GeraldH

I have a question: what do you wish to achieve that would differentiate your site from, say, http://www.memrise.com/? Flash-cards are a pretty well recognised learning method, which is a good point to start, but what else will the user do? It wasn't really clear to me from first glance.

Speaking of which...I'm wondering what English learners think of the Australian accent, since I am the proud owner of one myself! I get the feeling that there tends to be a stereotype in people's minds that I don't fit for whatever reason, which is why people first guess that I'm British. My theory is that it's because I'm from the city, and people expect to hear "bush" accents (think Crocodile Dundee).

There's a German one that I've encountered, and I think it's directed at learners because it's said when one wants to say that they're finding German to be a difficult language. Here it is: Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache. Then I've got a Russian one that I like. I can usually only remember the start, but I found the rest online. Enjoy Ехал Грека через реку, видит Грека в реке рак. Сунул Грека руку в реку, рак за руку Греку цап!

This is an interesting topic, and it always seems like it very much depends on where you live and what teachers you have. I went to school in Australia, and we had pretty much equal amounts of French, German and Japanese language students in the final years of high school. However, overall numbers for any foreign language were quite low, which I think is a shame. We could also only really choose one language: I did French, but have ended up in Germany now anyway. Oh well! Now, if you're of the school of thought that language learning is some kind of essential skill to teach students, then it does very much depend on where you live and what your native language is. English seems to rank highly for this reason, but it seems that Spanish does, too (i.e., in the US). Australians are poor at this: we should be studying Indonesian or Mandarin! On the other side, perhaps the more important skill in some cases would be to teach students *how* to learn another language. Teaching (English) kids German or Dutch could be good for that.

I always hear about this stereotype: that German is harsh or aggressive. My theory is that it's an English-speaker's bias. Because there are so many similarities with English, people tend to apply their own ideas about tone when they listen to German speakers. That, and perhaps some sounds which aren't so common in English seem out of place. The same goes when I listen to Russian sometimes: these "harsh" tones aren't so often used in English words, but they can be used by English speakers as a kind of tonal identifier (of anger, or frustration, or something). Mostly, however, it just seems like a stereotype that keeps getting propagated even if there is not so much truth to it.

Oh, man, this is true! I had a bit of a "fling" with Hindi/Urdu for a number of years around the end of high school. I managed to pick up one of those colourful vocabulary books for Hindi, but it seemed so trivial to me. Vocabulary learning in Hindi (for an English native) quickly becomes an exercise on how to speak English slightly differently. Plus, it doesn't help when you can't fit the words together properly! I did pick up a "Teach Yourself Urdu" book once at a book shop, and that actually did a lot more for my understanding. That, and watching Bollywood movies and trying to speak with Hindi speakers... Sadly it seems that the Hindi speakers I know stop learning or using their own language at some point in their education, so it probably explains the lack of materials for an outsider.

I have der die das on my iPad, and use it on occasion. The other one I may have to check out... Do you know of anything similar (to der die das) that I can use from a web browser? I ofter find I want to know the gender of a word when I'm on my computer, but Google Translate does funny things with cases and I don't necessarily want to interpret a dictionary entry every time. Perhaps I should just stick to one dictionary and get used to it, but I feel there must be a better way!

I've been using this for the last year or so: I started with Spanish simply because that was all that was available at the time, but I switched over to German as soon as it was available. It's a great community, and any of the downsides are really just due to it being a crowd-sourced enterprise. This means it's free, so I have nothing to complain about! Having said that, there is always room for improvement, so as others say, it's great as a *component* of your language learning. That's the case for everything, I suppose. Oh, and just to clarify in case it wasn't clear to some: it's not just a mobile app. It started as a website, in fact, and it's still there. I used it there and on my iPad, and they are subtly different. For one, on the website, you must type out the words fully rather than simply select them. It trains your brain in a different way, I feel!