Author Archives: sarah

300 Languages Record-a-thon

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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:

Language Rights in South Africa

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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)

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

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.

people’s choice for mobile

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Last night Mightyverse participated in Women 2.0 PITCH as a finalist in the mobile track. 150 startup companies applied and 9 were chosen, 3 each in mobile, clean tech and web. Being chosen as a finalist and preparing our 7 minute pitch was a great experience.

The judges had great questions and it was good to get both formal feedback from the judges and informal feedback from many attendees who we spoke with at the event. We were pleased at the outpouring of twitter love and were excited to win the “people’s choice” award! Here’s a video of the fabulous Shaherose of Women 2.0 announcing Mightyverse as a winner:

Many thanks to Aihui Ong and all of the volunteers who made this wonderful event possible.

Ty finds Good Coffee in Tokyo

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One of our early use case tests with Mightyverse was on a trip to Tokyo with Ty Roberts of Sony. We prepared a list of phrases specifically for Ty and then Glen took video of Ty using his PhrasePack to see if he could find a good cup of coffee in Tokyo. Ty doesn’t speak much Japanese, but is the kind of adventurous traveler who is excited to engage with local folks who don’t speak his language. Let’s go grab a cup of coffee!

how many people speak a second language?

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[Update] A Global Perspective on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, from the Center for Applied Linguistics, reports that “available data indicate that there are many more bilingual or multilingual individuals in the world than there are monolingual.” Experts debate what it means to “speak” a language and even what a language is. For example, most scholars agree that spoken Cantonese and Mandarin are different languages, even though they share identical Chinese writing. However, Cantonese is often referred to as a dialect of Mandarin. Are the 71M Cantonese speakers, the majority of whom also speak Mandarin, multilingual? I believe so, but I don’t think they were included by the sources used for my analysis above.

I was conservative in my analysis, so I do think it is possible that a majority of the world speaks more than one language; however, almost half of the world’s population still lives in rural areas where people are often monolingual, although in China, everyone learns Mandarin, in addition to their local language. Everyone agrees that multilingualism is increasing, but I haven’t seen reports with credible numbers that quantify the trend.

Based on research in the 1990’s George Weber of the Andaman Association wrote an interesting article on the world’s most influential languages.

I found it quite interesting to see the number of secondary speakers, with the largest being french (although there are plenty of folk on the web who argue with his assessment).

It is notable that the margin of error in looking at the number of speakers is quite large, and this study seems to have taken the lowest of each estimate .  According to a summary by M. Turner, the number of second language speakers was 571 Million, which is 8.3% of the world population.

In looking to update this list, I took numbers from Wikipedia and Ethnologue, surveying the largest languages where I could easily find stats of second-language speakers.  Here’s the list I came up with (number in millions):

English 1400
French 500
Mandarin 178
Spanish (100-171) 130
Russian 114
Portuguese 30
German 28
Arabic 21
Japanese 1
2402

*Wikipedia reported 100-171 Million (I took the average)

In summary, 2.4 Billion people would be 35% of the world population; however, the percentage of people should be somewhat less since this rough assessment doesn’t account for people who speak more than 2 languages, but I would also guess that in these stats I would show up only as an English speaker, even though I speak other languages also… how would any statistician even know about me?  So, this summary is far from scientific, but it feels about right that in today’s global economy roughly a third of us are speaking another language.

MightySushi Update

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MightySushi is a new iPhone and web based tool designed to connect people around the world to the richness of Japanese culture through the language of sushi. Now and then we add phrases to the app. The latest update includes one of my favorites phrases:
“Wow! The sushi chef is an ABBA fan!”

We’re pleased to share with you this lovely banner designed by Amy Lee at Sequence Mediaworks. If you include this post on a facebook update you will see it, or you can include it on a blog post, or frame it an put it on your wall:

MightySushi iPhone and iPad Application

MightySushi iPhone and iPad Application

Find it on iTunes.

MightySushi iPhone/iPad App

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Just last week during our Mightyverse trip to Japan, the MightySushi iPhone and iPad application was released on the app store. You can buy it for $.99 today and learn phrases like:

All of the phrases are available on the web, so if you don’t have an iOS device you can still use Mightyverse while tethered to your desk. However, I’ve found it very effective to have my own portable slice of Mightyverse that I can carry around with me. The app works offline, so you can learn phrases in the underground subway or just avoid the expensive international data rates.

learning Japanese

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I write this as I listen to “Change” by Miwa, which has transformed from a series of nonsense syllables to something I can recognized as Japanese but still not understand. A year ago, I knew how to:

  • Count to 5 (which I learned when I visited Japan when I was 10)
  • Say いただきます。 (“ittedakimas” which I incorrectly remembered as “let’s eat” but actually means “thank you for the meal” which you say before you eat.
  • Say and type こんにちは (“konnichiwa” which I learned so that I could verify that Laszlo Mail accepted double-byte characters as input text and rendered them corrected)

Early use case testing of Mightyverse showed that it resonated with people who already had some dual language fluency. People who had no knowledge of the language found it quite frustrating. The initial Mightyverse iPhone app had neither the software features nor range of language that language learners or travelers wanted. Nonetheless, when our Japanese investor came to visit, I decided to try using Mightyverse to learn Japanese. I picked a single phrase: “a frog in the well does not know the great sea.” In learning the phrase, I wanted to know what each word meant, so I asked my colleague, Ikuko, to break it down for me. Then I promptly forgot all but the meaning of the whole phrase except the first word (“ino” which means “in a well” since I found it surprising that such a big concept would be known by such a short word). I proceeded to learn the phrase phonetically, until I could successfully parrot it.

I then experienced the frustration and joy of a language learner with an interesting twist. When I spoke this phrase to my American friends who knew Japanese they listened carefully and might be able to understand one or two words, but not understand the meaning of the phrase. They would then say some simple conversation starter to me, of which I understood not one word, to my enormous frustration. However, when I said this phrase to a native Japanese speaker, he or she would immediately smile and nod and often finish the sentence with me. Suddenly we would have something in common and they would tell me in English about where they learned the phrase or about the original Chinese poem or share something about the well-known poet. I delighted to experience a part of the Mightyverse vision made real. I proceeded to learn phrase #2: “I’m sorry I speak the Japanese of a pre-schooler.” This phrase wasn’t as successful in creating connections, but introduced me to Japanese sentence structure.

A few months ago I submitted a talk to Ruby Kaigi, about language and unicode and web applications. (I felt the proverb fit the topic, so I made my first Japanese phrase the title of the talk.) A few weeks ago, I decided to start learning Japanese in earnest with twice weekly Japanese classes. Our teacher instructed us to learn to read and write Hiragana as part of her lessons. She claimed this would help us speak and I bravely ventured forth.

Since I spend quite a bit of time on muni, I decided to try a few iPhone apps to learn conversation and reading. My two favorites are iStart Japanese and Human Japanese. Each also has a free version that you can start with and provides a substantial amount of learning before you need to buy the full version for further lessons. They are quite different and both are complimentary to each other, to the language classes and to Mightyverse. I have found that I learn best when I can learn the same concept in many different ways and I have found that to be true of language more than most things.

iSpeak Japanese is a wonderful introduction to conversation as well as written Japanese. The teaching patterns for conversation were very effective for me.  I also love how you can toggle the writing between hiragana and roman characters and that they introduce the Kanji with the writing as well.  I don’t really feel like it is sticking in my brain yet, but I enjoy working through the exercises and the quizes do seem to help.  My only disappointment is with the pronunciation — I have heard from two native Japanese speakers that they do not really say the “su” at the end of a word like “nomimasu” (which is instead pronounced “nomimas”).  It seems odd that a language program would  teach conversation and not address this common pattern.

Human Japanese iPhone appHuman Japanese is a lovely application that interleaves cultural lessons with language lessons, starting with the hiragana characters. The attention to detail is very lovely and the pacing of the application is comfortable. The notes, gestural drawings and animated strokes really help me understand how to write the characters where my old-fashioned paper workbook didn’t give me enough of a clue. I highly recommend this exploration of Japanese culture and language for the new Japanese language learner.

While Mightyverse does not target beginner language learning, it does prove to be an effective complement. I turn elsewhere, whether it be friends, classes or language learning aids, to learn to fundamentals of sentence structure and simple vocabulary. From Mightyverse, I am inspired to learn more complex and entertaining or specialized phrases and to hear pronunciation from real native speakers.

HTML vs. Flash for Arabic text and video

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We recently realized that the rendering of Arabic script overlaying the videos on Mightyverse is incorrect. For example, the phrase:
كيف أوصل هناك؟ currently appears on the website differently in the search results (which are rendered in HTML) vs. the video (rendered in Flash) as seen in the screenshots below:

This was brought to my attention by Samar Moushabeck, an Arabic teacher at the Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. Since I don’t read or speak Arabic, I had to zoom in to understand the difference.

Correct:

Incorrect:

This is clearly unacceptable. It would be (sort of) like if we wrote the English as:
“Ho w w oul d y ou re com mend I ge t t here”

The letters are correct, but the sentence reads like we are illiterate (which, of course, we are in Arabic, but we’re hoping to improve with the help of Samar and language experts like her).

There are a few possible solutions to this.

1) Move the text from video overlay to below or above the video. This is technically simple solution. However, the thinking behind the current design is that it is helpful to be able to read the text while focusing on the movement of the speaker’s lips. The farther the text is from the video the harder it would seem to be for visual learners (which applies to most of us humans).

2) Render the text in HTML and overlay Flash. I want to run screaming from this solution, since I have some experience trying to intermingle HTML and Flash and found it to be time consuming engineering to get it to work correctly across browsers and, even with a lot of work, had to compromise visual design and/or user experience in some cases.

3) Render the text as a graphic, dynamically load into Flash, then overlay within Flash. This seems an awful lot of work to support my theory of more effective learning and a preference for the visual design.

4) HTML5 video, reported to support overlay for captioning seamlessly. While I’ve read that YouTube will continue to use Flash instead of HTML5 video, Mightyverse has short format video so the constraints for YouTube may not apply. My favorite quote from a Mark Pilgrim HTML5 video article is “support for the <video> element is still evolving, which is a polite way of saying it doesn’t work yet. ” It appears that to support HTML5 video across browsers, we would want to support the new WebM standard (with VP8 video and Vorbis audio) along with the H.264 that we already encode for iPhone and Android.

In any case, we have a few things in the queue (like re-releasing the iPhone app for iOS4) before we can address this on the site, which gives us a little time to explore options. Please leave a comment if you have experience with HTML5 video and/or Arabic text in HTML or Flash and are willing to share some insights.

browsing by theme drives traffic

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Unsurprisingly, allowing people to browse Mightyverse phrase recordings around a theme increased website traffic. When we released the Browse by Phrase List feature, we saw the average number of pages per visit go from just over 1 to almost 5. We also saw an increase in tweets and Facebook links which drove an increase in unique visitors (shown in the graph below) around Hawaiian phrase lists, first released on April 9th and later around Na’vi phrases released on May 9th.

The overall numbers are still quite small, but it exciting to see a response to these specific workflow improvements, where our gut instincts for how we believe people will want to use the website are validated by quantitative metrics.