English to Malibu

Today I decided to do this.
To discuss with the audience Habra format of learning English, which we use on our project and try to prove that he has the right to exist along with the other wonderful services.


You can immediately see what will be discussed: malibu.io.

Either walk with me from the beginning. It's not a long story.

For learning English, I was sitting on foreign entertainment sites:
9gag, reddit, imgur... etc (sorry, "etc").
Process I really liked, because for the rest I have received some benefit for themselves, evolve and learn new words, expressions, and saw how real native speakers use English. And most importantly – it wasn't so ashamed of your time.
Then I wrote all new words in a column in gmail draft, so you can later go and repeat.

This had several disadvantages:
the

the
• The first trouble was the fact that the layout of sites is often not possible easily (without opening the web inspector) to highlight a word or expression. At all these sites the most crucial and interesting text is in the title and a link to the page of the post, in which it is impossible to begin to select text in the middle (instead of the entire title-the link will be dragged).
the
• to Highlight words in mobile applications is not possible, and with the mobile version of the website is also wildly convenient.

I had to pereklyuchitjsya to the tab with the interpreter, and then to the tab with the mail, to bring a new word in your makeshift dictionary. The lesson is a bit tedious. the

• If it was a new phrase, coming to write in Google search: phrase + "meaning" to learn what it means.
the
• When I was going through the list of words, I have not been able to get back to the context in which I stertil these words. It was klassicheskiy column "eng. word – translation".

Starting to view entertainment content on foreign websites, I still sometimes go on speaking.
The feeling, however, was that a good 30 percent, if not more, are the materials skopirovannyj from the Western sites.
It caused a bit negative emotion, because often users were given false wonderful posts for your. For example, I'm most pissed off user who has translated a very interesting investigation + the hypothesis of the crash of MH370 c foreign blog and was given for his work. The authority of the League of detectives was provided.

All this has motivated me to create a project where you copy material from foreign sources will be beneficial to English learners, and will remain a link to the original.

The project deals with the fact that hosts interesting articles from foreign websites, citing not only the Russian translation, but the English of the original.

The format of the materials we

We came to it in natural way and never conducted a serious analysis on efficiency, but here's what I think:

I like it:

the

the
• the Study of words in context and with vivid visual associations
the
• Interest to learn the material (all I ever managed to learn successfully in English, was done with incredible passion, when I was indifferent to something)

Quick content. Yes, we sometimes dlinnopolyh (http://malibu.io/post/3902/), but even they are very light in content, not overloaded with text. This means that to come to us and look at a few posts at any time (at least 5 minutes while riding the bus or waiting for turn) at any time and can be interrupted. In my wgssd to learn the language – it is necessary to make a part of your life (at least a small part of it). the

• Translation from written on the bottom. We recommend you to read in English and watch the picture, and after, if you can not understand, watch the transfer (so he made more subtle grey font). And for the more advanced English we are advising to disable Russian language in the settings, and when you meet a new word, You can click on it and the translation will appear below. We could go the way of the use of technology LingQ / LinguaLeo, but in my view it is not really suitable for our project. I would not want to burden users with a task to figure out their own translations from English-Russian dictionary. Still on the idea in the first place on Malibu people come to relax, but along with this improve English. I think if the website are always displayed in English only, we would not be able to focus on a broad audience. Posts on one English will alienate users for whom this language is like an impenetrable jungle. By the way, it is believed that the most effective way to learn English is total immersion in the English-speaking environment. But there is one caveat. One dive is not enough. Try to throw a man into the water who cannot swim. It would seem that a full immersion in the necessary environment, but it will sink. When immersed in a foreign language is required assistant that will give a hand, help them in a difficult situation. In the best case it's Your parents, which explain the difficult unknown words on the basis of simple that you already know.
I don't like:

the
the
• Perhaps, as much as I don't like to read large "wall" of text in English, so the reverse side is not pleasing to me these viral headlines "the... in the world... ", "stunning, incredible... ", which is more commonly found in entertainment projects
the
• not that I do Not like it, but you have to understand that only these materials are not mastered. Do not learn grammar and speaking. But all you need to do in the complex.


// TODO: add both list reviews comments

My subjecting conclusion: what we've got – this is not a universal tutorial. It's just another format to explore. For those people who are already learning English, it can wonderfully complement existing approaches: courses, TV shows, movies, Skype, books. There is also hope that he will push it to the study of people who were too lazy to take.

A separate item worth the dream project in the future to help foreigners in learning Russian language!

PS
the
the
• Perhaps someone will wonder, how does the posting of materials. English text and pictures are taken from post from a foreign site, Google Translate API provides a machine translation. If it's not perfect, it is possible to manually correct. Ready! In addition, the script iterates over all the words in the post and refers to API Yandex.Dictionaries, to link them. The last correctly working at this stage in ~90% of cases, and we check posts before print to the main.
the
• I am Sure that there are small bugs, but this is not the most important thing at this stage. I want first to test the concept.

This is the second attempt to tell habré about the project. The first did not take place for reasons known only one UFO.

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru