Friday, February 27, 2009

(BE3) This dictionary described below is very useful to discover related words:

http://exploreourpla.net/languages/english/

WordNet is a semantic lexicon for the English language. It was created and is being maintained at the Cognitive Science Laboratory of Princeton University under the direction of psychology professor George A. Miller.

The purpose is twofold: to produce a combination of dictionary and thesaurus that is more intuitively usable, and to support automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications."

I personally like it because of its unique features. You may perform wild card searches (Put in part of a word and put an asterisk in the word which means replace the asterisk with any set of letters). For example, enter into the search box:
abbreviat* and these are the results you will see

abbreviate, abbreviated, abbreviation, abbreviator,

This shows you words that are spelled similar and thus often may be related to your search word. Additionally, you can click on the linked word (when you actually use the dictionary)

This dictionary can also perform other searches. Search for three letter words (use m?n) that start with "m" and end with "n" and you'll get man, men, Min, Mon

That is for an example to point out its flexibility. Try it, you'll like it.

Friday, February 6, 2009

Language help is out there


(be2)
The BBC web site contains many resources for learning so many languages. This site below is very intriguing. Where else can you quickly see essential phrases in 36 languages? They have extensive information for the core languages. I have improved my Spanish and Chinese by using the BBC web site. This site also has wonderful pictures for each geographical location. Please take a look:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/quickfix/



Here are a couple of interesting language facts from the site. I never knew Urdu was such a widely used language with almost a half billion speakers, including a million in the UK.

Why learn Urdu?

  • It is a living language spoken by 490 million people around the world.

  • The Urdu community in the UK numbers about one million speakers.

  • It is not just a practical language spoken on a daily basis, but one that produced great scholarships and poetry.

  • Learning Urdu will also help you recognise words in Arabic and Persian since many words are common in all three languages.

  • People will respect the fact that you make an effort to speak to them in their language, whether abroad or in the UK.
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