I have read Science Fiction stories based around physics, chemistry, biology and computers. But I have not seen one before based around linguistics. For all I know there are many of them out there and I just wasn’t interested before.
I am interested now, and so I really enjoyed “We Have Always Spoken Panglish” story by Suzette Haden Elgin (via Esperanto blog entry). I especially enjoyed the in-jokes such as
Task based language learning is supposed to give one the focus to learn language faster through general familiarity with the task and limited vocabulary. This approach fails spectacularly for one hard core knitter. Fortunately, internet is there to help. (via LanguageHat)
And if this situation is common for you, NativeText(WayBackMachine archive) is hoping to make a business (or at least a website) around the distributed human translation.
Stingy Scholar has collected a list of links to language study websites for less-popular languages (think Greek, Korean and Icelandic).
Recommended for comparison and (if you language is on the list) for the study.
After Soviet Union stunned the world with the launch of the Sputnik in 1957, USA allocated a lot of money to education, including foreign languages study. That had kick started a lot of research and produced some new methods of language learning.
And now we are repeating that past again.
As a delayed response to September 11, USA government is planning to pump money into languages again. The languages this time are Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and languages of Central Asia.
I have collected many links to help me learn French with computers. But the resource I have just discovered is really the best.
It is a WikiBook on Autonomous Technology-Assisted Language Learning (ATALL) written by Gary Cziko. It has resources organised by work type and acquisition method. There are language neutral as well as language specific links. And - as with all WikiBooks - anybody can add relevant material.
_Highly recommended!