Help in Learning Another Language

A personal computer can help you work with foreign languages.

I recently looked at three inexpensive language programs for IBM and compatible computers, each designed for a different task.

Spanish Assistant, $80, from MicroTac Software in San Diego, (619) 272-5700, is meant to translate English text into Spanish and to serve as a Spanish language dictionary. MicroTac also has versions for French, German and Italian.

Transparent Language, $99, from a start-up company of the same name in Hollis, N.H., (800) 752-1767, teaches you how to read and comprehend French, German, Spanish or Latin.

Japanese in a Breeze, $65, from Eastword Software in Berkeley, (415) 848-3866, teaches how to write, read and say either of two Japanese character sets, hiragana or katakana . You can buy both for $100.

Spanish Assistant is basically a word-by-word translator, using companion 30,000-word Spanish and English dictionaries from Random House. Unfortunately, many sentences cannot be properly translated word by word.

I enlisted the help of three bilingual colleagues to translate a simple newspaper story about the Cinco de Mayo celebration from English into Spanish.

The program translates a sentence at a time, word by word. Whenever a word is not in its dictionary or it could have several meanings, a window pops up on the screen offering you the choices available or asking you to supply the missing translation. Both the original English text and the translated Spanish text are easily edited from within the program.

We encountered problems in virtually every paragraph. For instance, the program saw even though as two separate words, not as a phrase. Thus it didn’t offer the right Spanish translation, aunque , until it worked on though after first offering a set of improper translation choices for the word even.

The name of the Hamel Street School came out wrong because the word order should be different in Spanish, something like “school of the street Hamel.”

The word Mexicanos needed no translation except that in Spanish it is spelled mexicanos with a lower-case m. The program did not do that.

The consensus of my panel of experts was that if you knew Spanish well enough to see and correct the mistakes being made by Spanish Assistant, you could probably do the translation just as fast without it. But if you didn’t know the language that well, the program would demonstrate your illiteracy to whomever you showed or sent the translated document.

Still, Spanish Assistant might be worth the price for students and others simply for its on-screen English and Spanish dictionaries, verb conjugation tables and grammar rules. Those functions can be run in conjunction with most word-processing programs and do not require use of the full translation program.

Transparent Language is based on the idea that people have trouble learning languages because they don’t get enough practice using them, according to developer Michael Quinlan. His idea was to give people something worth reading by presenting classics in their native languages.

The program makes it easier to read Cervantes or De Maupassant or Ovid by making annotated translations by leading American scholars available at the touch of a keystroke.

The idea is that you read the original text on your screen unaided as much as you can. But when you get stuck on a word or phrase, pressing a key brings a translation into view complete with the linguist’s explanation of why certain portions are translated the way they are.

The basic package is a sampler of four readings in Spanish, French, German and Latin along with an audiocassette so that you can hear the proper pronunciation.

A number of additional titles and tapes are available ranging from about $20 to $30 for each combination of disk containing original and translated text and audiotape of the reading.

Japanese in a Breeze: Hiragana is an impressive little program on a single floppy disk that does an excellent job of teaching the basics of the Japanese character set. It does not teach Japanese grammar or how to speak the language, although it does teach the sounds of the characters.

There are 46 basic characters in the hiragana set, plus you learn about 1,200 words combining those characters. The program presents large graphic depictions of each character, complete with step-by-step illustrations of how they are drawn. You practice drawing your own on paper, not on the computer screen.

A series of imaginative mnemonic devices are given to help you remember the names of each character. Sounds are presented phonetically, although with no way to hear them, you can’t be sure you are saying them properly.

Various drills are designed to help you learn and remember the characters and the small vocabulary given in the program.

I didn’t spend enough time to gain any proficiency, but I would bet that a dedicated person intending to travel soon to Japan could learn the language well enough with this program to read many of the printed characters and words that would be encountered.