Question:
I just want to develop a soft to help people learn foreign language,
especially on improving listening and speaking ablity.
The idea comes from my experience in learning English.
But maybe my experience will not work in USA or Europe.
(I am in Asia)
For Americans or other Euro countries, if they want to learn other
similar languages,such as Spanish, or French , Or Germany...
Pronunciation is an important and difficult problem for them?
Answer:
For almost any nationality. There are sounds in English that don't exist in
French ("th" and "h" for example) - the "r" is pronounced differently in
French, Spanish and English. Certainly for English speakers, I would say one
of the biggest hurdles to learning any of the languages you mentioned below
is pronunciation.
However, I'm learning French at the moment (because I live in France) and
it's understanding people that I find the most difficult. I would be very
interested in any software that focused on understanding the language, and
particularly expressions. You can usually find a round about way of saying
what you want with only 400-600 words, but people who talk back to you will
use a much wider vocabulary. As well, a lot of the words that they use don't
actually mean anything. The French, for example, have a habit of saying
"quoi" (which means "what") at the end of each sentence, like the Canadians
say "aye" - which just served to confuse me at first... but this isn't in
any grammar book that I've read.
Also, when trying to say something, I often want to use an expression in
English, that may not exist in the other language (French for me at the
moment). The saying "When in Rome, do as the Romans" for example, does not
exist in Italian (for obvious reasons) and nor does it exist in French. The
French say (translated) "There where you go, do as you see"... A kind of
dictionary of expressions like this would be pretty handy. Another example -
we often say "anyway" in English, as in "don't meet me at xyz, I'm not going
to be there anyway". The French, for the same thing, say "in any fashion"...
A lot of this is in a good dictionary, but I have found software products
trying to teach languages focus on teaching nouns and adjectives... but a
large part of everyday conversation is made up of expressions.
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