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If you've ever tried to learn a language, you'll know how important listening can be. That's why Duolingo has launched the Duolingo Spanish Podcast, for English speakers who are learning Spanish. The first episode is available for free on Duolingo's website, iTunes, Google Play Music, Spotify, and Stitcher. New episodes will roll out every Thursday. Each 15-minute episode is a narrative nonfiction story, similar to an episode of This American Life. Though they take place all around the world, the episodes feature Latinx characters, and discuss Latinx culture. The podcast is hosted by Martina Castro, co-founder of NPR's Spanish language podcast Radio Ambulante. She is also the founder and CEO of Adonde Media, a bilingual podcast production company. Castro narrates the stories slowly in clear, intermediate-level Spanish. A paragraph is read in Spanish first, followed by an English translation, with segments clocking in at about a minute long.


The English translations make it easy to check how much of the preceding segment you understood. They can also pull you back into the story if you got lost, or zoned out, during the Spanish section. Don't expect the monotonous listening exercises from your high school Spanish class (or those you might hear on the Duolingo app itself). The stories are interesting, unnerving, heartwarming, and a unique portrait of Latinx culture. Having taken four years of high school Spanish many years ago, I was able to get the gist of each section if I focused hard (though the English translations were certainly helpful). That said, you'll want to listen at a time when you can focus — my intermediate-speaker's brain had a lot of trouble translating if it was also doing something else. The first episode features the story of Rodrigo Soberanes, a Mexican journalist, who builds a friendship with a disgraced soccer player and makes a documentary about it. Upcoming segments will document a Chilean journalist who unexpectedly meets her future (Chilean) husband on a trip to China, and a woman's journey to build a life in Buenos Aires after her boyfriend (whom she moved there for) leaves her.


The objective of this paper is to introduce Hypertext as an alternative paradigm in developing a full-scale Intelligent Tutoring System to the traditional Expert Systems paradigm that has dominated for years Intelligent Tutoring Systems development. This paradigm has been employed in the development of PEDRO, an Intelligent Tutoring System for foreign language learning. PEDRO - The Spanish Tutor is an Intelligent Tutoring System designed to assist intermediate level students with their learning of Spanish grammar, by testing their knowledge of regular and irregular verbs. This paper describes PEDRO'S architecture, functionality and pedagogical strategy. PEDRO has been developed using HyperCard II.


8.5M in Series A funding. The round was co-led by Union Square Ventures and Reach Capital. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations with open roles in engineering, operations, and growth. Led by Amir Nathoo, CEO, Outschool is a live, video platform that introduces students to online classes and offers teachers a way to supplement their income by creating courses. The company’s offerings are created by independent teachers and include a wide variety of enrichment and traditional classes. Along with traditional school courses like algebra and U.S. History, classes are also abound including learning architecture through Minecraft, Spanish by singing Taylor Swift songs in Spanish, biology through Pokemon, and How to Become a Ninja. Outschool’s options offer a high-degree of variety with over 8,000 classes ranging from one-time enrichment lessons to semester-long core courses.


189. That's an excellent deal on our Editors' Choice for paid language-learning software. Looking to learn a new language? Rosetta Stone is offering a 40 percent discount on its language-learning software for Prime Day. 319). That's an excellent deal on the best full-featured language-learning software you can buy. The pack includes everything you need to learn French, German, Italian, or Spanish. You'll get a Rosetta Stone lifetime subscription, which includes all the lessons for the language you choose, available both in a web browser and mobile apps for Android and iOS. Your progress will sync across your desktop, smartphone, and tablet, so you can practice on whichever device is most convenient. Plus, with the included download option, you can practice offline whenever you like—for life. This Bonus Pack also includes Barron's Grammar Guide, which will teach you essential grammar rules such as verb agreements and sentence structure, and Barron's Dictionary to look up definitions. Rosetta Stone earned high marks in PCMag's review and praise for its "excellent user experience," "polished interface," "great bonus reading content," and more. It's our Editors' Choice for paid language-learning software.


Greta Fioravanti is not yet four, but already she is talking in three languages, thanks to having a German mother, an Italian father and living in Dublin. That’s not to say starting pre-school didn’t have its challenges for her because they don’t speak English at their home in Portobello. Greta’s mother, Claudia Kunkel, engages with her daughter through German, while the little girl’s father, Domenico Fioravanti, speaks Italian to her. As a couple, they communicate in Italian. Naturally a very chatty child, Greta went into pre-school being able to converse easily in German and Italian. But faced with trying to make herself understood among English-speaking children, she started pushing them out of frustration. Claudia says it was a "big help" that her daughter’s preschool teacher had experience working with bilingual children and recognised the behaviour as being related to language learning.


Children in that situation can react differently: some act out like Greta, others may withdraw, but generally they will adjust very quickly. As parents, Claudia and Domenico weren’t criticised for not speaking more English at home but simply asked to tell Greta not to push other children. It was also suggested that instead of Claudia taking her daughter home early, she should leave her in until the end when stories were read, which would help increase her vocabulary. "After two months, she was totally fine," says Claudia. Claudia is an outreach officer with Mother Tongues, founded in 2017 by Italian native Francesca La Morgia, a lecturer in linguistics at Trinity College and a mother of three Italian-Irish children. The organisation aims to support foreign-born parents in using their mother tongue and to reassure them that bilingualism is good for children.


They often give up so quickly, says Claudia, when they’re told how important English is for their children. Language is just one aspect of migrant motherhood that fascinates Kackute, who has conducted post-doctoral research as part of the Motherhood Project at Maynooth University. She has explored why some migrant women "mother" in their native tongue and others don’t. The festival, she says, raises awareness of how Ireland has "very recently and very dramatically become a multilingual, multi-cultural country. Kackute was living in French-speaking Geneva with her Scottish-born husband Andy when they had their son Inis, now aged 11. He was premature, the birth was difficult and, with no extended family around for support, she struggled with post-natal depression. "When he was born, there was absolutely no way I was not going to bring him up Lithuanian," she says.


"It’s a post-colonial place - people fought and died so Lithuania could exist. If you are a good Lithuanian mother, you pass on your language to your children. She and Andy spoke English at home and were living in a French-speaking city, so she reckoned Inis would acquire those languages naturally. But how would he become fluent in Lithuanian? Being a researcher, she consulted numerous books and devised a strategy to bring Inis up bilingually. Part of the plan she presented to her husband was to go to Lithuania for three months every summer. But Andy vetoed the idea, not wanting to spend that amount of time there, nor did he want to be away from his son for that length of time either.


"It was really hard - I took it really badly, considering I was depressed and not feeling very adequate at the time," she says. The argument that only three million people speak Lithuanian, so what use was it going to be to Inis, made no sense to her. "This is my language. I literally did not see any difference between French, English and Lithuanian - they were all on a par. She felt there was no time to lose if her son was to be bilingual and even set up a Lithuanian language school in Geneva. "I sang to him, I read to him; I took him to Lithuania as much as I could negotiate.


It is the language through which she and Inis communicate best but "if I speak Lithuanian to him in Andy’s presence, it can only be information destined for Inis because Andy doesn’t have enough Lithuanian to pick up on it. Kackute sees language and culture as inseparable, and recognises the challenge of bringing up a child across a cultural divide. "I may be cosmopolitan now but I am still Lithuanian and my son is not. He is Lithuanian as well but not in the same way as I am. He was brought up with so many cultural impulses. How do I make sure that we have that emotional link - that we will always understand what the other one is about?


"Then there are mothers who only mother in their native tongue because they are not fluent in the language of their host country. Women coming from a traumatic background may not want their children to have anything to do with a past they are trying to escape. Or women may have left their native country years previously and made a life for themselves in another country. Having arrived in Ireland in 2016, French is now "my headache" for Inis, she says. "Before he had that language naturally, now he has to become a learner of French. This transition is proving a little bit trying.


Kackute is doing what she can to keep her son’s fluency up; a tutor comes to the house once a week and she has found a French family they can meet up with. She tries to bring him back to Geneva regularly, but it is expensive and difficult to find the time. Kackute, who teaches a course on contemporary women’s French writing at Vilnius University, believes she and Andy, a chemist working in emerging technologies, will continue to base themselves here, at least until Inis has finished his secondary education. Since last October, she has been living in a house for the first time in her life - in the newly built estate of Moyglare Hall. It’s an ideal community setting for Inis, with friends and his school nearby.


"I have to say the Irish hospitality is a thing; it’s true, not a myth," she adds. "People are extremely helpful. Nobody ever offered anything to me in Switzerland. "Here people call to ask if my child needs a lift. Meanwhile, Claudia says "English will take over soon" in Greta’s life. However, she is glad there are other children at the pre-school who are bilingual "and they kind of push themselves". Greta’s best friend is half Irish, half Korean, and she talks about how the two of them can speak more than one language. Does Claudia fear her daughter will lose her ability to speak both German and Italian as she becomes immersed in English outside the home? "Yes and no," she replies.


"When we go to Germany, she is just like a German girl. She has no accent - speech-wise she is really good. But if you are not exposed that much to language, you might lose it. Frenchman Alain Servant’s first language was actually Spanish because his parents moved from Bordeaux to Bolivia for work when he was just three months’ old and they spoke Spanish at home in an effort to speed up their fluency. But nearly four decades later, having lived in Dublin for seven years with his Irish wife Zoe and now being tri-lingual, he considers his "mother tongue" to be French.


He didn’t speak English well when he came here but learned through talking to people and listening to the radio. A singer songwriter, "I am still thinking in French," Alain (45) explains, but he writes in English - with rewriting help from Zoe (40), who is a researcher in sociology. "Language is a way of seeing the world; we don’t describe the weather in the same way in English as in French," he says. Their four-year-old son Solomon speaks French to his father, English to his mother and is very adept at switching to whichever is appropriate when with extended family or friends.


As a family, living on a barge on the Grand Canal, they generally converse through French but it does depend on the subject, Alain says. "Everyday life is more in French," but for complex discussions, both Alain and Zoe may prefer to use their mother tongue. "We are really just jumping from one to another." In Ireland they speak more English but in France, where they go at least twice a year for long periods, they speak more French. Alain was eight when his family returned from Bolivia to France, where years later he met Zoe in a circus tent. He was working with circus people and she was a trapeze artist.


Solomon will start Irish when he goes to school in September but his parents don’t plan to introduce him to Spanish just yet. Alain has no doubt that his son’s bilingual upbringing is a huge advantage - "it helps a lot of things: reading stories in French, reading stories in English. Even the music we listen to - music in English and music in French. Three-year-old Alicia Alderete-Westbrook’s dolls speak in Spanish at home in Galway. It’s also her language of choice for singing songs. "For her, Spanish is about playing and English is about communicating," says her Spanish mother, Pilar Alderete Diez (43), a lecturer in Spanish at NUI Galway, who is married to Irishman David Westbrook (44), an engineer at Medtronic. But gradually Alicia, who will be four in March, is starting to understand that Spanish is also about communicating.


While Pilar speaks Spanish directly to Alicia, the family speaks English in the house and they don’t follow the model of each parent using only their mother tongue for two-way engagement with the child. "Sometimes I say we all speak in Spanish today and I force her to speak Spanish back to me. But, generally, I don’t force her because I don’t want her to have negative feelings about it. To lessen the emotional association of a language with one parent only, some families may allocate times in the week when only one language can be spoken in the home. Others, Pilar says, might allocate rooms to the two different languages, where one is spoken in the kitchen, for instance, and the other in the play room.


There is a theory that a minimum of 25 hours a week of interaction in the minority language is needed for a child to become proficient. "I struggle to get 25 hours," she says. Pilar, who first came to Galway for a year as an Erasmus student 22 years ago, has learnt Irish - unlike her Irish-born husband, because his family moved to Nigeria when David was seven. When he was sent back at the age of 11 to be a boarder at Glenstal Abbey, he was exempt from learning Irish. "I love Irish, absolutely adore it," enthuses Pilar, who did a diploma in Irish at the college when she was pregnant. "There are things in Irish that are closer to Spanish than English could be.


The two-legged, pill-shaped robot—upper half green, lower half white and small enough to stand on one’s palm—starts its lesson with a greeting. "Hello my friend. Welcome back," it says. Designed for children ages 3 to 7, the robot, Roybi, aims to teach kids at home a range of early-childhood developmental skills. In a rare demo of its abilities, Robyi’s founder and CEO, Elnaz Sarraf, listens to the robot name colors, animals and their accompanying noises while displaying pictures on its torso. The black cat meows. The orange lion roars. The robot then asks the user to repeat the information back to the robot, as practice. 4.2 million seed funding to help Roybi go to market. The company did not disclose their names. Currently, Roybi has about 500 lessons, stories and songs, promising to introduce children in school or at home to over 70,000 words in English, Spanish and Chinese.


Subjects include colors, animals and shapes. The robot has technology to detect children’s faces and recognize individual users to turn on and start its lessons. It records video and audio as children practice the lesson or if parents manually tell it to record or snap pictures through the Roybi app. The app also provides progress data on children’s learning. Such features in other internet-connected devices that can record children have proven controversial in the past. Amazon has been named in a lawsuit over allegations that Alexa devices record kids without consent. Germany banned an interactive doll called My Friend Cayla that collected data, and consumer advocates protested sales of the doll by retailers like Amazon and Walmart. To these concerns, Sarraf says parents can turn the recording features off at any time.


The company is also working with Amazon on data collection and storage compliance. Even when not in a classroom, certain toys must adhere to the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, commonly called COPPA. "Anything involving video and audio and children is uniquely sensitive," she adds. Founded in 2017, Roybi now has six full-time employees. The company has also participated in several education technology accelerator programs, including xEdu in Finland and Edstart by Amazon Web Services. "Our focus is the U.S. Roybi plans to raise additional funds through a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo before mid-August. The company is also in talks with retailers, an area of expertise for Sarraf, who co-founded iBaby Labs in 2013. iBaby provides internet-connected baby monitors which are sold by retailers including Apple, Best Buy, Walmart, Sears and Target.


The idea of robots teaching children has been the stuff of both dreams and dystopian fantasies, depending on whom one asks. But some studies have suggested that bots could help with learning new languages. A 2016 study of 67 students from researchers with Disney, University of Plymouth, University of Lincoln and Ghent University found that the children who used robots saw scores "improve significantly between a pre- and a post-test" on French language skills. Another study, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, used a group of 17 children to gauge the potential for robots supporting early language development. "All children learned new words, created stories, and enjoyed playing," according to the study. During Roybi the robot’s rare demonstration, its starts a lesson on numbers with an air of mystery. "Let me tell you a secret," says the robot. "I can count to three." The robot, still in a pilot stage, gets stuck on the number one. But after a reset, Roybi makes it to three, completing the lesson for the day. "Come back tomorrow," it says.


Based on Alexa traffic rankings, YouTube is the second most visited site on the web, right after Google. Unfortunately, a lot of digital marketers still treat it like any other social media site. But success on YouTube isn’t about posting content, it’s about optimizing your content — just like your website. It’s easy to find videos with millions of views and videos with almost none that are basically the same. The difference between success and failure often boils down to a few elements. When it comes to YouTube SEO, a lot of the optimization work can be encapsulated into a process that you can apply to all your old videos and then to each video as you publish it. And you’re about to learn that process.


Here’s what you need to know if you want your content to rank number one on YouTube for the keywords you care about. This section contains the essential background information you’ll need to understand before you dive into YouTube optimization tactics. Given that YouTube is a video search engine, you should approach content creation in a strategic way, as you would when optimizing your website. This means conducting keyword research to find out what your audience is interested in and how they talk about it online. It’s easy to start your YouTube keyword brainstorming. Simply go to YouTube and start typing a keyword in the search box. As you type, you will get popular searches suggested to you by YouTube Suggest, which is the autocomplete feature built into the search box on YouTube.


You can take this to another level using the free Ubersuggest tool, which will iterate through the alphabet for the first letter of the next word of your search phrase. Keyword brainstorming is one thing, but you probably need to be able to compare keywords to each other to see which ones are searched on more frequently. There’s a tool for that, and it’s completely free, provided to us by Google: Google Trends. It’s surprising how many SEO practitioners don’t realize Google Trends has a "YouTube search" option underneath the "Web search" option, which will give you YouTube-specific search volume data.


This tool doesn’t give you actual numbers, unfortunately (everything is in percentages), but nonetheless, it is quite handy for comparing keywords to each other. You probably track your positions in the Google search results for a range of your favorite keywords, but are you doing this with YouTube? If not, you should be! There are many tools for this, both free and paid, so find one that you feel comfortable with so that you can track your progress as you optimize your videos. Obviously, to compete with all the other creators in the fast-paced, aggressive world of YouTube, you need great content that stands out from the crowd. While achieving a viral hit is great, remember that YouTube isn’t just about views: You’re looking to build a subscriber base and form long-term relationships with viewers.


How can you accomplish this? By producing quality content and publishing it on a regular schedule. Posting irregularly will only hurt you and result in lost subscribers. If you commit to posting every day, make sure you post every day. If you post once a week at 9:00 a.m. Tuesday, never skip a week or post a late video (even if it is only a few hours or the next day). Beware of agencies and production houses that tell you people only watch short, one- to two-minute videos on YouTube. Remember, YouTube’s ultimate goal is to compete with television so they can charge TV-like advertising rates. What they’re looking for is high-quality, long-form content that will allow them to run more ads and keep users on the site for longer.


Videos that are at least five minutes in length tend to perform better and have a higher chance of ranking in Google searches. A key metric to keep an eye on is watch time — not just for each video, but for your channel overall. Ideally, you should be seeing monthly increases in watch time as your channel grows. Playlists are an underrated promotional tool on YouTube. While most businesses create playlists around dates, content genres, products and other broad categories, to really take advantage of this feature, you need to go deeper. Use your keyword research to figure out what people are searching for in your niche, and create playlists based on those topics. If you don’t have much content, you can even create playlists using other people’s videos to drive viewers to your YouTube channel page. YouTube’s algorithms are notoriously unforgiving.