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news
Japanese jewel
Cara
Garcia/Daily Forty-Niner
The
Earl Burns Miller Japanese Garden, located on Earl Warren
Drive, near Parkside Commons, is a popular wedding spot. The
garden holds an annual Chrysanthemum Festival and koi auction.
Learning
new languages made easy
By Michael Watanabe
Daily Forty-Niner
It truly is a small
world after all. And, the Language Labs on campus have made
that world even smaller.
The labs offer
all students a chance to explore any language phonetically,
grammatically and culturally.
Using a combination
of Real Player, Winamp, Windows Media Player and Divace Media
Player, students can listen to recordings and view video clips
for lessons.
Divace, has special
features that help to learn a foreign language.
For example, if
a student wanted a section of a clip repeated, he or she could
do it. The player also has a recap feature, allowing a student
to repeat individual sentences.
Using software
from Microsoft, students can type or browse the Internet with
the actual characters of one of eight supported languages:
French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
and Tagalog.
Browsing the Internet
in different languages is good for "even first semester students
to go and explore the country or the area in ways they could
never do before,” said Claire Martin, chairwoman of
the romance, German, Russian language and literature department.
"They can go into
newspapers and galleries ... ,” she said, "and have
very real artifacts for meaningful communication.”
Jeff Winters, director
of the Language Labs, said: "There's a whole bunch of things
[students] probably already have. They have the textbook already
and they listen to the dialogue. We just put it all together
in a video and then on the computer.”
The labs consist
of two rooms; 24 computers in one with Divace Media Player
installed and 41 computers in the other room.
The Language Labs
had previously been on campus, but not always with such great
technology. Before the 1999 fall semester, the labs were filled
with audio tapes.
Eventually, the
machines and replacement parts became too old to continually
fix, Martin said.
"The only way they
could keep the tape recorders running was to take broken ones
and pick them apart,” Winters said.
The Asian and Asian
American studies and the romance, Russian, German languages
and literature departments sought the high-tech alternative.
Both departments
fund the day-to-day operations, while the College of Liberal
Arts bought the computers and the software.
The Language Labs
are located in LAB-305 and LAB-306. For more information,
call Jeff Winters at (562) 985-9333 or e-mail jwinter2@csulb.edu.
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