The world is made up of things that work, mixed together with things that don’t work. The busted and dysfunctional, tripping against beauty and perfection. The yin and the yang as it were. It’s human nature to think that things should work all the time. We get bummed, when they don’t. Oddly, we do this day in, day out, like it’s an everyday predictable recurring surprise. Since we are designed by nature to be problem-solving animals, it’s hard not to transfixate on the broken.

I think happy people train themselves, by hard work, to continually notice the many little things that are actually working. It’s incredible, if you look around, how many things, on any given day, really work well.

But this post is not about the singing birds. It’s about computer stuff. My daughter Sally and I were talking about this, how some things are just so easy to use, and it’s hard to appreciate the achievement behind that surface simplicity, the sophistication that must be going on in the background. So this is an Ode to Things that Work:

OneNote & Evernote. First on my list. Unless I’m walking through a swamp someplace, I use them all day every day. Finding neat stuff and saving it is the heart of my existence. I would like to write a post about this someday, because it’s also the heart of Knowledge Management, hence interesting. At least to me. This would be in the category of that thing where I look at other people, who are seemingly getting by fine without either OneNote or Evernote, and I can’t figure out how they do it. Since these are right now the two leading note-taking apps, they are logically viewed as competitors. I need them both. I would rather die, than live without either one.

Sync. All the things that sync by magic. In my life these would be e-mail, bookmarks, contacts, calendar, Rhapsody, Evernote, OneNote, Kindle, and placemarks. Not to mention all the cloud-based apps accessible from a browser like Facebook, Picasa, Netflix, Pandora, and financial sites; these don’t use local sync strictly speaking, but they do remember your work and settings no matter which way you come at them.

Encrypted PDFs. Amazingly, almost any device can open and display an encrypted PDF, because Adobe makes readers for everything there is. This simple fact solves 99% of all cross-device security puzzles. Do you have something super-secret, but want to carry it around on your phone, Kindle, tablet – and even if The Enemy gets it, No problema? An encrypted PDF with a strong password is rock solid security, in and of itself, no additional layers of protection required. There are online testers for password strength, but generally after 8-10 mixed digits, you’ve built yourself a Fort Knox for data, right in your daypack.

Server-side voice recognition. The voice recognition I use every day, like right now, runs locally using a lot of hard drive, a lot of processor, and Windows. On weaker little devices like phones and tablets, voice recognition gets moved out to the server – you say a phrase, it goes to the cloud, gets processed there, and returns as text. Already, it’s spectacular how well this works. I’m using two voice recognition products now, both from Nuance. Dragon is the Windows client I’ve used for years, and Flex T9 is their server-based product that runs on Android. I can already tell that Flex T9 is doing futuristic stuff that Dragon hasn’t learned yet – contextual cues for example, to decide between two, too & to; algorithmic improvement probably based on heavy statistical analysis that would be too much for any PC. All I know for sure, Flex is getting uncanny accuracy at my end, from a cheap pinhole microphone and no customization to my voice. It’s definitely thinking harder. And it toggles over to Spanish! Nuance recently acquired both Vlingo and Swype, two of the longtime leaders on small devices, so that’s fun. They also provide the engine behind Siri for Apple. Voice recognition, right now today… works.

"Like” on Facebook. If you use Facebook, you already appreciate the power of this innovation. But have you ever thought about it from the standpoint of labor efficiency or information theory? Wow. If a picture is worth a thousand words (and we know it is), what’s really going on when you click "like" ten times, for ten different friends, in a couple minutes? You can dis the depth of the discourse if you want, and nobody will argue with you. But that’s just a spectacular burst of communication-per-second, between friends.

Video snapshots. Something good happened to video. At the upper end – TV, movies, TED, YouTube – not much changed. But at the very bottom, the quick videos shot from any little camera, they are just as easy now as a still snapshot. Often, just by remembering to toggle to video, it can be the better way to capture a place or a moment. Not just because of the motion, but also their ability to sweep a panorama for context, combined with snippets of conversation or background sound. Video snapshots – anything less than one minute – are a whole different critter from "real" video. Did you know they are as easy to crop as any other snapshot? Fire up Windows Live Video Editor (or its equivalent) if you haven’t already. I was surprised. The learning curve to crop a video clip is essentially nil.

Personalized search. Google has a brave new vision for search. It’s exciting to me, and I believe they know what they are doing, and that it is right. But at the same time it is understandably, and perhaps justifiably, scary to people. The results of their efforts are creeping into search now everywhere, and it will only get more so. When I was a kid there was a science fiction story by Frederik Pohl where everybody had a "joymaker," which was a little thing you could hold in your hand, talk into, and get quick answers to any question from the big computer. Cool vision; pretty nearly where we are now. Something goes without saying, though – the computer has to know you as a person to carry on a reasonable conversation. There’s just no getting around it. If it doesn’t know where you are, how can you expect it to help you find something? If it doesn’t know what you like, what you care about, your age, gender, situation, and history, how can you be mad when it botches up half its answers? So would a human botch answers, if you refused to let them have any context whatsoever. In the long run, privacy issues will get worked out by each of us as we decide how much we actually trust the thing, and dial our distance or closeness accordingly – a relationship like any other, really. But meanwhile, watch. Already, personalized search is on the list of things that work.

PS – Here’s a photo of my gadget family now. I’ve noticed in tech forums people often sign at the bottom with a list of what they currently use, because it helps the readers to put their comments in context. Everybody’s gadget ecology is different. Right now I have 1) Joe, a 2 year old Windows 7 slate, 2) Flaco, an Android tablet, 3) the plainest Kindle and 4) my phone, which maybe looks smart, but isn’t.

Back in May I described a great method for language learning based on finding super-interesting articles, then reading them in combination with the text-to-speech and mini-translator functionality in Word (New Toy, May 2011). I now use this technique every morning, usually for 10 to 30 minutes. It’s by far and away the best thing I’ve ever found for an easy, everyday language warm-up. Since writing the original article, it has smoothed out for me into something I look forward to, and a good little habit.

Here are the actual steps I go through now – this will assume you saw the first article, played some with the technique and have the mini translator working well:

Depending on how you find good things to read, collect and maintain a little inventory of super-interesting articles, organized in a simple folder with subfolders. I either save these articles as I run across them, or sometimes I actively go out looking for them. Primarily I use Google Reader, with RSS subscriptions to my favorite sources. I won’t list those here since yours will differ from mine of course, depending on your interests. You don’t need to spend much time looking though, since 5-10 great articles saved ahead in your reading queue is plenty. Save them in Word format, dropping them into your reading folder.

Every day as you finish your 30 minutes (or whatever time you’ve allotted), wherever you quit, drop a bookmark – Insert, Bookmark – in Word. That makes it easy to pick up the next day right where you left off. When I get to the end of an article, I simply slide the whole file into a subfolder, getting it out of the way and indicating it’s been read.

So every morning, go into Reading, click on something good from your collection, and skip forward in it to the latest bookmark. Now comes the good part. Since writing the original article, I added the use of a microphone. This puts a whole additional dimension on things.

Get comfortable – adjust the text size if necessary for easy reading, put on your earbuds or earphones, and the microphone. Now read aloud for a few sentences or a paragraph, recording your own voice. This will be the first pass over the material, so try to understand what you are reading at the same time you’re speaking it. I use OneNote for the recording, it works well for managing little audio clips; but whatever you have will work. Play it back through your earbuds, noticing especially the words that got sadly mangled like a gringo, but also noticing words that sounded surprisingly good. If any. My recordings are set at a high bit rate; I enjoy hearing every little nuance.

Now highlight the same text, hover to pop up the mini-translator, click the play arrow, and listen while the machine-lady reads the same passage. Again, try to understand the content, as she reads aloud. Also as she’s reading, try to keep up with her, reading along under your breath. Replay troublesome words or phrases if you want.

Now try reading and recording the same passage a second time in your own voice. Playing back this second recording, you’ll notice an improvement that’s very pleasing – somewhat addictively so. Myself, I get a fair amount of entertainment talking along over the top of myself as I listen to my own recordings, making my mouth contort around the hard phrases. Sometimes I do them again and again fast, like little tongue twisters. I keep this up until either they sound pretty good, or I give up in laughter, or defeat.

Move ahead to the next passage whenever you feel like it. And so on. I just do whatever I want for my 10-30 minutes, going only by the clock. But it’s rather transfixing and I could easily go longer if I allowed more time.

Along with the reading aloud, listening, and re-reading, I also study how good writers say things – the words and the phrases they choose. I often take side trips, delving in a bit with the translator and dictionary tools in the mini translator, or going beyond them to the other dictionaries, translators, and conjugators I described in the my August "Language Tools" article.

So that’s it. You can see I put a lot of energy into pronunciation (you wouldn’t know it) but I also let myself get easily sidetracked into just studying meaning and construction. And of course I enjoy the articles themselves.

What is it that I find so attractive about this technique? There are lots of other great ways to study language – in particular, listening to interesting podcasts, writing e-mails to friends, talking on the phone, and watching interesting TV. But I think what’s so special about this technique is that, in spite of what you might think with the microphone and earbuds, it’s quite light weight. It’s very easy to find good articles, very easy to get set up in the morning, and especially (unlike e-mails, phone calls, TV, or live teachers) easy to confine to a fixed block of time. It has a private, peaceful quality; you can do it on any schedule. Because of this, it’s the easiest thing I’ve found for making into a habit. It’s plenty powerful, involving as it does strong personal interests, pronunciation, vocabulary, reading, talking, and listening. But it’s the easy little habit, more than anything else, that turns out to be what matters.

A year ago I wrote an article about traveling light without a computer, even in a business setting, by using a cloud drive along with public computers instead. I had just returned from Argentina, and the method worked great. This year I was packing for the same trip again, and planning on doing the exact same thing. The technique involves a small amount of printing to paper. In the original article I said this:

"Every trip is different. When packing data, I think about the trip, I think about the things I’ll need, I think in terms of a toolkit at my disposal which includes 1. Paper, 2. Computer, 3. Mobile devices, and 4. Thumb Drive. (Paper, by the way, should never be underestimated. Instant-on, infinite battery life, and who cares if it’s stolen. So thin-and-light that it vanishes when viewed on-edge. There’s a reason it’s popular.) To this list I can now add #5: Cloud drive."

So there I was, packing for the same trip a year later, and thinking as usual of the few things it would be nice to have printed ahead for paper reference. These would be lists that are nice to have in the hotel room, like plane schedules, phone numbers, and addresses; also, some language stuff to study, and perhaps some reading. As I got ready to print this stuff – it’s not a lot, maybe fifteen sheets – I suddenly wondered… how about using a Kindle instead?

I’ve never given Kindle much thought. Friends have them, but I never really wanted one. Well, after just a few minutes of research, I suddenly saw how Kindle could organize and replace all the paper, plus carry guidebooks and dictionaries, and fit as the "missing piece" in the whole cloud drive/public computer concept. I was in Salt Lake, so I jumped in the car, drove to the store, and picked up two of them (one for Laura) for $79 apiece.

I’m back from Argentina now, after three weeks traveling like this, using my Kindle every day. One week was a regular business trip requiring plenty of browsing, e-mail, document editing, spreadsheets and such. Here’s what I ended up loving about Kindle for travel:

• 6 ounces, battery seemingly unlimited. Seemingly indestructible. I didn’t protect it in any way, it just floated loose in my stuff. Cheap. Silent. Works good one-handed.
• Anything you can print to Word or PDF, you can print to Kindle. It even takes encrypted password-protected PDFs, so it’s easy to carry some sensitive stuff – a big advantage over paper, and safer even than a cloud drive. If it gets stolen no biggie, that’s $79 down the drain. If you get on the trip and forgot something, just stop into the Cyber, pluck it off your cloud drive, and e-mail to Kindle. It shows up magically within minutes, assuming Wi-Fi. Quicker than printing.
• It gives off no light. It looks small, dull, gray, and cheap. Laura and I both found it comfortable reading our Kindles for hours on the bus, crossing La Rioja province. Reading on an iPad or computer would have felt very Gringo; we actually saw some tourists like this during the trip, and they really looked geeky, decidedly non-local. Kindle, for some reason, just isn’t very interesting to anybody. A common cellphone is sexier.
• We put good Spanish-English and English-Spanish dictionaries on both of our Kindles, and really used them. Also regular guidebooks like Lonely Planet, and something to just read, like a book or some magazine articles.
• Less tangible benefits become apparent after the bonding period. Primarily, its little personality – so totally different from other gadgets, calm, peaceful. Limited, in a very nice way. It’s easy to organize stuff into folders. So unlike digging around in your pack for the thing you need, you grab your Kindle, and everything is right there, one-handed. In fact, if you haven’t experienced it for yourself it’s hard to describe the way the little thing automatically holds your place. Folders automatically sort to the top by most recently used; files automatically bookmark themselves, opening right where you left off. This is really nice. You can have a lot of material saved on there, and for some reason the thing you want is always conveniently on top.

So after three weeks traveling, I love my Kindle, and I think it loves me; it’s the perfect little traveling companion. I never considered buying one before just to buy and read books. But for traveling light and packing data, it’s undeniable now: Kindle outshines paper.

… to everybody who helped with my logo. I expect to thank each of you directly, but I’m going to Córdoba for a few weeks leaving tomorrow, and probably won’t do much e-mail. So I wanted, at least, to write a quick post. Here’s what I ended up with; this is the front and back of my new business card:

Getting ready for the trip I also quickly re-did the old placeholder homepage at Transrio.com.ar; it now has a little letter of introduction. I wrote it myself in Spanish, so it’s rough, but I’m quite proud that I could do it at all. It’s only one tenth as good as what I hope to have eventually, but then again, it’s twenty times better than the old hand-scribbled thing I was getting by with before. So I feel good. I’m traveling with some kind of a business card, and some kind of a homepage. Thank-you to my friend Omar for the idea of including "Traductor” links on the homepage that machine-translate this blog to Spanish.

People had a gazillion good ideas about the logo. A lot of people liked the handwritten look; I ended up going with the font (Candara by the way) because I already use so much handwriting in everything I do. I thought it helped the logo to look more formal, just to set it apart. As for colors, people varied much more widely than I was expecting. I was expecting the process would be like a little democracy, with a clear winner. But in hindsight I can see that each of us (including me) simply likes their own favorite colors. Many of you, I know you well enough that I already know what colors you like, and big surprise, those were the colors you preferred. Not to diminish in any way the help it gave me – in fact, in addition to identifying quite a few colors that didn’t work for anybody, it also made me realize that I shouldn’t trust my own personal gut favorite (the all-green one), but instead should go at it a bit more logically. The final color choice was the actual chosen favorite of only two people, but I ended up liking it because I think it looks professional and matches the business. I like the blue rhyming with Rio; I like the green for agriculture, growth, and money. And overall it had a personality that was friendly, comfortable, yet also solid.

At least I hope so. In any case, what a relief to be done! I’m 90% packed, and I’m already getting excited to see those first cities of South America, all lit up and pretty, sliding backward below the plane after midnight.

Man, talk about unpleasant and inconvenient…

Four days ago I clicked my own homepage, and saw my antivirus go bananas. Looking at my own source code I saw a strange little script that had no business being there. At first (being extremely naïve way back then, four days ago) I thought, hmm, that’s weird.

I finally got the mess cleaned up. It’s Sunday night, and it took me 20 hours of hard work. I’m leaving for Argentina in a week, so I really needed to be able to point people to my blog. I couldn’t afford to just take it down. So after four days of sweaty palms, there’s nothing at all to show except the same blog as before, only clean, more secure, and more substantial under the hood.

I sure learned a lot. So that’s good. They had hidden backdoors in five separate files on my server, so that even if I tried to lock them out they could still mess with me. I had to find and hire a very nice company, Sucuri Security, to isolate these blocks of malware code and carefully extract them without harming the patient. I did updates and backups and password changes until – literally – I was seeing blurry.

It’s a nice feeling to be done and have it behind me. I feel like I did when I got my green belt in tae kwon do. One teensy notch more sophisticated. Time to celebrate; then on to packing!

I’m trying to make a logo for Transrio, and unfortunately the project has taken on that dreaded look of a long-term hobby. Time to wrap it up. Here are a dozen that I’m liking now:

#1#2#3#4

#5#6#7#8

#9101112

The first two are hand-lettered, and all the rest are identical except for color. If you click on a thumbnail it takes you to a dummy page I made, placing that particular logo in the context of some content. This helps I think, but it’s also a little risky because the blog has evolved its own color scheme which may or may not be like the website and other materials. So if you like a certain logo but it doesn’t particularly match with the page colors, don’t worry about that — after choosing a logo the other colors will rearrange to match.

I’m asking a small group of friends to just quickly look at these 12 logos and tell me what they think. (Anybody can help me, though, and I would super appreciate it. I didn’t want to impose on too many people.) I might go with one of them as-is, if people steer me to a favorite. Or I could make additional changes, big or little — I would love any suggestions at all. I can easily combine the handwritten look with different colors, or try a different font. Modifications really aren’t much work, the point is to decide on something, and hence, finish.

If you are trying to point me in the right direction, it’s helpful for you to know what direction I’d like to go. Here are some keywords I’ve been using for guidance. These are feelings I would like all of my materials, but especially the logo, to express or engender:

• Personality of Pete — Authentic, Enthusiastic, Warm, Experienced, Pragmatic, Inventive, Solid, Friendly, Competent.
• Personality of Transrio — Business, know-how, growth, agriculture, thriving, prosperity, technology, international, Argentine-U.S., collaboration, franchising, multi-latino, projects.

Thank you in advance for your help. Call or write with any ideas or impressions at all. Don’t be shy, either — if the very name Transrio strikes you funny, or the little knot seems off the point, I would love to know because I’m too close and can’t see well. Nothing is going to hurt my feelings; I’m a self-avowed amateur in this. I’m going to be nothing but grateful.

Awhile back Natalia pushed me out of the nest, saying it was finally time for me to start writing to her in Spanish. For years we have been writing back and forth bilingually, my e-mails in English, hers in Spanish. Which was super pleasant. But it was laziness on my part, and in fact unbecoming of a person whose goal is to do business in Latin America.

Writing in Spanish was hard for me at first but it’s getting easier with practice. I read well, but speak poorly, and I had zero experience with writing. To my surprise though, just having everyday language tools readily at hand makes it much, much easier now than it would have been, say, 5 years ago. It isn’t cheating to use these things. In fact writing simple e-mails with the support of spell-checkers and grammar-checkers, conjugators and dictionaries, and of course machine translation, is just a great way to get continual correcting feedback while learning any language.

Over the years I’ve written several posts about language learning and language tools, so today I decided to make a new category called Language — it’s apparently a theme on this blog. If you click Language on the sidebar, you’ll see some of these prior posts. Always they have a special focus on free or nearly-free computer applications. I just finished sending an e-mail to Natalia and I thought it might be worth describing the tools I like best for anybody else who’s struggling with a second language. With almost no modification, these ideas will work in any mainstream language. For example they would work great in the opposite direction, i.e. for a native speaker of Spanish who wants to write in English.

Normally (like right now) I write without a keyboard, dictating into Dragon. But of course I use a keyboard for Spanish; it’s basically the only time I actually type. So to write a Spanish e-mail I attach a keyboard and open a blank document in Word. I don’t use any special Spanish template, just the default blank page. I have the status bar displayed at the bottom, and it starts off showing "English (U.S.)." Usually though, if I type just a few sentences, it figures out I’m talking in Spanish and switches by itself to "Spanish (Argentina)." If it doesn’t, I can just control-A to select what I’ve written so far, click Review, and set the proofing language manually. As soon as things are flying straight, I save the little document as a dated temporary scratch file under Transrio\Spanish\Writings.

I don’t want to come off overly Windows-centric. But frankly (and depending on your view perhaps, unfortunately) I doubt there’s a better program than Word for writing in foreign languages. If you read my last post about language learning, you’ll see that out-of-the-box Word can be driven in a whole slew of crazy directions, linguistically. If you haven’t had time to explore what’s available there, prepare to be amazed by the depth, width, and quality of the language tools right within Word. For this reason it goes without saying that I compose in Word until I’m 100% done, and only then lift the finished text into e-mail, HTML, or whatever else I’m going to use it for.

While actually writing, the tools I use most are:

• A good bilingual dictionary (Oxford in my case) for finding words when I’m drawing a blank. And also, equally useful, the right-click synonym-thesaurus feature within Word.
• Google & Bing translate, opened in a browser and set for English-to-Spanish, to give me a boost with short phrases. I can type a few words into them in English, and they usually return some pretty decent Spanish for me to work into my writing. Often that’s faster than the dictionary.
• An online verb conjugator. My favorite for Spanish is Onoma because it gives the Vos forms necessary in Argentina. I use the Analyze tab for deciphering obscure verb forms, and the Conjugate tab for straightforward conjugation. Depending on your language, you definitely need to find an online conjugator you like. Another truly fine conjugator in Spanish is SpanishDict. Really I use the two of them interchangeably.

I know it sounds like an awful lot of crap to have up & running for a simple e-mail. In practice, though, none of this gets in the way, it simply helps. I type along freely, not worrying much about mistakes, until I hit a little sticky spot. Then I go to whichever tool is going to get me unstuck the quickest.

When all done writing, I proof normally. This is where my relative fluency in reading serves me well. If what I wrote doesn’t read well, I can often see it. Then I spell-check and grammar-check the whole thing in Word. That’s a one-click process. This usually rounds up the little rogues and strays, while at the same time teaching me a few new things about the language.

For the coup de grace, I control-A-control-C and paste my completed masterpiece into both Google & Bing, now set for Spanish-to-English, like this:

If the reverse translation reads clean, great. More often it trips in a couple places, and immediately I recognize why, and can see there’s a more straightforward way to say things. Any corrections that I think up, I make them in the original Word version, then copy-and-paste again to run it through MT one more time.

A quick and final spellcheck, then I lift the finished thing into e-mail, and format for mailing.

So that’s how I like to write these days. And in my May post I described a method of study whereby you can read super-interesting articles with the support of Word’s mini-translator and TTS, text-to-speech. I’m still doing that, generally 15 minutes each morning, and I really have nothing to add to that original article. The method works great, I love it. I feel like I’m learning quickly.

Perhaps there is one little thing of interest. I’ve found by experience that present-day statistical MT like Google & Bing is, surprisingly often, superior to the best dictionary. For example, if you are reading and you stumble on an important word that you just can’t gist, and you check the dictionary, and either the word doesn’t exist or the definition makes no sense… then paste the whole paragraph containing that word into either of these modern statistical MT engines. If you are using Word’s mini-translator, this is as simple as highlighting the passage and hovering over it.

Two things commonly happen. First, it may be a new word or regional word or slang word which hasn’t made it into the dictionary. But if it’s floating around on the Internet, Google or Bing will often be able to fetch recent parallel text from its store and convert the word correctly. Or secondly, you might be looking at an uncommon meaning for a relatively common word. For example in English (I’m looking out the window at a tree) there are boot trees, leaves for a dining room table, gold leaf, a dog’s bark, a bank’s branch, tree structures, etc. You might know full well what a tree is, but have no foggy clue what a boot tree is. Yet statistical machine translation, because of the way it works, will look at "boot tree" as a connected expression in the context of the full paragraph, and often translate it mindlessly into the exact Spanish equivalent. Whatever that is. If they even use boot trees.

Remember, this isn’t magic. At its foundation it’s like any other search, a highly polished machine algorithm combing parallel text like a spider, text which was originally translated by top-notch human professionals. This is why it keeps up automatically with the leading edge of the evolving language, and also why it can translate words accurately using the surrounding context of the paragraph, while a dictionary can’t.

Just yesterday while reading an article I ran across this sentence, which I thought I understood but wasn’t sure. So, curious, I pasted it into Google:

I was unfamiliar with the words fueres and vieres, although I guessed correctly they were exotic or old-fashioned conjugations of ir and ver — "to go" and "to see." As it turns out, Onoma identifies them as future subjunctive, an uncommon tense. So the phrase “donde fueres haz lo que vieres” means — Pete’s translation — "wherever you might go, do what you see there." As you can see, Google gave an ELEGANT translation, and one which would be completely out of reach to any rule-based engine. In fact, it mimicked a human’s understanding of the two cultures.

When I was a tyke they gave us map-reading aptitude tests. I loved those tests. Ever since, I’ve tried to stay one jump ahead of the rest of the class. Now I’m an old guy. Anybody who knows me knows I get stuck in a good map, like anybody else might get stuck in a good book. In fact, on trips, I no longer bring a book to read. It can be a camping trip, a foreign trip, no matter where I go I know I’ll just be reading maps. It’s relaxing for me. Sometimes after staring at a good map for a really long time, suddenly there it is: the perfect route, the perfect camping spot. Or in a city, something fun beyond the bridge, that I would have totally missed.

On any trip, I’d rather have the perfect map than the perfect guidebook — or even the perfect guide. It’s fun having that freedom to just explore on your own. Maps let you do that. It’s not uncommon to know things even most locals don’t know, based on serious perusal of a good map. Come to think of it, in our house, we even decorate with maps. The maps get the premium wallspace. They are our art.

This article is about how I’m doing topos now. So it’s about topos specifically. Much of what I say though is equally applicable to city maps or road maps, like you’d use on other kinds of trips. Every trip is different. Every trip needs maps. But topos have a special place in my heart. In fact looking back across the panorama of my life, I’ve come to realize that most of my best memories just would not have happened the way they did, if not for a good topo.

Like the title says, I’ll talk about where topos are today, and where I’m pretty sure they will be quite soon. I’m not going to clutter up the discussion with links or specifics. But I did include a rather elaborate appendix for resources and technical details.

The best topos are digital. Because this is so, it helps to be really clear about the three distinctly different environments in which you will be reading maps:

1) At the house. Here you have fast internet, full strength computing, and printing. You have 100% of your resources, no limitations. Unfortunately, this is also when you are usually the most pressed for time. You might be packing for the trip. You know where you’re going, but only in a general sense. This is the only time you can print to paper. Yet you haven’t really thought through the specifics of the trip, and you don’t want to.

2) On the road. This is when you really might feel like studying maps, specifically looking for tomorrow’s route, on the edge of the bed in a motel room, or beside a campfire. I usually have a computer, as well as a file-full of useful paper maps. But it’s best not to need or expect much by way of internet.

3) On the trail. No internet of course, and whatever you’re carrying should be lightweight and durable. This generally means paper. But the trouble with paper is you need to have had enough forethought (and time) (and energy) to do the printing while still in stage #1 at home – when you least feel like it.

The USGS officially finished mapping the country in 1992. Since then, as we all know, paper topos have been going down hill. In the appendix, I’ll talk some about the The National Map, and the US Topo project, which has huge momentum right now and is proof that topos are still alive and well.

The new quads are all digital. This could be because the government is ornery, or so insulated from its customers it can’t give us what we want, or maybe just so cheap it would rather you did the printing self-serve. But actually in this case, it’s none of those things. There are good and valid reasons for all maps and mapping products to be digital, from now on.

Just for starters, the new topo quads are free for anybody to download. That’s $6-$8 cheaper per quad, just by getting rid of the friction of paper. The raw quads from the government aren’t anything I would ever use, really. But what’s important here is that since they are digital, and free to the public, they can be fluidly repackaged into all kinds of inexpensive third-party applications and products.

Here are some things you can do with a digital map (depending on the product) that you can’t do with a paper map: Zoom out, move someplace else far away, then zoom in, pulling data off a server someplace on an as-needed basis. Pan and center for the perfect view, never running off the edge of the map, because there is no edge. Trace an interesting route on the map with your pen, then instantly generate an elevation profile showing exactly how hard or easy the hike would be — how much climbing, overall distance, how steep. Markup the map with different color waypoints and notes, then hide the whole ugly mess, or display only the one route you’re interested in. Easily turn layers off and on to present the simplest, cleanest picture depending on your needs. Search for, and jump to, a specific mountain by name. Receive corrections, fresh imagery, minor or major changes, the moment they are uploaded by cartographers.

I mentioned that the new US Topo quads are not usable in raw form. Why? Well for one thing they have edges, just like the old topos. But more importantly, there is a TMI problem — too much information. If you display all of the available layers, the map is unreadable, hopelessly complex. If you display the contour layer only, it’s very clean, but you get no clue about surface characteristics like vegetation or rock. The image layer is fine-grained — nice — but toggling between the contours and the imagery just isn’t something that works.

It’s helpful, I think, to jump ahead of ourselves and imagine what the perfect topo of the future might look like. For starters it would display on a durable, lightweight device with an 8-10 inch screen and no battery problems, something you could toss in your daypack. It would show surface imagery and contour data simultaneously without TMI overload, through some kind of 3-D trickery — you could zoom, tilt, and rotate the landscape any way you wanted to, and see what it really looked like. Yet, the underlying locked-down numerical data, elevations and such, would be easily available by hovering. The various layers, imagery, man-made features, contours etc, would be a mashup from various sources, but freshness dated. It would usually be nicely current, from the last year or so. And there wouldn’t be an edge to the map. None.

This shouldn’t be hard to imagine. In fact, you’ve already had it in your hands and played with it. It’s Google Earth. It’s not hard at all to imagine Google Earth playing from local data, i.e. off-line, on something like an iPad. Throw in a little red wandering dot on the map — your actual location based on GPS. That would be a pretty nice topo. All of the pieces for this are already here. Early adopters from the geocaching and orienteering, aviation and nautical, hunting, and GIS communities are already putting the pieces together and playing with them. It won’t be long.

Meanwhile back at the present. Here’s what I’m doing now. I don’t have an iPad, just decent internet, a computer, and a printer. Let’s use the example of going into a brand new area for several days, for hiking and camping. Let’s say that, in my usual way, I’ve been anticipating the trip and drooling over maps in spare moments. Now it’s time to think about actually packing. What is it I’m going to want on the trail, or away from internet?

I’ll describe a rather complete job of packing, it might take me an hour or two. But bear in mind this only has to be done once. If I’m going back to an area I’ve been to before — which is usually — all I need to do is pack up the bundle from last time, and maybe print off a couple new routes I might be thinking of.

So here goes. First, a good overview — where are we likely to camp and hike? This information has usually self-assembled as though by magic. Ideas from guidebooks, talking to friends. But also, for the big picture, just a standard statewide recreational atlas like you can buy at a truckstop or outdoor store, either Delorme or Benchmark. In spite of all I’ve said about digital, these still get used. Also, good old Google Maps. Not Google Earth — I’m talking about Google Maps, especially terrain view. I include some tips on how to use Google Maps in the appendix. Useful at this stage too would be land ownership maps, especially the Forest Service and BLM travel plans, and any other specialized maps I may have collected. For popular areas there may be a Trails Illustrated available, they’re perfect for overview. I’ve probably nosed around in all this material already. Actually, I probably already know where we are likely to be hiking.

For the actual 7.5-minute topos I’ll be bringing, I use two products in 50-50 combination — Google Earth, and National Geographic Topo. Following this article in the appendix I discuss some of the pros & cons, and nuts & bolts, for both these products.

Like any packing project, it’s about "What am I going to wish I had, when I get out there?" When I leave the house I’m leaving fast internet behind, and printing. Map data is enormous, its proper home is on a server someplace. So packing is about transferring the maps you will need onto your hard drive for the trip, and printing anything you would like for the trail.

National Geographic Topo costs $50/state. I own Montana, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada, so that’s a $200 investment. It’s nice though being able to quickly view a detailed topo anyplace in any of those states. The data amounts to 13 GB, which I mounted on an external hard drive at the house, and also to my cloud drive. I use both — the USB drive is a bit faster if it’s convenient, but the cloud drive is really nice for reading topos on the couch, or from the road where I might have internet.

Google Earth is free of course. Most people assume it requires an internet connection, but once you’ve gathered the data it works wonderful off-line. Actually it’s even better off-line. There’s no skipping or halting, it’s like a dream because it’s pulling everything it needs at high speed from local cache. You end up with a 3-D model that you can turn in your hands, reading in a lawn chair, soaring in and out to explore at any angle or scale. If you have flying dreams, you know what this feels like.

The actual packing process goes like this. I open NG Topo and Google Earth side-by-side, then zoom into a similar view on both of them, clearly showing the area we’ll be going to. Toggling between them it’s easy to locate, let’s say, five or six trails, campsites, or general areas we’ll probably be interested in. Using my pen (a mouse works fine too) I quickly sketch some of the trails in pink, and some of the access roads in orange, in Google Earth. This makes the area of interest really pop out from any elevation. It’s nice to do anyway because later I can view the elevation profile on these same paths, to see what the various hikes look like. With the area now defined, I draw some data-gathering spirals in green. I describe this technique in the appendix — it’s quick and easy. I clear the old cache, then set it to run a repeating tour on the spirals. The image data pours in at a steady 3 Mb per second. Since it’s going to collect almost 2 gigs, I can work on the NG Topo piece while GE scuttles about the countryside by itself.

In NG Topo now, I print off anything I might want for the trail. 8.5 x 11 works fine. At the default scale that will show plenty for a good long dayhike. I print to map paper, usually two sides, usually just a couple sheets, but sometimes 8-10 views if it’s a brand new area. When the printing is done I trim them with scissors or a papercutter so they fit nice in a ziploc. I like to give them titles, too, with a purple sharpie, it makes them quicker to find later. These printed maps get tossed aboard with the other paper reference — Forest Service travelplan, guidebook, Trails Illustrated map, a Benchmark atlas — all the stuff that will be sliding around the front seat.

Before I leave NG Topo I capture the map data for the broad area of interest to my hard drive, in the form of a giant high resolution Jpeg. Usually it’s 30-40 Mb, one big file. That way after I’ve disconnected from everything I can open the image on the road, zoom in for a nice view, and easily pan around. It acts like an enormous well-behaved topo on my computer, with all of the underlying quads seamlessly stitched together. I find myself wandering around happily on this "mother" topo, any time I want to look something up. While map-reading on the trip itself it’s normal to have the mother Jpeg up for reference, once again, alongside Google Earth.

So that’s it. By now Google Earth is done collecting. I have a big continuous Jpeg topo of the whole area saved from NG Topo, and enough printouts to cover at least the foreseen eventualities. Stuff the computer, and set it by the door with the rest. The maps are packed.

I don’t use GPS. There are times when I wish I had it, and there are some things I could do with it that I’m not able to do now. Like for example in Utah there is this kind of terrain that’s just patchy aspens alternating with open meadows, it gets covered with deep snow and has no trails, but you can see beautiful ski routes from the air in Google Earth which would be quite doable with GPS. So I know what it is, and what I’m missing. But since we are usually in simple open country, not doing anything fancy, our need is more for route discovery and planning — hence, maps — and not so much for staying found, GPS.

Likewise I seldom use my compass. I’m good, even excellent, with a compass. I would never hike without one, it’s so lightweight, and once in awhile, invaluable. But anymore, the kinds of things we do, a good map is all we need.

I don’t use traditional paper topos, unless I happen to have them from the old days. They are beautiful to look at, compared to the scuzzy little printouts from National Geographic. You can still buy them. But it’s not just the cost that stops me now, it’s the hassle of deciding which ones to buy, then organizing them somehow. Once you get used to the freedom of digital maps you can’t really go back to the traditional quads.

My friend Kurt has an iPad running a lightweight topo app. The screen is plenty big enough because it zooms and pans so freely with your fingers; it’s fun to read. Next time you have an iPad in your hand, think of it as a topo map, and you’ll see it’s really not too heavy to throw in a daypack. There are specialized iPad ziplocs for rain, I put links for these in the appendix. Durability isn’t a significant worry, iPads are meant to get used. Kurt is a professional naturalist guide, and when you consider the iPad easily replaces his bird books, plus stores reference PDFs and photos he may want available to show people — things he may already wish he could carry — the weight matters less and less.

Right now if you buy the $800 iPad, the one with 3G, you get GPS. It’s real GPS, not the kind that has to triangulate off cellphone towers, so it works in the bush. It probably doesn’t have the positioning precision of a dedicated GPS device. But that’s not a given; people are just beginning to use it this way. And because so few people have the most expensive iPad, the topo apps out there now aren’t yet taking advantage of the GPS capabilities in the device. All this, though, will weave together given time.

Right now, in standard orienteering, you hold your GPS in one hand, about the size of a smartphone, and your map in the other hand. The devices are too cramped for map reading. That’s why GPS people are so fascinated by gridlines on maps, they sync their gadget with their paper, by brute force. When the map and the GPS merge and become inseparable in one device, that’s going to be fundamentally different. About one full order of magnitude different. And leaving your old GPS at home, alongside your old bird books, there’s yet one more several-ounce item you can replace with the iPad.

I read a post by a helicopter pilot who uses her iPad with aviation maps for navigation. She said this:

"iPad… offers better functionality than the $12,000 panel-mount Garmin GPS in my helicopter. Rather than view my location on a primitive screen display, I can see it on an actual aeronautical chart. I can also download charts and other information in advance so there”™s no need to rely on 3G connectivity in flight… screen size puts my panel mount system to shame… G3 iPad 2… includes a GPS… I am convinced that Garmin and the others will be hurting as in-phone GPS use proliferates. People will simply stop buying stand-alone GPSs."

The point here is twofold. The reason iPad has better functionality than a $12,000 system, at 1/20th the cost, is because it’s a multipurpose, mass-produced, mass-marketed gadget. It wasn’t designed to be sold to some little cadre of helicopter pilots. But the second point is this. $800 might seem pricey for a nice topo map. But when it starts to replace your GPS, your reference books, etc etc, it makes more sense. In fact soon you might already own a multipurpose reader anyway, it’s maybe sitting there on the kitchen table used for other things, and all you need do is fire up an $8 map application. That’s when it suddenly gets cheaper than paper.

As of right now I haven’t heard of anybody caching a full 2 GB of image data from Google Earth onto an iPad for off-line viewing. I’ve fiddled with Google Earth on the iPad, it does cache, but it just can’t do what a regular computer can do. Nevertheless, that’s coming too. There’s more than enough storage capacity — it’s just a software issue. So it’s easy to imagine being five miles in on a trail, able to view a quick Google Earth flyover of your surroundings, side-by-side with zoomable modern USGS topos, and all the time location-aware via real satellite GPS. That’s not far off, and it would make a very nice map.

This month’s Inc. magazine printed a harsh but well-written feature story about Argentina. The author is Max Chafkin, a writer I like. Lately he’s been specializing in going to countries with extreme business climates, interviewing people, then writing a good article full of direct quotes from locals. In February he did Norway, a country which measures surprisingly healthy for business in spite of being highly socialized. Argentina is at the other end of the spectrum, historically and currently a rough environment for business. I found it really interesting to read stories about how people adapt. It’s a good article which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the subject — the Norway article is especially good, too.

I’m hoping Mr. Chafkin keeps going with this idea. I vote he goes next to India, Egypt, or Peru.

PS — If you found these articles interesting, here are more links you might like:

• Doing Business – World Bank Group
• Human Development Reports, UNDP
• And also, here’s a page from my FAQ I wrote a few years ago, titled Why Argentina

Recently a good friend called me and asked my recommendation for the best way to learn Spanish. This post is not about language learning generally, it’s about one single, wonderful toy I recently discovered, which I’m using every day now in my own language practice. But first, as background, I would like to talk more generally about learning languages, from a bird’s eye view.

If you want to skip over the "Tricks" section right below, feel free. The new technique I found is at the end, under "Toy."

This is the big-picture advice that I gave my friend:

Everybody learns in different ways, so the very first thing I would say about language learning is that, unfortunately, you need to take charge right from the beginning. You are going to have to build, from scratch, a method that works best for you. Not only that, but as you gain strength in the language, the best tools and techniques will change dramatically.

It’s easy to feel, to gauge, the pace of new learning. This works for anything of course, not just languages. It”™s like a little speedometer inside. You can easily feel when learning is barely happening (boring), when the needle gets up in the yellow zone (fun), and when it’s pegged in the red (learning so much, so fast, it hurts). It’s worth cultivating this sensitivity. Then as you try new things, you can quickly quit when the learning is slow, and be delighted to discover something that feels yellow, or red.

For getting to square one, I am completely in love with the Pimsleur tapes. Laura and I began our Spanish adventures, years back, with Pimsleur. But just recently I had the opportunity to use them again as a beginner in French, and I was blown away for the second time by the simple elegance of his method. I’ve never used Rosetta, but I’ve heard they are also good. Either way, a person needs to grind through some sort of mass-produced, formal tutorial, all the way through to "Level 3" or whatever, just so they can get started into the fun part — what I think of as "full-language" learning.

Leaping from a sheltered environment into the full, living language is the goal, and it can be done way, way earlier than you would think. By "full language" I mean no training wheels, full vocabulary, full speed, the whole language all at once, the way it really sounds in everyday use. There are lots of great ways to do this, and eventually you want to use them all, because they become a toolkit you can draw from depending on circumstances.

The gold standard is a one-way, one-person plane ticket to a homestay with locals — nobody to speak English with — and a couple months of one-on-one daily lessons. Impractical most of the time, I’ll freely admit (in fact I’ve never done it) but still important to hold in mind because you want to approximate this ideal as best you can using whatever you have available. At the very least, whenever you are able to travel, try to add homestays and classes to the trip if you can.

What is it about full immersion that works better than anything else? It’s because in real life you need language, for basic survival. Actually the ultimate gold standard in language learning is known to be an international romance, since it automatically sets up a burning need to communicate. As kids we learn 30 words a day, for the first 18 years of life. That’s not anything we think about — we’re just trying to get things done, make relationships, and be people. We start from social and practical necessities, and only later do we move on to talking correctly, and even later yet (if at all) grammar, structure, spelling and the like. Nonsensically, formal language learning is expected to function okay, doing this exactly in reverse — from words and structure, to sounding good, and finally to getting out there and using the language for getting things done. Immersion does nothing more or less than force an adult into learning in the proper order, like any child.

What can possibly substitute for this, when there’s nothing you need from your new language, and you’re unable to travel, and you’re surrounded 360° by English? Here are the things that have worked pretty good for me:

1) Real socializing or business over distance. E-mail, phone calls, having friends overseas, setting things up overseas. This puts the necessity back into things. My daughter Addie is right now doing one-on-one classes with a woman in Guatemala via Skype. Real listening and speaking in real time is always best, if you can figure out a way to make that happen. It takes commitment and energy though. And for Skype classes, money.

You might notice I left out friendships or classes with native speakers in your town. This would seem like the perfect solution. But in my experience, whatever country you are physically in, that’s the language everybody naturally uses. An enduring Spanish conversation is hard to arrange and sustain, even in America where Spanish is so common. Classes work of course, but they’re expensive and hard to get around to. If you get lucky in this regard, great. But for some reason it’s never really caught fire for me.

This brings us to:

2) What we might call interest-driven passive learning. This means locating super high quality materials in the language, which naturally pull you in. This won’t necessarily put "need" into things, but at least we get "want," and a sense of exploration and fun. For me, this has been primarily podcasts, good videos, good magazines, all solidly in my areas of interest. If you are learning a language, presumably one of your strong interests is the country and the culture. So that’s the place to start. But also just anything you find truly interesting. What do you read mostly in English? Try switching some of that reading into the new language. For me it tends to be business, science, and economics; for somebody else it could be horses, news, self-improvement, or good fiction.

When we speak or write, we are active, pushed to think and create. When we read or listen, we are passive, just along for the ride. For years I assumed that this made reading and podcasts a lower form of learning. They’re the easiest thing to fall into, out of plain laziness. But my real-world experience has surprised me. Consuming raw quantities of articles and recordings has really worked for me.

Here’s why. When you speak or write, you are in the driver’s seat. You can always get your meaning across, somehow, patching your favorite words together, selecting from whatever limited lexicon you might possess. But when you are doing something as seemingly no-brain as watching a foreign TV show, you lose all of this control, and the full language is thrown at you — you just have to understand it. This means lots of words. Pronounced lots of ways. It may be passive, but it’s voluminous. Not only that but there’s a big intangible. You exercise your ear and your eye, and they get faster. Over time, you get to where you can keep up. You start understanding things that are said quietly, words pronounced poorly, radio programs that are fuzzy but fun. Just like you do in English. Your brain builds little bridges, without actually needing your help.

At this stage in my own learning I’m a person who understands well but can’t talk or write without working quite hard, and then, poorly. But what happens to me in-country is that… well… I’m a good listener! In fact listening is the only thing I’m good at. It turns out that people naturally like good listeners, and they always will. I laugh with near-normal timing, at all the right moments in the conversation. Being personally overdeveloped in the passive quadrants (listening and reading) means I’m able to learn quickly, when finally pushed to speak or write. I can listen to myself talk, I can read myself write, and I have a pretty good instinctive sense if it sounds okay. I may not be able to retrieve the right word quickly, but once I do find it, I’m confident about it.

So now I make no apologies for podcasts and articles as a way to learn. They’re easy, free, infinite, and definitely not a waste of time. You would be amazed how little preparation you need to get started. When I began in podcasts and recorded books I had no idea what they were even talking about. I just listened real hard for any single word I could actually recognize. As I got quicker with the single common words, sentences started to cross-link, and take on meaning. I came to have a hunch what some of the other words meant. After a while I could tell generally what the podcast, or the article, was about.

I never used a dictionary for learning. Dictionaries are essential for travel, when a single indispensable word may get you out of a pickle. But they are way too slow for language learning. To build vocabulary I’ve always loved parallel text. In fact just recently, trying to learn elementary French, I dove right into parallel text even though I could barely read a single word. That’s the beauty of parallel text; you can really start it any time. The challenge is finding something that really interests you, and that somebody has translated. I used to read a lot off the United Nations website — a paragraph in Spanish, the same paragraph in English, the same paragraph again in Spanish. Back and forth like that, you learn very quickly, especially if it’s something interesting. Books are good that way, too. Especially a book you wouldn’t mind reading anyway. It’s usually possible to order both languages from Amazon, at least for common languages and common titles. Sometimes there’s even an audio version to toss on top.

The last time we were in Argentina we did the usual one-on-one daily classes, and a lot of socializing with our friends there, and it was great. I returned motivated to keep trying to learn the danged language. Trips, of course, keep that motivation alive better than anything else.

I found that what I really need most, now, is to exercise my mouth. Pronunciation. The easiest thing for this is reading aloud, quickly, without trip-ups. So at this stage in my learning I’m trying to do several things. I bought a subscription to an Argentine business magazine I really like, Gestión. Besides reading the articles, I made a commitment to try to read a page aloud, ten minutes before work, every morning. This was the #1 homework assignment handed me by my professora at the little school in Córdoba, based on what she thought I needed most. As easy as it sounds (and it is easy) it’s quite powerful — it makes me less shy to talk, and easier for people to understand. At the same time I continue with interesting podcasts whenever convenient, like sometimes before bed, or on long road trips. Plus calls or e-mails of course, when I get an opportunity.

Which finally brings me around to…

This technique seems so ordinary, you’ll probably wonder why it gets me excited. In fact, if you are into languages, perhaps you already use it.

Above, I talked about the importance of finding materials that are super interesting to you personally. Also we sang the praises of parallel text, for consuming vast quantities of any new language, painlessly, without a dictionary. The trouble I’ve always had is that these two things don’t play well together. I can find lots of parallel text; I can find super interesting articles or podcasts. But it’s very hard to find interesting parallel text. It would be like, if you love horses, trying to find an inexhaustible supply of well-written articles about horses, translated into both of your languages. Parallel text tends to be easiest to get from multinational businesses or nonprofits, or translated bestsellers. That gets old, and confining.

So here’s what you do — I’ll quit beating around the bush. First, find absolutely the most interesting material you can lay your hands on. It needs to be machine readable for this to work — basically anything HTML or PDF. Select all, and paste into Word.

Now you need to get a few things working. In Word 2010 this would be:

• Review, Language, Set proofing language, just make sure the document is set to the right language.
• Review, Translate, right-click on Mini-translator, and add it to your Quick Access Toolbar.
• Right-click on the Quick Access Toolbar, and open the Customize Toolbar dialog. On the Choose-commands-from dropdown, choose All Commands. Scroll down to Speak, and add that to your toolbar as well.

To get Speak working in your foreign language, you need to do two very quick installs from Microsoft. The first is an under-the-hood engine it needs; the second is the spoken dictionary itself, an audio database in your target language. To find the howto for this, just paste "Using the Speak feature with Multilingual TTS" into Word Help. TTS means text-to-speech.

These four steps might take you fifteen minutes, and you only need to do them once. Now start reading your article from the top. Hover over any word you’re unclear about, and a dictionary translation pops up. Select a phrase, sentence, or entire paragraph, and the thing transparently runs up to the server and fetches back an amazingly good full-sentence translation (Microsoft Translate. Actually my current favorite; see this article from last year.)

But personally my own biggest need right now isn’t understanding, it’s to be able to talk — pronunciation. For that there’s a Play button on the gadget, and when you click it, a nice machine-lady (in my case Mexican) pronounces the word, or the phrase, or reads the whole paragraph to you. She does it good, too.

Like anybody else I suppose, I would much rather be reading a paper magazine than reading on-screen. But the overpowering advantage in having these tools so fluidly available just completely trumps aesthetics. If I get a particularly tough word or sentence, it’s quick to drop it into Google Translate for a second opinion, or check RAE, which is the Spanish equivalent of our Oxford dictionary, huge and online. You learn what works best. For example, it’s an undeniable fact that Google can find the correct meaning for lots of words that aren’t in the formal dictionary at all; it’s truly keeping up better with the advancing edge of the modern language. Google Translate now has browser-based TTS incorporated, albeit with a European twang. Reading on the computer is of course unpleasant, but it gives you full access to whatever you need at the moment, every lexicographical tool out there.

The overall effect, reading this way, is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Instant dictionary, translation, or pronunciation. By the word, by the phrase, by the paragraph. Instant isn’t just a faster form of fast, it’s fundamentally different. You choose on the go, on-the-fly. These are just ordinary tools, free inside Word. Likely there’s similar functionality, on other platforms. Yet paradoxically they work, for me, even better than a human teacher. I can pound back and forth in clumsy mispronunciation of a single word, and the machine-lady doesn’t seem to care. Or I can fly along reading silently, my choice. The feedback is transparent. I’m free to be myself, anything I want, check meaning, check pronunciation, with a hover or a click, nothing to interrupt the learning flow. It feels yellow-zone to me. Fun.

The best part is that this works at any proficiency level right down to beginner, for any mainstream language, on any text from any source, just as long as the article or book is interesting to you.