BROWSE THE WEB AND LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE?

I’m currently learning Chinese along with my wife and four children. It’s been a lot of fun and we’re all learning, but I really wanted more ways to engage this new language on my own. Recently I stumbled across a way to experience this new language while browsing the web- Language Immersion for Google Chrome.

Language Immersion for Google Chrome is an experimental web browser extension. It works by switching certain words in English with words from your choice of the 64 languages supported by Google Translate. Currently, English is the primary language of this extension, so if you want to learn English, you’re out of luck. There isn’t a translation from other languages into English. It works great for English speaking people wanting to learn other languages though.

To use this language extension, you first need to download the Google Chrome browser. After that, you can find the extension in the Chrome Web Store. Go to the extensions tab and click on productivity. One you find the Language Immersion extension, click on the green button in the upper right-hand part of the screen and add it to your browser. Once added to your browser, you will see a small box just to the right of your address bar. You can click on it to turn it on and set your options.

I added the extension to the Chrome browser on my iMac and gave it a try. You can easily switch between languages, but even more impressive is the way you can increase your level of immersion. Options include novice, intermediate and fluent with levels in between. With each increasing level more words are substituted from the chosen foreign language.

There is also an option to have the translated words highlighted and you can select a hover and translate option. That part is pretty cool. Your mind naturally reads the words being replaced, but sometimes you don’t know a certain word in the new language. You simply mouse over the new word and a nice voice reads that word to you in the new language while revealing the text in English. It really helps to hear how new word are pronounced so you don’t start a bad habit of saying them wrong. I’m guilty of that in English.

Google lets you know upfront that this is an experiment. They don’t want your expectations to be too high and they state that translations won’t always be 100% accurate. They also said, “…it probably won’t turn you into a language genius overnight.”

I’m definitely not a language genius, but I can definitely see how this could be an effective way to kill two birds with one stone approach- a fun way to incorporate learning a new language while browsing the web.

Matthew Anderson – A stay-at-home father and primary educator of four amazing children. I’m currently learning Mandarin Chinese along with my family and enjoy researching linguistic tools and services such as Transparent Language and others.