Sometimes great ideas are born, and sometimes they are just clever combinations of existing great ideas. The Language Immersion plugin for Chrome is in the latter category, combining the existing technology of Google Translate and the individual user’s browsing habits to aid language learners.

So, how does it work? The method is actually extremely simple: you tell it what language you want to learn (of the 64 currently supported by Google Translate) and your current familiarity with that language. In turn, when you browse your regular websites the plugin will take specific words or phrases and translate them into the language that you’re learning. This way, you’re learning vocabulary while you browse. If you don’t know the translated word, you can click it to translate it back to English. You can also change the level of immersion on the fly.

While it works better for some languages than for others, this is still a wonderful idea, and a very simple (almost effortless) implementation.

Here’s a video demonstrating the plugin in a little more detail. Download it here. You’ll need to be using Google Chrome as your browser.

Thankfully verbs in Chinese don’t conjugate depending on who’s doing them, so the memories of hours and hours spent learning verb conjugation tables are still a fairly distant memory for me. However, learners of other languages – particularly romance languages – are not so lucky. These languages not only have different verb endings depending on the subject of the verb, but several different verb types. Let’s take French as an example: it has -er, -re, -ir verbs, as well as irregular and reflexive verbs. Now multiply all these verb types by the number of different verb tenses for each one (present, passé composé, imparfait, futur simple, etc.) as well as the indicative and subjunctive moods for each type and tense… you suddenly have yourself a pretty lengthy list of verb stems and endings that you simply need to know in order to communicate effectively.

The most effective way to learn these types of things is simply rote learning. However, that doesn’t mean you have to do it by mind-numbingly reading and reciting verb tables over and over again to drill them into your mind – and this is where Conjuguemos comes in.

Conjuguemos is a web site that gives you a verb, a pronoun and a tense, and asks you to compile the correct form of the verb from those clues. You can tailor your testing so it only asks you for specific verbs, specific pronouns or specific tenses. They also have flashcards for learning vocabulary, as well as vocabulary lists to help increase the number of words you know along with perfecting your verb conjugations.

The site includes tests for French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. It also includes Latin tests, but these are unfortunately not available for free users. The site does, however, work via an ‘honor system’ of sorts, in that teachers and schools can pay what they think is a fair price for unlimited use of the site.

Rote learning is never fun, but making it into some kind of game like this really does help you with your language drills. I have also mentioned memrise.com on this blog before, which is another great way to make otherwise dull drills more fun.

So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and start testing yourself!

Back at school I had a French teacher who wasn’t a native French speaker, but still spoke the language fluently. His grammar was perfect, he had a wide vocabulary, but many students just could not take him seriously. Why? Well, he spoke French in what can only be described as a broad British accent. While a French person wouldn’t have much difficulty in understanding what he was saying, he never at any point sounded like a French speaker.

However, it is important when learning another language to learn the accent along with it. As this article says, an accent will help you in many ways – namely, improving your clarity, as well as fostering intimacy and promoting respect.

As regular readers will know, I’m currently learning Mandarin Chinese, and am in contact with others who are also learning the language. Many native American English speakers I know who learn Chinese make very little effort to affect a Mandarin accent when they speak, which is a much larger problem with Mandarin since it is a tonal language, and when speaking a tonal language in an atonal accent, it’s much harder to distinguish what tones the speaker is using.

Likewise, I know many foreigners who have learned English, and while many of them have around the same level of fluency, some have worked on their English accent so much that they are almost indistinguishable from native English speakers, while others still sound like a foreigner speaking English (albeit very well!).

So, don’t be afraid to emphasize your target language’s accent when speaking it. Of course, conversing with native speakers (or perhaps watching movies and TV shows in the language) will help you master the intricacies of the accent.

Humor site cracked.com have got a “top 10″-style list for almost every subject you could think of, and the English language is no exception. This time they’re lampooning the prescriptivists of the English language – those who apply rules and normative practices on the language’s spelling, grammar, syntax and pronunciation. This article lists 7 common “mistakes” in English that aren’t technically mistakes, such as split infinitives and people liberally using the word “literally” when they mean “figuratively”.

While these ‘errors’ so often fuel the ire of the grammar police, there is little – if any – evidence that they aren’t technically correct (the best kind of correct).

As always with cracked.com articles, before you click be warned that there will be plenty of foul language and childish humor! You can read the full article here.

Lifehacker ran an article today on polyglot Gabriel Wyner, an opera singer who was tasked with learning 4 languages due to his career choice. He has achieved near fluency in Italian, French, German, and most recently Russian.

His four-step method is simpler than you might think, and relies on taking each language step by step; first learning correct pronunciation, then immersing yourself entirely in the language to improve your grammar and overall vocabulary. After that, you work on listening, reading and writing, and only then do you work on improving your speaking skills. Read the article to find out more about Wyner’s language acquisition method, which has certainly proven to be pretty successful for him and serves as something of an inspiration for aspiring polyglots.

Gabriel Wyner attended a language immersion program for German back in 2004, and enjoyed it so much that he then tasked himself to learn French and Italian, followed by Russian. It helps that he’s living and working in Vienna, which means that most – if not all – of his daily routine will be performed in German. However, it’s certainly extremely impressive to have gained such fluency in 4 fairly disparate languages (French and Italian will obviously help each other out, both being romance languages) in such a short time.

You can learn more about Gabriel Wyner on his website.

Since the majority of people are right-handed, being left-handed was often seen as contrary or against the norm. Since a mostly right-handed populace generally means that a society will use tools and implements primarily suited to right-handed people, anything to do with the left side was seen as unfavorable, and even potentially injurious.

This eventually gave rise to the Latin word for “left-handed” or “left”, sinister, having a rather more negative meaning in modern-day English. We use to word to describe a wicked, evil or troublesome person or deed, when the original root word simply refers to a direction.

However, this also means that ambidextrous has a wonderful, if little-known, antonym: ambisinistrous. This means to be equally clumsy or unskilled with both hands!

However, a retronym is a little different. A retroynm is when a word is coined after the fact, because the original term has become inadequate. A simple example of a retronym is analog clock. Before digital clocks, all clocks were analog, and were just referred to as a clock; but after digital clocks became popular, the word clock alone was no longer specific enough.

Some more examples of retronyms are acoustic guitar (after electric guitars were invented), corn on the cob (after canned corn became common), dial-up internet (after broadband internet came along), live music (all music was live before the advent of recorded music), and First World War (simply known as “the Great War” or “the World War” before WW2 started in 1939).