Representing tonality via text

Note: this is adapted from elsewhere but it's more appropriate here.

You can use adverbs in the quotation. E.g.
(Mockingly) Why not?
"Why not?" [she said] mockingly.
WHOA  sounding surprised
"Really?" he says, pretending to be serious because he wants to steal her pocketbook while she's not looking, but she mistakes for cheap moves--and so she looks away, saying "I'm not that easy," only to look up again and find them both gone.
Why not? --he said laughing --I'm game.
Etc.
The last example is rather like in Polish; every change in speaker is presented with a dash, and quotations are offset with a helping phrase because it is spoken by a narrator (the "she said" part). (Note that it's not capitalized tho, so its not a new sentence.) It may not be easy to come up with words for every sense you're going for (tho there are lots of words in English," he said, being droll) but then you can make up words for those manners of speaking. The strikethrough is a way of making it seem more meta like for making comments in programming code; stuff that's written and crossed out is understandably not officially part of the text tho still there. You can present implied subtexts that way too, like how it would be if you spoke and intoned those words. It basically imitates the effect of speaking by sneaking in more, it doesn't necessarily give the reader a blow-by-blow of it. I like to italicize the text that is crossed out too.
E.g.
--I would hate love to have you over more often.
--I like that but I hate everything else.

What is weird, is that some languages e.g. Japanese present solipsistic speech (i.e. talking to oneself) in young children by talking in the 3rd person. It sounds kind of crazy to English people, like something a mad person might do. There's even a trope of characters using quotatives for their own speech, which definitely sounds dissociative. It's funny tho when that character is speaking in a monotone, and their narration adds how they intend to be heard, or hear themselves. [url=http://hasegawa.berkeley.edu/Papers/Soliloquy.pdf]Here's some more on soliloquy in Japanese.[/url]

"That's absurd," I murmur irritatedly to myself.<--Here the utterance is performed; tho it is kind of a lie if you don't say it too. Maybe "I write in anger" is more honest but it makes less sense. Both incidentally are performatives.
"Sarah thinks its crazy," says Sarah quietly to herself. Or "she says~" <--Japanese style example

Libreoffice gives you a ton of text formatting options e.g. Small capitals, double, triple lining etc. I like punctuation marks for beginning sentences too á la Spanish e.g. ¡ ¿Why do you ask?? You could always innovate new punctuation marks.

Maybe there's a history of using emoticons, comics, or ideograms of authors' feelings?

Diminutives, denigratives, honorifics, etc make attitudes more explicit. Certain sentence-final particles in Japanese serve only stylistic purposes. Of course there's an endless number of ways to change narration to capture speech. Otherwise you'll have to dig into intonation which is a big field. I'm digging into [i]English Intonation[/i] by Wells, but im using ad hoc labels for several things which aren't finely distinguished in the different methodologies. None are really super-comprehensive for what a native speaker knows about the language tho. For instance, 'disbelief' and 'incredulous' accents have very similar profiles (tho they are distinct; they have different  height spans and different onsets within their syllables); overall, you're better off just labeling them.

On the other hand, certain gradients that people are super aware of, are handy to have a notation for. For instance, "Tell me." Say the first word high and the 2nd one lower. There are several minute variations on it. If you pronounce "tell" gently rising, you'll sound urgent. If you keep it level, it will sound neutral, and if you pronounce "tell" sloping down, you'll sound confident maybe even reassuring. (That example is from Bolinger's [i]Intonation and Its Parts[/i], page 225. That general profile is considered an A-profile in his terms, with different "glides".) I still think its more convenient to use adverbs here, tho e.g. urgently, flatly or plainly, and confidently or reassuringly. I honestly think its a bit tedious labeling stuff with [url=http://blogjam.name/?p=9070]intonation diacritics[/url]. (Almost forgot to mention, but the American and British approaches have only been partially reconciled, that program uses a British accent. It should still be useful, but you may want to do some work.) Same reason I like audiobooks tho.

Updates

I kinda like languages
Basic Esperanto dictionary
Esperanto shorthand
Esperanto hub
Vikipedio pages read aloud

I have the strongest urge to write lessons for Novegradian or Alashian, but I can't see doing it. Who'll read it?  I'm digging into French again but I don't see much point. I have the pronunciation and 
intonation down pretty much pat,
 if not the liaison, but it's so ridiculous.

I was looking into imageboards source code and I like shimmie but I don't really have the time. Maybe I could get the Esperantists to help? The idea was to have users upload their photos and other users would tag them. It's kind of like the basic english word list, except this would be over 9000.
 The other alternative is to somehow use it for conlangs so that tags from several (all) languages would display at once. Frathwiki people might be tempted I think.

Blissymbols & language hunting

I've been trying to sponge up as much language hunting/where Are your keys and its slow going but it feels good. The hardest part is that I've not yet been able to teach someone anything yet.

I'm trying to do esperanto first because its easy. The problem is, I don't know enough of the game to teach what I know in esperanto! The videos for irish Gaeilge and chinuk wawa take time to go thru and a lot of the WAYK wiki is either abstract, or links to dead videos. I bought the book for language hunting but that's slow go too. I've made my way thru 40/400 pages.

Meanwhile, other languages, like Elvish & Alashian are actually within my grasp, at least for first steps. So too is Esperanto, but there's a lot more game time mileage in learning quenyan "What is that?/make me say yes/make me say no". I might have to make up words for the other basic parts of the game for quenya, but maybe not.

One thing I've thought about is making Blissymbols to match up with the use of sign language as a bridge, but this time for the written page. Each Blissymbol could be a morpheme or lexeme and function as a kind of visual gloss, one per hand sign. Since it's Signed Assisted (insert X language here) it doesn't need the full grammar of sign language, its being used principally for the physical stimulation and iconicity...so using Blissymbols instead of signing symbols could make sense.  Unfortunately I haven't found explanations for all the Blissymbols but I have found a dictionary.  Some signs are more iconic than others.

One surprising thing I've realized about WAYK (actually it was a first impression) was that its a lot like a game that elementary girls play that goes something like this:
"What is that? -That is a stick. -A stick? -A stick. -Oh a stick!" There's a variation that involves a fuck instead. WAYK's big difference is that it uses sign language simultaneously, and goes into things a lot deeper. Yeah, pretty big differences. But I can see how it's called a game.

Fusion in conlanguages

Matthew D. Martin is a conlanger & he has a neat post about creators giving their fans a hand in their design.  I agree with the sentiment and think that while their have been many collaborative conlangs, few have been truly crowd sourced.  I think it would be great if creators found a way to impart dynamism to the communities that they want to grow. So far, like with Esperanto, that has meant tinkering inside the grammar and coining new words, but nothing allowing that grammar to grow. If there were enough glue to hold a language together while not being a closed loop, that would be fantastic.

I realized something awhile back, that when words are made up of morphemes those morphemes can still be bound, or the meaning dictated by convention. In other words, meaning isn't created in those words by their composites. Instead people create little folk stories that help them learn the word and its meaning, sometimes even it's pronunciation. The process sometimes even works in reverse if people are really pressured into needing a way to remember it...Which is where much conlang design comes in. Esperanto is really good for this. However, the process isn't really regular, and I don't see any reason it should be honestly. So lets say you want people to actively work on the language, Why not let people change the language fairly often? Ere are languages that glom together words all the time, and those words' morphemes can have different forms, different meanings, etc. And the thing which eventually works out is convention. What's popular catches on and gains currency. People work out little stories for themselves.

This happens slowly somewhat in English. A word like "acorn" gets reparsed as meaning "egg" + "corn" = "eggcorn" = "acorn" (That might be a "typological pun" but bear with me.) This is not too productive in English because its language community is huge and people are all literate, and because English isn't hugely fusional, but you can see it in other ways.

In English there are two morphemes, "-in'" and "-ing", and believe me they are two morphemes. In ye dayes ov olde our language had separate endings for the gerund and active participle, but fashion and vowel changes shaved them down. However, rural speakers retain them still in certain places and mark a distinction between them that urban speakers have long lost to syncretism. It's a mistake that most speakers of English make when parsing these that they can't tell there's a grammatical distinction present. We make a story that these speakers mean the same word as we do, but chop off the <g> at the end...It's not actually a natural sound change, and its not being lazy. That's our prejudice as more fashionable less conservative, more innovative speakers of a different dialect with more prestige. This language change can happen more rapidly in a small community of speakers hashing out a language speaking to each other. People will crush and mangle words and misunderstand each other and contrary to most conlanging that's natural.

I've said this before, but I really like lernu's forum dictionary. Now if its going to work with the above, users need to be able to add entries like urbandictionary. That way they can give derivations...if they choose. Or leave it to other users to puzzle out.

P.S. A while ago there was a guy posing as a philologist by the name of Edo 
Nyland. He was trying to relate all the world's languages to Basque by fusional processes. His energy is good, and a different kind of Conlanging, one which I nevertheless respect. It would be a shame to not let it in the picture.

Language hunting & my prosody wiki

This is amazing and shows you how eliciting an entire language's grammar can work fairly painlessly. It also shows why some redundancies I've noticed in the process are important. Here's another video. This time it's the astonishingly hard-to-pronounce Georgian language being hunted.

  Right now I'm working on a language hunt for Esperanto with anyone I can snare, but I have to get over this laryngitis first. Esperanto is coming along; I've already read several forum posts. I think I have memrise to thank for teaching me the correlatives, and the Intense-EO flash card app, as well as the fantastic lernu! website with its automatic translations.

  This is my wiki about intonation. I'm sorry its so bare and forlorn but I have a wikiPad with a lot of information on my desktop. I think it's going to be hopelessly messy no matter how I start it so I should just get this thing together anyway. One thing is that I may need to split the wiki according to accent which I'm not looking forward to, but it all depends on who joins up on it.
  I've mentioned French is coming along fairly well albeit slowly. I've given up on buying stuff in French because I don't have the resources anymore. Comics just keep climbing in price.
  Y'know what I've never seen before? Pictures and poems together. That would be gorgeous. I guess in anthologies they go together but they're not usually visually juxtaposed. I think I've seen that with Japanese tho e.g. Karuta cards.  Speaking of karuta, I've been thinking of printing a deck for my friends when they visit for the first time in a year since finishing school. I found this awesome website.
  I've been practicing my ocarina too. It's a transverse 12-hole model and my substitute lately for talking what with this laryngitis.  I picked up a sogeum PVC flute off eBay too recently, but that won't come for a while.  I'm thinking about picking up PVC whistles off Becker too. They're very affordable.  I wanted to buy a PVC flute but I haven't found anyone yet. I already have a shakuhachi but it's really difficult to play and requires a lot of breath.  I don't want to make my own because I don't have the time or the skills. Conceivably, one could make a Bohlen Pierce flute or whistle but its more of the same, I mean in terms of difficulty. There are also no plans available.  That scale would suit the ethos of the shakuhachi well tho. OTOH these are all kind of goofy anachronisms...I mean, the appeal lies in the potential for using these woodwinds as clubs am I right? Because that's the real benefit to using PVC, tough and cheap. At least, that's true of the shakuhachi (it was designed as a weapon first, instrument second.) This, despite the fact the design predates PVC.
  Meanwhile I should be composing iPad music for a certain contest...I find the less I think, the easier it is to accomplish things. I have a tendency to just make things balloon out of control when I should be pursuing the opportunities available to me in the moment. Planning, planning, while nothing is happening, and then forgetting the plans.
  I've practiced pen shorthand too and I've found that its not too hard to write at 80 words per minute.  I gave up Plover tho. The computer keyboards, even if they have NKRO, aren't suited for shorthand IMO, so it's a waste of time or worse.
  I still really love pen shorthand. It's gorgeous and easy, but the more I'm used to writing the more I get annoyed with it. Writing really doesn't cut it as an information transmission vehicle. My reading shorthand is finally catching up to my writing. Maybe my attitude will change the more I practice? I doubt it tho. How does anyone ever write a book? Dragon was my saving grace until I contracted this laryngitis. Man is it annoying.
  On the other forefront, I'm considering a special business venture. I've still got to think it thru. I'm not sure how I would start it.

Intonation & texts cont.

...texts should be sorted according to the length of time the discussion has been ongoing. This could be based on an average, so recent exchanges wouldn't change the status of a very long old post too much. (There would be no such thing as necromancy.) I don't think any site does that.  So oldness, length, average length of posts (verbosity), and average span of time between posts (slowness). (I think this is a useful way to categorize texts and their discussions). Furthermore, old content should be stored for posterity.
  Chats are different in that you don't have to respond directly to people, however I'm not sure that's a behavior that should be encouraged. In a sense forums do this (if they're not IMDB forums). (I like quotes in that you can respond to people anywhere in a thread and it orders the thread chronologically. IMDB doesn't do that, strictly. On the other hand if messages are short, just respond to the message, a là message boards.) Similarly, it would be more like natural language scenarios but I am not sure simultaneous messaging should be allowed. This would show overlap between the times of different posters texts/utterances.  However, it could become like a party line.
  In all of these, the real difference between natural conversation becomes the delay and the lack of FaceTime, and there's no real getting around that unless you use Skype.  But then there's no record of anything, or helpful info. This is all about data management.
  It would be cool if there were a word checker to suggest translations etc. while writing something, but that seems like a little much, especially if the focus is on dictation. Otherwise it would be very useful for encouraging grammaticality and conscientiousness.
  The other thing I wanted to get into is the issue of anonymity. I encourage its use, but I think people should still be kept track of like Wikipedia does ISPs, but do it privately for admins to see. Forums don't do that enough, cloak their users ID if they so choose, and I see no problem with it. The only thing is, you shouldn't be allowed to double post or respond to your own posts. That should clear up a lot of problems with sock puppets and pseudo-ostension, the rest will just require a smart admin. Also if you just find someone annoying you can block a cloaked user but not someone entirely anonymous. Alternatively, they can change the name of their "cloak" to something besides anonymous, so long as no one else has it. There should be an option for partially registering names so that several people can go by the same name e.g. Anonymous, but Anonymous would be the only one no-one could partially register. Once you stop using a partially registered name it's up for grabs, and you can only partially register one name at a time, so that one person doesn't start hoarding names. Blocking/ignoring someone would not depend on their name at a given time, so that they couldn't avoid ignores. Similarly, you should be able to look in that person's backlog of posts, although they could block access to certain times/names. In the computer, they would be associated with one user. I don't know how to avoid snoopy people in that regard. Maybe the only use for the actual user info would be for statistics about the corpus? I'd have to think about what that could be. Otherwise, other users could only search for the posts affiliated with a given public name, so they couldn't connect a user's names. The only way they could do that would if they played tricky games with their ignore list, but it would have to occur over a long period of time.
  This would all mean people start talking to their smart phones again.

Intonation & Text

  This is in a similar vein to another of my earlier posts about what a fully integrated website platform might look like. That was in turn inspired by the format of lernu! and various imageboards, message boards, and data repositories.
  First some background on these things, forums are places you go to post stuff and have discussions. You may contrast them with chats, which are much faster and spool out ridiculous amounts of data...tho the most popular forums and message boards are about as fast as the fastest chat. Chats are not private like instant messages between two people. Twitter is very similar to the chats and message boards, with lots of short texts, but its more like blogs in how people connect to you and interact; tweets are like a soapbox. In a message board, the newest message bumps the entire topic to the top (unless the respondent wishes to see the topic not be pushed: see SAGE(ru) a Japanese term), but how long it stays up there depends on how active the topic is. Unlike a forum, message boards show part or all of each topic in-line on the main page, while in a forum, each topic is linked to from a main page with a title and an optional subtitle. IMDB forums are neat in that they show the tree structure of the conversations i.e. who responded to who; they do that by indentation.
  Now all of these have the same linking structure, i.e. clicking a link will bring you to a certain kind of page. In a Wikipedia, that means entry/category/talk/edit/etc. pages.  What if each link were treated as a kind of object you could interact with by clicking on it and pulling up a menu...Maybe you could shift+click it, or alt+click it, to do things faster, like a videogame.  Right now it's the individual pages that are affiliated with links, and according to their structural template (e.g. Wikipedia entry pages have talk, edit, etc. pages) but what if it was the data on the pages themselves that needed specific entry pages? This is the idea I got because every esperanto word on a page at the lernu forums can be clicked on to find its definition, in addition to the possibility of using that same data as URL links. (I got this idea from the drop-down menu format used in certain new adventure games where the text is alive and the only way to interact with objects. Clicking on a hyperlinked object pulls up a number of applicable action verbs or METHODS you can use on it, in addition to various objects you can do those actions to it with. See Quest Adventure games.)
  The 3rd thing that I thought was really important was the need for more audio online. The only advantage text has over audio is that it's faster to skim and search. Well, what if every audio object had a text? There is a minimal level formatting that would be useful, so that instead of skimming, we just click a mouse and skip to the relevant portion. What would that require? Very little. Dragon already does a darn good job inserting punctuation into documents on its own now without needing to even end your sentences by saying period. This is a much easier task, associating word/clause/sentence boundaries with spaces/commas/periods/etc. Thats not much more than some basic thing you cna do in Praat (altho I'm not sure you can just click on words and play audio, see Praat). Unless we want to go whole hog and just speak to our PCs and let people sort out what was actually said when the computer malfunctions and mistranscribes something. Where did I get this idea? From Dragon Naturally Speaking. You can actually go into Dragon, and check what you really said and whether it matches what the computer wrote.  I can see people getting used to that and not wasting time writing anymore.  Opera has a good voice synthesizer but this would be putting speaking before writing, which is really the way it should be. Speaking is easier, faster and carries more information.
  So that's several layers of information--dictionary, audio, links.  Lets add another. What if there were several tropes layers? Tropes are patterns. One of the best expamples is in intonation, inflection, how we say things. Intonation is very poorly studied and readers really have to read between the lines to get it right. What if we had a crowd sourcing effort? It would be much easier with an audio corpus, and for the first time this seems possible because everyone has audio recording functionality in even the most basic computer models nowadays.  Essentially, a text would be analyzed according to its audio and annotated with tags at the syllable, prosodic word, intonational phrase, etc. levels.  There is no specificity whether this folksonomy should be holistic, like emotions e.g. "Angry", or based on paragons e.g. "Y'know", or if it would break up and be more fine-grained and take into account gradient phenomena. At the very least, it should be able to sort out like from dislike, and provide good audio. (That's another thing, audio should be marked for how natural it sounds, as in atypical or poorly enunciated.)
  The basic structure of the platform should take into account older vs. newer discussions, but ongoing discussions should be allowed to survive. I suggest sorting topics by their busy-ness, and the stretch of time

Duolingo

  I've found a really good new service to compete with busuu and memrise, called duolingo.  It's really neat, and the translator in it is very encompassing, it covers almost all the possible translations I could think of for a given phrase in say, French. That puts it well above anything else in my opinion. Unlike Rosetta Stone, it only focuses secondarily on how well you pronounce things, but given how spotty Rosetta Stone is with regards to that, that's not a bad thing. The only beef I have is that when I'm typing on the iPad it's too easy to mess things up--like I've been getting everything wrong by only one letter. Oops! I missed a space so I got it wrong! Thank God it doesn't matter so much. I've been passing with flying colors overall. A lot of translation involves mixing and matching words to make sentences which the iPad is ideal for. Overall the pacing is very slow, even slower than working thru Madrigal's French, but faster than Rosetta Stone (marginally) and you're given the option of testing out of things, and you can plow thru stuff pretty well anyways. Audio is nice and fluent tho clearly copy-pasted together.
  French for Reading is coming along pretty well but still slow, tho that's to be expected. I'm not sure how close I should be paying attention, and I can't tell if I should overlearn now or later...Probably now. The prices for French comics seems to always be increasing so I'm not sure if ill be able to keep my fluency for very long. I mean, le français may be la deuxiéme langue pour les mangas but it means little if there's only meager access to resources. I'll have to look around some more, but i have a feeling it'll be easier when I know the language better.
  I wish there were an online French Where Are Your Keys? but there isn't. The Gaeilge resources are great and I can't wait to getting back to it.

Audio & chat resources

 This post is going to be more of a list format because I haven't tried all of them. Well, any of them.
 i) Skype, the ubiquitous telephony service for the web. I think it uses video too.
ii) irc, the ubiquitous chat service typing service; downsides include killing lots of time, and killing lots of time typing. It doesn't exactly bring people together...
iii) image-chat, which are just more quality goof off time. You could make some graffiti in your foreign language...Which is fun right? Would be cool if it had a video connected with sound so you could chat to each other while drawing but I don't think anyone has invented that yet.
iv) teamchat
v) youtube & Vimeo are good for video messages, also lockerz
vi) ...I'll have to think of some more.

Memrising

 Okay, I promised a post on Memrise so here it is.
 Memrise is great but flawed. It's not as good at some things as a true flashcard program like Anki, but there are some cool things here and they are why I use it.
 Memrise is an online program for associating bits of information with other bits. When it comes to language, this is usually words and glosses.
 You're presented with the information and at the same time you're given a choice of user mnemonics or memory tricks to remember it á la Heisig. You can also write your own, which you can associate with a picture from their database or upload.
 There are several as you're tested: by having to click the word, or its definition, or you're given the word and have to type the definition, or vice versa.
 My problem with these kinds of things is that I get bored hammering stuff into my head, tho I do quite well at this. There are problems due to growing pains with the site but I learned the Esperanto correlatives like a pro with it. I'm also writing my own courses. for several planned languages, tho I feel like focusing on Esperanto right now...and French, then Spanish.
 It also has the single best setup for learning the places of the predicates in lojban, if that's your thing.
 There are also all-image courses e.g. Japanese.

Where are your keys?

 There is a remarkable little language game going on.
 It's called Where Are Your Keys? and it's basically an "elicitation" game meaning you learn to 'draw out' linguistic forms from a speaker and then copy them. The second part is that you teach simultaneously to the person you're eliciting from.
 It uses ASL but it uses most of the same signs for each game across different languages, whether Japanese or Finnish. So the first language you learn will probably be the hardest because you're learning the ASL for the 1st time. ASL is neat because it's i) simple, ii) iconic, and it iii)disambiguates (so you can get by mumbling). There are more benefits but you can see them for yourself when you try it.
 Here's the core game. There's brief Descriptions of some of the techniques on the WAYK wiki but it isn't kept up to date. It's been used for conlangs (e.g. Feayra, Mohuana, lojban) but also Irish and there are more videos on the way. There are courses for various endangered Native American languages e.g. Chinuk Wawa, Squamish.
 One of my ambitions is to write a WAYK curriculum for Esperanto and then film it. It would be a good bridge language too for later lessons in other languages. (I would like to do the same with another conlang with the permission of the creator.)

Remarkability of True Interaction

The Internet has changed immensely since its beginning. Way back, there were MUDs. Multi-User Dungeons, they're something like today's WOW. Today people still write them, but the feel is different. They can use hyperlinks instead having to type commands, and instead of typing commands they type out the game itself. The difference then is that the hyperlinks allow people to choose actions or methods as appropriate to the objects. So what this means, is that every link can mean there are several associations. So instead of a traditional wiki, or any other kind of specific link due to the structure, it's more flexible, you can have several. This can be more simply done, or it can be as a full-on game with various puzzles being built into the structure of the different objects. So the data can be active.

Interaction & the online corpus

What I'm going to say goes for a lot of languages, tho what I'm going to reference most often aren't the natural ones, but the planned ones, e.g. Esperanto.

 How do you kickstart a language community? There are several interesting ways that have not yet been fully integrated. Note that all of them, like most sites nowadays, will need a dedicated webmaster to avoid Internet mischief.

 1) image boards: these are very popular for various types of discussions, tho despite their format they're not often used for ostension a la Rosetta Stone. Nay, they're better for bizarre visual jokes, tho what is remarkable is because of that, they very easily innovate very opaque jargon and slang. What's more, there's the capacity to generate and enforce vocabulary shifts front the top down via "wordfilters" and these are a very tried and true method for creating these sorts of changes.

They can be incrementally introduced this way, for example, you post a picture of a cat and say, "This is a jurgol." Someone says, "No, that's a cat," but 'cat' gets changed to "jurgol". I think it would be fun to have an up-front automatic translator for your text so that it does a lot of the work for the user right away,and you add increasing layers so that it's not just a standard calque. Like, maybe have a separate grammar that stipulates OSV word order, implement the word-translation software at a global level, and implement a voting system that would hopefully help police well-formedness.

Active moderation would help too, and I think it would help to be able to retroactively change messages. It should be encouraged to tag posts for content as well, and potentially implement a wiki for the sorts of tropes regarding that content to make it easier to find for people.

2) forums: they would have the same moderation system as above, with karma for users and the ability to thank people for posts as well. Unlike most imageboards content should be archived. Also, posts should be treated as potential 'talk' pages that can be associated to a more traditional sandbox page; that open-to-edits quality is what separates forum posts from more general content pages, and i think that should be something up to a user, whether his post is editable.

I think it would be fantastic to have an ordering of texts, like a separate section for newsposts, user generated fiction and texts, and responses to those; at some level, there would have to be an ontology of posts and certain kinds of aggregators. Certain actions should create their own level of article, e.g. Creating a group for derivative works based on one work of a particular author, or aggregators that decide to group together certain constellations of data for future access and monitoring. What's more it should be possible for these groupings to be private or public, and thus shareable. At a global-level everything would be visible to administrators. Which brings me to...

 3) dictionaries, like urban dictionary or wiktionary. Ideally these would be implementable globally, so that translation back and forth from the target language would be easy. Lernu! does this for Esperanto, but only on certain parts of the site. (It's a godsend for a language learner.) It could be possible to have a user-generated level and a creator-level. I actually think it's not a bad thing for certain things to be private, which is the opposite of much of the Internet, and somewhat inline with some of the aspects of Facebook.

4) Kalusa: there was a conlanging site awhile ago that allowed users to vote on how close to the aesthetic a given text was; people would just vote whether it was right or not. There should be a level for bringing utterances to the attention of the group for checking and parading as exemplars of grammaticality. These could include clever jokes in one post or another, but I don't think they should necessarily be the origin of texts, nor should whole texts be under scrutiny at one time. Nor should grammaticality for conlangs be necessarily a criterion, no more so than in natural languages; some of the best sayings break the rules.

Now one of the chief difference in all of these forms of venues is, how much of a preview do you get? What snippet do you see? With blogs, it tends to be several lines of text before it cuts to the next post. With tweets you see the whole thing, tho images Lways need expanding. Image boards tend to be a mix of long and short posts of great variance, with small thumbnails of pictures beside them, which can be clicked on to open in a new tab (tho it usually can be recognized without expansion.) Wikis show only briefs when you search, just like a typical search via google, but may or may not tell you what a link looks like on the other side of a page. Forums give posts space on a page depending on length, but giving a minimum size depending on the avatar size and user information (Reddit and BBS message boards improve on that by disallowing much user info or avatars.) The ability to ignore users is a benefit to the IMDB forums; being able to focus or block out content depending on a user's whims is an important thing. It should be possible to implement this via tags and tag-filtering that go into a user's preferences. These tags would combine with any particular search tags a user chose on a given search. (Part of this is inspired by the need to encourage creative works a la the massive databases on fanf*ction websites.)

Books for traditional langs...A big research project

Spanish is the semi-ubiquitous language of the U.S. Dialects and accents are quite divergent, and regionalism is strong. Not to mention, the language tends to be spoken very quickly. Nevertheless, Mexico is right under our American border and it has the largest population of Spanish speakers in the world, so it's not so bad to learn and there are lots of good books available.

South America is quite fun to vacation in and most of the countries officially speak Spanish...or Portuguese, which is like Spanish...but easier grammatically and harder phonetically. Different parts of the Amazon use that and Spanish, sometimes mixing them both into riverense portunhol/portuniol, with perhaps a few hundred Native languages like Guarani. Amazonian Portuguese aka Caipira tends to also have an unusual minimal inflection and an /r/ much like American English, making it perhaps the easiest language to learn for American English speakers; Brazilian already generally uses a much reduced conjugation. Argentinian Spanish is very different phonetically with a very strong influence from an Italian dialect substrate due to immigration. Syllable final r-dropping or substitution with /h/ is prevalent for instance, and reminds me of British versus American English.

  Madrigal's Magic Key is a fantastic resource and don't be put off by its size. The method it uses requires you to chunk together sentences and is very empowering. You will also immediately be using words that Spanish shares with English to make them, and it's got cute little drawings by Andy Warhol. There is a very similar course online that reminds me of by Marcus Santamaria. It has more words of encouragement than Madrigal's and is spread out over a much larger bit of text, so I definitely think it would be useful if someone needs that kind of intensive format. It also mostly covers the present tense for practical needs while Madrigal's jumps in at the past tense because it's good for telling stories and is more regular than the present tense (not that Spanish is that irregular compared to most other languages.)

There's a Madrigal's Magic Key for French that comes highly recommended but for some inexplicable reason it's out of print and costs as much as college course in basic French (depending on availability), tho some would argue it's worth your money. Theres also a German version.

If you just want a taste of Spanish there's See It & Say It In Spanish which is a bit like Rosetta Stone...except it came before Rosetta Stone. It also costs $7 not $500. And it's illustrated by Andy Warhol--crazy huh? There is a version of this for French that comes highly recommended because it's the only book I know of that shows the obligatory liaisons, which is the French word for the phenomenon of actually pronouncing the end of a word in French (you'd be surprised, it doesn't happen that often.) Not to mention there's a basic book by Madrigal for Italian, German and Portugese.

 Another good book, but it can be very imposing, is Spanish for Reading. This is also available for French, but I think it works well with Spanish because Spanish orthography is easy to sound out as you go (more so than French's at least.) French for Reading is likewise quite good but out of print (I recommend the version with the eye on the cover, it's more recent.)

 If you need audio to go with these there are a ton of Memrise courses. These are good because of the crowd-sourced mnemonics that people think up for them too, and there are pictures too! And you can make your own courses and have your own forums! It's like a better Rosetta Stone for free. But I'll leave some more for another post.

Learn languages like a boss

Welcome. My name's Nay and some would say I'm too old to be learning languages. I have far too much to talk about. Here I will discuss things some things I am doing with languages; the purpose of sharing these things is hopefully to help others and myself improve these methods--of learning language.

 This is something of a personal quest. I'm an American and did not face the challenge of learning another language until high school, when I was put into the undignified position of having to learn how to sign along to stories about cats beating up rats in francais mauvais. The teacher wasn't all that happy about it tho.

 Language learning shouldn't be impossibly hard I think and it shouldn't require a hit to the learners' egos, so what you'll see here may be just as scattershot as my own experiences but in the privacy of your own home. Nor should it require huge gobs of money. The scope of the blog will encompass everything from Spanish to conlangs to shorthand to xenharmonics. (Yeah, I just said shorthand; I know shorthand.)