create a peaceful prosperous world and literally our survival as people on this planet. We are very excited to participate in this project.

Please join us. If you can be in SF, you can record with Mightyverse. If you are remote, you can submit recordings of the UDHR or other spoken language that you record on your own:

The South African Bill of Rights, enacted in 1996, provides very broad protections for human rights as part of the constitution, including strong protections for language and culture. Here are some excerpts:

• “Everyone has the right to receive education in the official language or languages of their choice” (29.2)
• “Everyone has the right to use the language and to participate in the cultural life of their choice” (30)

Naturally, the Bill of Rights is available on the web it in the other 10 official languages:

• Afrikaans
• isiNdebele
• isiXhosa
• isiZulu
• Sepedi
• Sesotho
• Setswana
• SiSwati
• Tshivenda
• Xitsonga

From 2001 Census reports, fewer than 1% of South Africans speak a native language that is not one of the 11 official languages ( via wikipedia). Visiting South Africa, I have enjoyed the rich diversity of language and culture. Of South Africa’s 11 official languages, I speak only English, but I’ve overheard many conversations in a great variety of languages and I’ve noticed that most South Africans speak at least two languages and many speak 5 or 7.