Mark Davies, who developed the invaluable Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), recently launched two new language corpuses: Corpus del Español and Corpus do Português.

Once you get the hang of the query syntax and the user interface (which can be daunting at first), you can search through a large database of Spanish and Portuguese sentences to answer lots of different questions about these two languages, e.g. which preposition goes with insistir, which synonym of duro is most commonly used with trabajo, and many others.

Unlike Google, Mark’s corpuses allow you to search for all the grammatical forms of a word (just put the base form of the word in [brackets]), specify parts of speech (e.g. [v*] stands for any verb in any form), or search by proximity (e.g. find all adjectives within 5 words of ojos). They will also sort the results by frequency, which can be a real time-saver.

I have just rolled out a full IPA “keyboard” which lets you type IPA phonetic symbols for any language (not just English).

You will find it useful if you ever need to type phonetic transcriptions for a language other than English. You will also like it if you’re a phonetics geek and always wanted to transcribe tree as [tʰɹ̥ʷiː] or heel as [ç̞iəɫ].

There are other online solutions for IPA input, but this one is easily the fastest, allowing both quick access to buttons and intuitive keyboard shortcuts. There is almost no learning curve — just hold Ctrl and press the letter that most resembles the IPA symbol you want to type; keep pressing the letter until you get the symbol you want.

You will need Windows Vista/7 or a third-party IPA font to see all the symbols. Works best with Firefox, Internet Explorer 8 and Safari on Mac.

Added May 2012: See here for a better solution to problems with the LDOCE.

It appears there is an unofficial patch which fixes many of the LDOCE’s shortcomings (thanks are due to my readers who told me about it). Here are the main fixes:

• Mousewheel scrolling works (still a little too slow for my liking).
• Keyboard scrolling is fixed for the most part (there are still occasional problems with PgUp)
• You can select any text and right-click it to copy it to the clipboard.
• The PopUp mode window can now be resized. This is probably the most convenient way to use LDOCE, as it has very few distractions. I’ve noticed that in the PopUp mode, LDOCE tries to look up every piece of text you copy to the clipboard. To turn this off, you have to right-click the QuickFind icon in the system tray (bottom right corner of the screen) and choose Exit.
• You now get the dictionary window immediately after startup rather than having to click Dictionary.

The only big problem that hasn’t been fixed is the startup time. It still takes about 10 seconds to open the dictionary.

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There are two problems with using Google to check your English:

1. The Web is full of bad English written by non-native speakers and verbally incompetent native speakers. This is a serious problem when you’re looking for correct example sentences to learn the usage of a word or when you’re trying to check if some phrase is correct, because you cannot trust the information you get from the general Web. In each case, you have to examine the source of the sentence to check if it’s trustworthy.
2. Google routinely reports the wrong number of hits, especially for phrases. It may tell you that “I have a question for you” occurs on 1,600,000 pages, but the actual number is 473. This means you cannot trust the reported number of hits when you want to check if some phrase is correct. The only solution is to find the last search results page, but this can be hard if there are a lot of hits. (Bing used to be accurate, but now has the same issues.)

The Correct English search engine (based on Google) solves the first problem. It includes a subset of the Web — a hand-picked list of sources which are known to contain good English: online dictionaries, news sites, selected blogs and communities, Wikipedia, movie scripts, government sites, and others. Of course, the content is not 100% “pure”, but the quality is vastly better than on the general Web. Correct English contains practically no sentences written in bad English.

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My friend Michał recently asked me for an opinion on Extreme English, the flagship English-learning course at SuperMemo.net. He has moved to England and is eager to improve his English.

Michał is a smart guy. He realizes that just living in England will not make him a good English speaker. As a case in point, the Polish family he is currently staying with has lived in England for five years and speaks hardly any English. They watch Polish channels on TV, they talk mostly to each other and to other Poles, and they do jobs that require little communication skills, so they don’t get enough input to make progress.

So he is simply continuing the English-learning strategy that he used in Poland. He listens to English radio, watches English TV, reads English newspapers, and develops his own SuperMemo collection. The only difference is that now his future depends on how well he can learn English. This leads to more intensity (he’s now learning for several hours a day), but also a lot of pressure.

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