線上免費工具 學外語的好幫手
摘錄自：天下雜誌 經濟學人電子報 2014/3/14
2014-03-07 Web
only 作者：經濟學人
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| 圖片來源：flickr.com/photos/butterflysha/ |
有些東西可以讓面對語言更簡單、更愉快；事實上，現在就是學習語言、了解語言的最好時機。
想了解單一字彙的意思非常容易。韋氏詞典（Merriam-Webster）的網站免費提供相當不錯的定義，但對筆者來說，最棒的某過於牛津英文詞典（Oxford English
Dictionay）的網站了，它的網站用起來非常棒，其英語的歷史紀錄亦無人能敵；可惜的是，每年295美元的費用可能會讓許多人卻步。
翻譯詞典的選擇更是多不勝數。Google翻譯大多可以正確地譯出單字或短詞，要是它一開始沒有給你正確字詞，只要點一下翻譯紐，它就會列出其他的可能結果；在結果上再點一下，還能看到更多同義詞。
維基詞典為維基媒體的計畫之一，它可以當作單一語言詞典，也非常適合用於多語言研究：在某個詞的定義頁面，從左側選單選擇語言之後，就會叫出目標語言中的同一個字詞。換句話說，它既是詞典，也是譯者。
另一項免費服務Linguee，則兼具翻譯詞典和搜尋引擎的功能。輸入你想搜尋的字典和目標語言，不但可以得到翻譯，還能獲得使用此字詞的的雙語對照文章，讓你看到字詞在原文和目標語言中的使用脈絡，進而了解其細微意義。
那文法呢？Language Log上的語言學家，已經辯論過幾乎你想得到的每個文法和用法問題。遇上常見問題，可以用Grammar Girl尋找簡潔而合理的答案。還有些新工具可以讓好奇之人研究英語的使用歷史，例如Google的Ngram Viewer就非常適合用來追尋字詞的長期使用變化。現代美式英語語料庫（Corpus of Contemporary American English）收藏了總計達4.5億字的美式英語文章，實用又免費，但用起來不是十分便利。
最後，拜行動科技之賜，外語學習亦出現熱潮。Rosetta Stone仍舊是最昂貴的選項之一，它非常不錯，但比較低廉的Babbel、免費的Duolingo也都很棒。搭配其他資源，效果就更上一層樓；TuneIn讓使用者得以聆聽全球各地的廣播，Memrise則是強化字彙能力的好方法。加上幾個報紙和雜誌應用程式，排隊時再也不會浪費時間。等你回到桌前，還能使用名為Google
Dictionary的Chrome擴充功能；只要在某個字上頭點二下，立刻就能得到它的定義。（黃維德譯）
©The Economist
Newspaper Limited 2014
The Economist
Language tools
Johnson: A few
favourite things
By The Economist
From The Economist
Published: March
07, 2014
Mar 5th 2014,
12:57 by R.L.G. | BERLIN
WHEN Johnson needs
to research something, a long list of bookmarks, plus a stack of physical
books, plus a phone jammed with apps, have made the work faster and more fun.
This column is dedicated to a few of the things that make working with language
easier and more enjoyable. Indeed, there has never been a better time to learn
a language, or learn about language.
Research on
individual word meanings is easy enough. Merriam-Webster has a good free site
for basic definitions. But for this columnist, one online dictionary stands
out. The Oxford English Dictionary's website is a delight to use, and its
records of the history of the English language are unbeatable. For those who
miss the serendipity of finding great words they weren't looking for while
paging through the dictionary, there are even contextual menus that show the
words before and after in the alphabet. Unfortunately, the price tag of $295 a
year will put most hobbyists off.
For translation
dictionaries, the hobbyist is spoiled for choice. Google Translatenearly always
does an adequate job for single words or short phrases. If it doesn't turn up
the right word on first go, simply click the translation and you'll see a list
of other possibilities. Click one of those, and you'll see more synonyms still,
both in the original and the target language.
But translation
doesn't begin and end with Google. Wiktionary, a Wikimedia project much like
Wikipedia, can work as a single-language dictionary, with over 3.6m entries.
But it is also good for multilingual research: on a word's definition page,
choosing a language from the left-hand menu brings up the same word in the
target language. In other words, it's the best of both a dictionary and a
translator. A friend is researching how "evil" translates into other
languages and what those words are associated with. Wiktionary makes it easy to
discover that the Spanishmal also simply means "bad", the German Böse
can mean "angry", and the Danish ond is the same word for
"pain". Wiktionary is also brilliant for looking at Chinese/Japanese
characters; the roots, phonetics, number of strokes, various pronunciations,
multi-character words and tones are all right there and again, clickably
interconnected to related items. Finally, Linguee, another free service,
doubles as a translation dictionary and a search engine: enter your search term
and target language (for 218 language pairs), and you get not only a
translation, but examples of parallel (human translated) texts in which the
word is used. This lets you see both the original- and target-language word in
context, crucial for understanding nuance.
What about
grammar? The linguists at Language Loghave debated virtually every controversy
of grammar and usage you can think of, and are a good first stop. Grammar
Girlis good for shorter, sensible answers to common questions. And new tools
allow the curious to do their own research into the history of English usage.
Google's N-Gram Viewer is great for tracking words and phrases over time. Many
people are prone to the "frequency illusion": that a usage that
irritates them is a recent solecism. Those who dislikeimpact and authoras verbs
(as The Economist does) will have to do more than describe them as recent
barbarisms—their rise began decades ago. Last year Google added wildcard and
part-of-speech searches, making the tool that much more flexible. The Corpus of
Contemporary American English, a 450m-word trove of edited American English, is
also a useful (and free) resource, but not so user-friendly.
Finally,
foreign-language learning is enjoying a great boom, thanks to mobile
technology. There are so many free and inexpensive apps that the best answer to
"Which program should I use?" is "Lots of them."Rosetta
Stoneremains one of the most expensive options; it is good, but so are
quickly-growing Babbel, which is cheaper, and Duolingo, which is free. All are best
used with other resources. TuneIn (for desktop or mobile) allows users to
listen to (and with a paid Pro version, even record) radio from around the
globe. Memriseis a clever way to add and strengthen vocabulary. Add a free or
cheap flashcard app and a couple of newspaper and magazine apps, and no time in
a post-office queue need ever be wasted again. And when you're back at your
desk, a Google Chrome browser extension called Google Dictionaryworks for both
English and foreign words: double-click a word and you have an English
definition immediately. A must-have for the intermediate learner.
©The Economist
Newspaper Limited 2014
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