Language and Humor Blog

You can now get free audio phrase books for your iPod from Coolgorilla (so far German, French, and Greek, with Spanish coming soon).

I expect to see tourists in foreign marketplaces frantically pushing buttons on tiny devices the way they used to frantically flip through paper phase books (though I guess they already do that with electronic dictionaries). But this way you don’t mispronounce something and call the seller’s mother an “ugly warthog” (when you actually wanted to call her a “coolgorilla”).

EDIT (July 5, 2007):
These are now free with a purchase of something from travel/tourism site lastminute.com.

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For closer to home, if your home is in a major Chinese city, you can search for local information [EDIT (3/26/10): Now only for Shanghai Daily subscribers] about restaurants, hotels, weather, etc. via your cellphone/mobile phone in English, Mandarin, and pinyin (romanized Mandarin) thanks to mInfo Inc.It’s interesting that the advertisers supporting this service are not only restaurants and hotels but also “agencies promoting English learning.” Is the goal to have Chinese people search for information in English for the heck of it? The future’s fully integrated cellphone-iPod (or CellPod), will probably include a Star Trek Universal Translator that can hear a dozen words in an unknown language and then magically translate the other hundreds of millions.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 8th, 2006 at 4:30 pm and is filed under English as a Second / Foreign Language, Foreign Languages, LANGUAGE, Language Technology, Words / Dictionaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.