A Knitting Academic

Lingq offered it's annual sale and I signed up. I was excited to make lessons for myself using the OCR capabilities of Google Drive. So, I took some photos to "scan" the first few pages of my book, and Google gives me the following... Google Drive I suspected the error is due to me including too many pages, too many pages with pictures, or having too imperfect photos. So, I pile the PDF into OneNote, where I need to copy text from each page individually. It can't get accurate text from the image pages, but the text pages are actually fine... OneNote Argh. Still, the OneNote conversion means I have to copy and past every page in addition to fixing the linebreaks. So I download paid commercial software (trial version), FoxIt PhantomPDF and Abbyy. Here's what Abbyy ($199) did with the PDF from GoogleScan: Abbyy OCR editor interface Abbyy FineReader verification tool The Abbyy program is really really nice and has lots of ...

Learning a foreign language (especially an uncommon language) can be pretty expensive, frustrating, or boring. The price increases as the language becomes less common because there are fewer people paying for the content, meaning the creator needs to charge more to get by. I'm learning Finnish, so there's not nearly as much content as there is for English, Spanish or Mandarin. Learners want a mix of vocabulary lists, graded readers, video, audio, writing prompts and in-person conversations. Finding someone to converse with is harder with Finnish because there are about five and a half million speakers in the entire world. Spanish has about 480 million. I found three conversational partners on websites like Italki for about $14-40 an hour. It was ok, but hard to schedule the time due to the time-zone difference and it required a lot of preparation to plan what we would talk about. Luckily, I also have access to native speakers locally because they are my fami...