Cultural Integration through Language Learning

This blog is a process log of my Master's thesis in Interaction Design at the Umeå Institute of Design in Umeå, Sweden.

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The poster is ready for the exhibit! #uid13

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After successfully defending my master's thesis in front of an examination jury, I present a short video telling the story behind the lin'guage service and giving an example of how it can be used.

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So this is happening today.

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What I'm working on now

It's been mostly silent these days because I'm working on the final pieces of the puzzle. Here are some things I'm trying to get together for May 22nd: my examination.

Working Android application prototype

Concept movie for lin'guage

Touch projection table for Chinese calligraphy

Presentation slides

As per my last post, I'm updating Android code on github as I go and maybe post a thing or two on here until the presentation. The rest is likely to be kept quiet until May 22nd.

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svenguage

svenguage - Code for prototype to my master's thesis project for the language learning app: Lin'guage

Checkout the code for my thesis project on this GitHub page. It doesn't do much, and there are many like it, but this one is mine.

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sven'guage

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I've been silent for a while. Here's a screen from the sven'guage (for Swedish) mobile software running on Android.

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5 Weeks Before Presentation for Lin'guage

5 Weeks Before Presentation from Alexis Morin

  The last presentation from me before the Master's thesis examination. I'll be releasing more material for Lin'guage as I go.

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Hey! Aaron Myers put my blog post from a few weeks back onto The Everyday Language Learner blog. It's nice to see that my work can be influential to more people.

Keep on learning, everyone!

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中'guage branded Chinese calligraphy brushes

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Started user-testing my paper prototypes for sven'guage™

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Paper prototyping with a custom-built [portable computer acrylic interface holster].

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Seven design tips for Social Design by Paul Adams

In the wake of me designing a system (not a location) for learning new languages, the previous video I posted was very helpful in pointing me in the right direction. Here's the tldr for the seven tips Paul gives in his presentation:

Explicitly design for personal identity or social identity

Show people things they have in common

Design lightweight interactions with people

Design for feelings, not facts

Give suggestions for who to communicate with

Design the feed story first

Design the friend's experience

Considering the type of system I'm making (which is not a social network, but will connect people), there are certainly some design tips that I should heed in whatever thing I make. Later in his video, he describes the process of social design as being very different from User Centered Design. It goes a little something like this:

Build a hypothesis

Build a simple product

Launch it

Measure. Iterate

Repeat.

It may be too late to build something at this stage since I'm still designing it, but it would be super cool to gather some buddies and hack on lin'guage until it's working.

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Many, lightweight interactions over time.

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What if you wrote your own dictionary as you learned a language?

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On the importance of "mostly" understanding

I've been spending some time on fluentu.com over the past months. It's a good way of watching videos in Chinese with comprehensive two-language subtitles whilst having the option of quickly pausing to inspect one of the words that was said. It's great because it allows the transition between content made "for learners" to content "for natives".

It boosts you up to that point where you can grasp what people are saying with the help of subtitles. Self-confidence in the language also gets a boost because you know you're watching material that was created for natives. If you're viewing content that is level-appropriate, you should be understanding 70-80% of the sentences and what's going on, allowing you to stretch into learning new words. The process of learning a new word this way is powerful because you'll be hearing it in context. Maybe you'll have to encounter the word a few times before it's assimilated and you can use it, but you'll know it because it has manifested itself and not because you learned a translation of the word. Translations are often non-accurate and misleading or can give you only one of the meanings of a word which will often leave out connotation. For example: 老 [lao3] in Mandarin means "old" but is so wildly different from the English "old". 

In most languages, native speakers tend to omit/mumble/say quickly any in-between or very commonly used word. Just think of the difference in sound from when you say [I can go.] to [I can't go.] at normal speaking speed. The difference is mostly intonation and a glottal stop. You never hear that [t]. Mandarin or French or any other language is no different.

Such a technique of "mostly" understanding is called scaffolding. It means bringing together the cognitive constructs necessary for you to understand the meaning of new information. It's no different than when you're speaking in your mother tongue and you hear a fancy new $5 word. You figure out what it means because of how it was used.

I plan on leveraging scaffolding in lin'guage because that's how people learn things in the real world; in context.

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Printable DLQs

In the past week I've been working on a potential physical manifestation of Daily Language Quests. I wanted to see if my results from ideation would be as potent in a physical / notebook form.

Here are some of the DLQs I've designed. I believe these to be (at least content-wise) quite close to the result I want to achieve with lin'guage. For now, they all target Swedish, as to retain consistency during the project.

DLQ exercise book from Alexis Morin

I am pleased with the result and would still expand on these. I do believe that producing a high-fidelity web mockup of these would be quite beneficial. I realized that audio, video and hyperlinks could play a significant role in language learning in the case of lin'guage. More on this next week!