Hey Twitter: Teach me German
April 25th, 2009
I have a long-running background process of trying to learn German. I can understand a fair amount, but have difficulty calling to mind the words when I want to say or write something.
I wrote a Monkeybars app to do a sort of flash-card thing with German vocabulary (see my IBM devWorks article), but for whatever reasons I don’t run it much.
I do, however, have a Twitter client running most of the time, and I figured I should be able to get Twitter to teach me German: http://twitter.com/teachmegerman
If you follow @TeachMeGerman you’ll get a tweet every hour with a vocabulary item.
I may adjust the interval, but so far this seems OK.
I’m not sure how many words are in the list; maybe 100. Each tweet is randomly selected.
Now the experiment is to see how well this sort of ambient education works out.
3 Responses to “Hey Twitter: Teach me German”
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May 2nd, 2009 at 01:34 AM
you shall make this into a service where usere register and upload their own wordlists, I’m not interested in german but I am still struggling with hungarian ;)
May 3rd, 2009 at 11:26 AM
Interesting idea. But there is a single twitter account, so I don’t see how followers would select what language to follow, or what word list to get.
It would nice if one could follow @someName#someHashTag.
You can do this via searches, but not (I don’t think) as part of a general time-line feed.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:19 AM
I was thinking a) let users register and use direct messages instead of public posts b) let users introduce a login/password pair together with the wordlist
But it’s just lazy thinking :)