{"id":3666,"date":"2015-06-22T12:22:49","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T16:22:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=3666"},"modified":"2015-06-22T12:22:49","modified_gmt":"2015-06-22T16:22:49","slug":"a-difficult-ding-made-easier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2015\/06\/a-difficult-ding-made-easier\/","title":{"rendered":"A Difficult Ding–Made Easier"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DifficultDing\"<\/a>Learning a neue language can be a difficult Ding<\/em>, but drei Professoren in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Education’s Center for Technology Education think they may have found a novel Weg to do it.<\/p>\n

The trick, says machine translation expert Philipp Koehn\u2014who is working with computer scientist Jason Eisner and the School of Education’s Chadia Abras\u2014is to devise an interactive program that monitors a student\u2019s comprehension and subtly introduces more foreign words each time a passage of text is read.<\/p>\n

Thus, that opening sentence might evolve into: Learning a neue Sprache can be a difficult Ding, but drei Professoren denken they may have gefunden a novel Weg to do it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea was to make it as little effort as possible for the person who wants to learn a new language,\u201d says Koehn, a native of Germany, who began studying English there as a fifth grader. \u201cWe start with mostly English words and grammar and slowly introduce words in the new language. As you read it, you think, \u2018Well, so far that\u2019s pretty easy,\u2019 and that is when we make it a bit harder.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two-year software development project is funded by Johns Hopkins\u2019 Science of Learning Institute, which encourages collaboration between computer scientists and education researchers.<\/p>\n

\u201cTraditionally, if there was a term that you didn’t understand, you had to look it up in a dictionary, and that\u2019s a really slow process,\u201d Koehn says. \u201cAnd the way that small children are taught languages\u2014\u2018Jim meets Mary\u2019\u2014if you teach that at the college level, it\u2019s pretty stupid. Also, there has been a huge emphasis on grammar, which is also a\u00a0buzzkill and not too much fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers plan to test their English-to-German application on the Web and in Johns Hopkins classes in combination with more traditional classroom and textbook instruction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Learning a neue language can be a difficult Ding, but drei Professoren in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Education’s Center for Technology Education think they may have found a novel Weg to do it. The trick, says machine translation expert Philipp Koehn\u2014who is working with computer scientist Jason Eisner and the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3668,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-impact","issue-summer-2015"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Difficult Ding-Made Easier - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2015\/06\/a-difficult-ding-made-easier\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Difficult Ding-Made Easier - JHU Engineering Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Learning a neue language can be a difficult Ding, but drei Professoren in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Education’s Center for Technology Education think they may have found a novel Weg to do it. 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