Listen and learn - Language learners hear words in context on the language portal Comprehencia

    /24-7PressRelease/ - April 06, 2008 - Most language learners are familiar with the difficulty of recognizing freshly acquired vocabulary in conversational situations with native speakers. No matter how diligently one studied the words, it is hard to recognize them in the spoken language. "Native speakers combine words in their natural flow of speaking to an acoustic whole. This makes it difficult for beginners to hear and understand separate words." says Dr. Marc Busch, founder of the language learning portal Comprehencia.

With Comprehencia, people learn vocabulary and at the same time listen to native speakers using the words in context. The student gets accustomed to the sound of a language and acquires new words quicker into active vocabulary memory. So far, around 4000 example sentences in English, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese have been recorded by native speakers. "Our target is," says Busch, "to provide recordings for the basic vocabulary in many different languages."

Language learners worldwide can efficiently maintain and extend their vocabulary with Comprehencia. The standard vocabulary building tools use the Leitner flash card system or a variant. Flash cards are sorted into groups and reviewed following a set of simple rules. Forgotten words are sorted back into the first group - the learning process starts again from the beginning.

"The problem with this simple flash card approach", explains Dr. Busch, "is that our memory does not separate content into few groups. It is rather a continuum of states that are in constant motion. Furthermore, there is no such mechanism like 'back to zero' when a word is forgotten after some time. The flash card system is an extreme simplification of reality."

Comprehencia, on the other hand, treats the vocabulary as a constantly changing integral whole. Comprehencia learns how the student's memory changes over time and applies these rules to the online vocabulary. This way, it becomes feasible to retain, quickly reactivate, and extend ones vocabulary even after longer study breaks.

Students, teachers and others interested in learning more, in taking an online tour of the system, watching the tutorial videos, or in signing up for a free trial should visit http://comprehencia.com.

Dr Marc Busch has spent the last few years working in industrial research and has headed up a number of international projects in the fields of molecular imaging and computer visualisation. In his spare time, Busch enjoys learning all about Japan and the Japanese language. His own frustrating experience with the many Leitner-type flash card programs gave him the impetus to start Comprehencia in August 2007. The object of the program was to develop an algorithm which can realistically model the state of knowledge of the learner even after fairly long learning breaks. The result of this research is the online portal http://comprehencia.com, where learners all over the world can use this algorithm for their own language studies.

Contact:
Dr. Marc Busch
Kronenburger Strasse 28
50935 Cologne, Germany
Tel.: +49-221-2590-1624
Email: [email protected]
Internet: http://comprehencia.com
Internet (English Version): http://comprehencia.com/en/home

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