Tonguesten Community for Lovers of Language & Creativity

Campfire
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Who we are

We are Tonguesten - a group of people passionate about language, learning and creativity. We created ReBeats because we believe that language learning should be as creative as language itself. We believe that the way language is currently taught - in blocks that are easy to teach, not easy to learn - is plain wrong, and so we are trying to do something about it, using technology with user experience at its core.

Our first game

Our first game ReBeats, aimed at 8-15 year olds who are learning English, is now in private beta, and it was created with the challenge of making an app where the experience is so fun and easy that all the learning happens without the user even realising.

Building a community of believers

We seek to create a community of people who love languages and culture - to become the online home for people who believe that creativity and education belong together.

We would like to reach out to EdgeRyders to find like-minded people who can help us to understand what it means to build a community with giving at its heart, and what kind of resources it takes to make something with real value for the community.

What We Believe

We have just outlined our core beliefs on community in a blog post here, which we’d love to hear your thoughts on.

How You Can Get Involved

We fundamentally believe that a world where the default approach is Google Translate is not a world that we want to live in - that the easier is becomes to translate experiences into our native culture, the more we will lose the ability to understand each other in any depth.

We hope very much our ideas and beliefs find a spiritual home here on EdgeRyders, and we’d love to hear from any like-minded folks who want to get involved, and help us to build a community for creative cultural activists.

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two things stroke me in your post: “learning without realising” and “learning culture indepth” instead “google translate”

I beleive that the best way to learn is, when one does not notice when learning. I know too many people using google translate extensivley. it might help at times when you want to have an idea what something (like a website) is about, but to use it instead of translating yourself or learning a language I find not appropriate (I heard about better automatic translators though. Which might work for translation, but possibly not for learning).

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Not sure

Hello Alexander, I am really not sure… in the days before the Internet one way people learned languages was by translating as exercise. You would use dictionaries, of course: you would have to look up words you did not know, conjugate the verbs etc. And after looking up the same word multiple times and conjugating the same verb the same way multiple times, you found yourself memorizing them and being able to use them thereafter.

Today it is the same: but you use GTrans instead of dictionaries. Am I missing something?

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Re: language learning thru google translate

dear alberto,

i actually learned english and using computer about at the same time, thou there was not too much literature on computer then. i remember reading a book on dos 3.2. i did understand how to copy something, but not much more. i only occasionaly looked up a word in a dictionary, sometimes i managed to understand terms thru the context, and sometimes i was just too lazy. back then many terms you just could not find in a dictionary at all (i was lucky also to live and work with people from all over the place. which might have helped as well).

with this google translator i am just not sure if one is able to learn a language. til now i did not see any progress people were making in using it. i am happy if somebody can convince me of the opposite and to be wrong here.

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People are all different

you might find GTrans is helpful for some, useless for others. It (like dictionaries) certainly helped me beef up my French, because accessing dictionaries or GTrans is the difference between being able to write a nice email in French and being unable to do so. I only need maybe five words from GTrans, but if those are not there I can’t get through. But with those, I can then use perhaps 50-100 more French words that I do know, and write a letter! And the more I write, the more I learn…

But that’s just me. I appreciate that for others things might be different. :slight_smile: