Language Learner Hub, or Human Common Intermediate Language (HCIL).
What is the best strategy to learn a new language, - to take courses, - to study books on grammar, style, usage, - to listen to audio? That’s the kind of a question every educated person asks himself/herself. The learning curve is expected to be smooth, to let the focus of a person’s main activity stay unaffected.
So, can a big IT company revolutionize the way how people learn and use languages?
The “Common Intermediate Language” concept sounds very promising. People use a lot of languages in their everyday life. Languages are different, but what the languages describe - people, world, relations between people and world are basically the same. Why not introduce Human Common Intermediate Language (HCIL) to describe that?
The main requirement to HCIL will be that it must be parsed and translated correctly by some software tools into any of the main Human Languages. That’s the key point: one way correct automatic translation. HCIL must also be human readable (and understandable). The phonetics for HCIL is not required, but probably HCIL would benefit of it greatly.
So, for HCIL we would require one way correct automatic translation. The opposite way, from a human language to HCIL, the quality automatic translation is impossible in a general case. If it is not possible for any text, then why not give writers a choice to write a text the way it could be parsed by some automatic tools into HCIL. After such parsing into HCIL the author would read the text in HCIL, make sure everything had been parsed correctly, and would tag the text as “HCIL compatible”.
Thus, a writer, once having written a text, can be sure the text could be read and understood correctly in a hundred of other languages.
It would be great if the diagram of the process of parsing writer’s text into HCIL would be available to the reader. The reader would be able to check out what Language rules had been applied, and if needed, would follow supplied links to the reputable Language reference sources. That can be very effective way to learn languages especially if audio representation of the text is available.
Summing it up:
- Human Common Intermediate Language (HCIL) needs to be developed.
- The main requirement to HCIL is that it must be one-way automatically parsed and translated correctly into most Human Languages.
- The writer must be supplied with automatic tools to check if his text is “HCIL compatible”, that is, the text can be correctly parsed into HCIL.
- The reader should be supplied with the diagram of the process of parsing writer’s text into HCIL. The diagram should contain all the necessary links to help a reader learn the writer’s Language to understand the process of parsing. The audio representation of the texts and links to phonetic rules would be great.