You know that story about a box which said “see inside for opening instructions”? It was about Antimoon. You see, Antimoon tells you how to learn English effectively. But to understand Antimoon, you have to know English. Classic chicken-and-egg problem.

Of course some learners can understand the articles on Antimoon and the advice can help them take their English to the next level. But that does not change the fact that people need two things to benefit from Antimoon:

1. They need to find it.
2. They must be able to read and understand short articles in English.

Let’s face it: These are significant barriers. Most beginner and intermediate learners are not in the habit of searching Google for English phrases like How to learn English — they search for phrases in their native languages and Antimoon never comes up in those searches. And even if they somehow come across this site, they do not have the skills or patience to read so much English text. The idea of reading in English arouses terror in many, if not most, learners.

Enter the Antimoon Translation Project. Thanks to the inspiration and cooperation of Eun-Deok Jin, an enthusiastic English learner from Korea, I have set up a wiki where anyone can post their translations of Antimoon articles. The goal is to bring effective learning methods to beginners all around the world.

If your native language is other than English and you can understand English well, you can contribute to the project by translating something — either a whole article or part of an article — into your native language. As in Wikipedia, anyone can add a page or edit an existing one.

So far, Jin has translated 10 articles into Korean and Michal Stanislaw Wojcik has translated 2 into Polish.

Of all the advice on Antimoon, “Do not make mistakes” is by far the most controversial. Hardly a month goes by without an e-mail or forum post from an angered English teacher, letting me know how stupid I am for telling learners to avoid mistakes. Don’t I realize that mistakes are a necessary element of all learning? Haven’t I heard the phrase “learn from your mistakes”? And why am I scaring learners into silence?

With this article, I hope to clear up the confusion once and for all.

Read more:
The role of mistakes in language learning

In July, I wrote that the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary had been dropped from the Collins product line. I have since found out that I was wrong. HarperCollins has partnered with an American educational company called Cengage to release a new (sixth) edition of this landmark dictionary. I suppose the complicated business relationship with Cengage is one reason why it is so hard to find any information on this edition on Collins’ websites.

Anyway, I have installed the sixth edition on my PC and I must say it is the most bloated, slowest, buggiest software dictionary that I have ever used. Looking up a word takes 1-5 seconds on a fast machine, the dictionary takes up over 300 MB of memory, there are no phonetic transcriptions, and the recordings are of a quality that we used to have before CDs came along. It is painfully obvious that this product was written by incompetent programmers, tested by no one, and approved by managers who didn’t care. Avoid like the plague!

If you want to buy a Collins COBUILD, get the previous (fifth) edition. It is a solid piece of software developed by a completely different company. It runs fast, has phonetic transcriptions and good-quality audio. It has been discontinued, but the Elearnaid store has enough copies to last a year.

For more information, read the updated reviews of the Collins COBUILD Dictionary (book version and CD-ROM).

I’ve started playing computer games after a few years’ break, and I’ve noticed the Polish videogame market has changed a great deal. When you walk around in a videogame store, all you see are boxes that proudly proclaim: Full Polish version! Featuring the voices of <insert names of well-known Polish actors>! It’s almost as bad as in Germany, where every single product of American culture is translated and dubbed by an army of voice actors.

Needless to say, I was appalled when I found that this trend had reached Poland. “Don’t they care about learning English?”, I grumbled. “What about all the inaccuracies and stupid mistakes you get in translations? And what happened to getting the original experience as envisioned by the authors of the game?”

I was looking for a copy of Doom 3, so I asked the sales clerk about an English version. “Nope”, he said, “There was an English version when the game first came out, but once the Polish version appeared, the English version was discontinued”. He looked surprised that anyone would want an English version even though the clearly superior Polish version was available. Those customers, sometimes they want the weirdest things!

In the end, I bought the Polish version and downloaded the English version (God bless the Internet!), which I installed using the Polish version’s CD key. Luckily it worked.

I have since looked around and asked around, and what I’ve found out is that sometimes you get full Polish voices (the aforementioned Doom 3), sometimes you get English voices with Polish subtitles (Company of Heroes), and sometimes you get to choose between English and Polish versions (BioShock). In general, you have to be very careful because information about the English versions is not always shown on the box. Obviously it’s considered unimportant to the majority of customers.

I guess this trend towards “localization” is due to the growing affluence of the Polish consumer and the increasing marketing prowess of Polish game distributors, who are looking for new ways to compete with each other. The sad thing is that Polish gamers are getting used to receiving American and British entertainment that’s stripped of the English language. When Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC came out this month, there was an outcry from many Polish gamers disappointed at the lack of a Polish-language version. The irony is that, in a few years, many of the same people who are now avoiding English like the plague will be paying for expensive language courses in Britain in order to immerse themselves in English.