Tuesday, February 17, 2009

More on Google for learning Language

Following on from my last post Using Google for Lexis, I have a habit of posting thoughts and then searching for what other people are doing, actually I think this is a better way to learn :).

I found http://bbs.english.sina.com/archiver/?tid-805.html using google to learn English.

For example:
"on another hand" 107,000 results
"on other hand" 415,000 results
"on the other hand" 78,700,000 results
The majority rules..

I also found Jim Stroud at englishcafe.com explaining How to make Google your English Teacher

Unlike Jim Stroud suggests with learning English I have not found any useful functionality with the ~ character when learning Chinese at google.cn, however the * is very useful. Just remember to make sure you are in English mode with your input method, the Chinese * is not the same as * and google will not see it as a character wild card. Basically if you put an asterix in your query then google will substitute any character for the asterix, seeing what comes out the other end can be very instructive.

Google also be used to search specific sites, which can be instructive, for micro-blogging for example you can restrict the search results to fanfou.com by adding site:fanfou.com to the front of the query.

2 comments:

Keith said...

"on the far hand" 996

"on the another hand" 8,350

"on the back hand" 23,000

"on the opposite hand" 147,000

"on the left hand" 6,470,000

"on the right hand" 12,400,000

The majority rules. Or maybe you have to know what you are doing.

Unknown said...

Good point Keith, you do have to have some idea of what you are trying to say.

Assuming you do though, search can help. For example which sounds more natural to the average English speaker, "salt and pepper, or "pepper and salt"?