A Year in Review: What’s New in Transparent Language Online Posted by Transparent Language on Sep 25, 2013 in Company News, For Educators, For Learners, For Libraries
It’s been a busy year for us here at Transparent Language. Last year we launched our online language learning system, aptly known as Transparent Language Online. We’ve spent much of the last twelve months improving Transparent Language Online with new features, capabilities, and courses.
So here’s what we’ve been up to…
Adding New Features
EveryVoice™ Speech Analysis
We’re very excited to announce that Transparent Language Online now includes EveryVoice™ speech analysis technology. Developed by yours truly, EveryVoice analyzes and matches your utterances to native speaker utterances with surprising accuracy in any language. We’ve leveraged EveryVoice to revamp two classic activities:
Voice Driven Multiple Choice
Click no more! With EveryVoice, you solve multiple choice questions by speaking the answer. EveryVoice will listen to what you say, compare your sound wave to the possible answers and report if you said the right or wrong answer. 
Pronunciation Practice with AIM
Sometimes it’s not about what you say but how well you say it. The Automatic Intelligibility Meter (AIM) can actually measure how “understandable” you’d be to a native speaker of the language you’re learning.
Easy Typing
Did you know Transparent Language Online is the only online learning system that actually teaches you to type in the language? Typing is a critical skill, especially in this digital age of email and social networks.
To make text entry easier for you, we created Easy Typing. This feature allows you to input foreign language characters without knowledge of the foreign keyboard. Easy Typing solves this issue by offering you up to five valid characters from which the user can choose the correct character.
Adding New Languages
We are proud to support more than 80 languages in Transparent Language Online, but with more than 7000 languages spoken in the world, there’s plenty of room to grow.
For English speakers, we added 10 languages. A number of these we produced under our 7000 Languages Project, through which we partner with heritage, cultural and other organizations to support their efforts to preserve and promote their language:
Ojibwe*, Ojibwe Central*, Ojibwe Nothwestern*, Cree*, Oji Cree*, Dakota*, Balinese*, Tuvan, Mongolian
* Created under the 7000 Languages Project
For non-English Speakers, we added content in 8 foreign language pairs, targeted at Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese native speakers:
Portuguese Brazilian, Italian, French, and German for Spanish Speakers
Spanish, German, French, and Italian for Portuguese Brazilian Speakers
Adding New Courses
Transparent Language Online is the only major online language-learning system that makes a meaningful effort to instruct typing in every language we have available. Writing, typing, and reading all begin with knowledge of a languages alphabet. As an English speaker you could do pretty well with the Spanish or French alphabet, but what about Arabic, Hindi or Thai?
For non-Latin alphabets we could see that our traditional Alphabet Explorer was not enough, so we developed complete Alphabet courses for 18 of the more challenging languages, including:
Arabic, Arabic (Iraqi), Armenian, Bulgarian, Chechen, Dari, Farsi, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Pashto, Russian, Thai, and Urdu
Conversation Courses
The Spanish Conversation Course is a video-based language course that helps more experienced Spanish learners prepare for practical, everyday interactions. The core learning material is derived from a series of authentic Spanish video
s delivered entirely in the target language. The course is organized around 5 common situations (video units): shopping, at the hotel, travel, restaurants/eating out, and asking for directions. With approximately 40 hours of learning material this course delivers plenty of great material for experienced Spanish learners.
Developed in cooperation with BASAbali as part of the 7000 Languages Project, we have also added the “Balinese Conversations” course, focused on 24 authentic conversational videos shot in stunning Bali.
Essentials Courses
The German Essentials Version 3 course is designed to help people prepare for practical, everyday conversations. The course is organized around 10 common situations (units): getting around the city, eating out, shopping and money, getting to know each other, dealing with emergencies, etc. The course provides more than 60 hours of learning material intended to take beginner and advanced beginners to the intermediate level.
For speakers of French, Portuguese, and Spanish, we have added English Essentials courses with fully localized learning support. Each of these courses is built the same way as our regular Essentials courses, but focuses on building English proficiency.
Intermediate English Course
Targeted at the largest segment of the English learning audience in the United States, “Intermediate English” is a full immersion-style course that is targeted at higher-level English learners. Based on every-day situational dialogs, Intermediate English provides an ideal resource for learners to build their conversational English capabilities. The course includes 10 units themed around a common social situation. Intermediate English includes over 3,000 words and useful phrases. The typical learner will spend between 40 and 55 hours of learning time to complete the course.
Find a library near you that offers Transparent Language Online. None close by? Print this info card and bring it to your local librarians to let them know you’re interested, or sign up for the free trial!
Build vocabulary, practice pronunciation, and more with Transparent Language Online. Available anytime, anywhere, on any device.
About the Author: Transparent Language
Transparent Language is a leading provider of best-practice language learning software for consumers, government agencies, educational institutions, and businesses. We want everyone to love learning language as much as we do, so we provide a large offering of free resources and social media communities to help you do just that!
Comments:
Jordan Seagers:
Hello. I seriously enjoy Transparent Language’s approach to language learning and the way they teach. However, while using the Transparent Online feature (the one where you get a free trial for 7 days) I feel as if the Transparent Online should be just like how Byki Express is. And if they want to upgrade like how you can upgrade from Express to Deluxe, then people should pay. Or get a free trial and then pay rather. It gives language learners like myself more opportunity to learn and more choices, more variety. Also I would like to suggest, that for people who want to do schooling online for languages whether it’d be to obtain a high school or college credit with their college or high school, or just to serve as a teaching unit altogether (for college students who want to major in this subject for a degree online) Should also benefit from the Transparent Online. I feel as if Byki Express (for me) isn’t really effective. Because their just cards that have word and meaning on the front and back side. I just feel as if Transparent Online should be a more structured version of Byki. Starting from Basics of each language (greetings, days of the week, months, numbers, colors, verbs/verb conjugation and tenses) to actual topics (Food, shopping, likes/dislikes, people, family, occupation, politics) And as the learner progresses, the past lessons could be incorporated into the new lessons not only to challenge the learner, but to always keep the previous skill fresh in his or her head. About languages, for all languages with a different writing style (Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Russian) Should have complete romanized/transliterated versions of the text. And languages such as Esperanto, Romanian, Macedonian and all the other different dialects of each language should be added as options to learn because there’s more variety as said previously. Learning a language should be beneficial to all and should not be used to make profits. It’s just how I look at it because I’m very passionate about wanting to learn the various languages I wish to learn.