Will Google's Project Glass Make Foreign Language Classes Obsolete?

will it come to the uk

I am yessed here there

Google glasses might help you understand the language but it will not help you speak the language ;-)

They won't make foreign language classes obsolete but will likely facilitate them.

A great use I have for them is eaves dropping on people who speak another language.

And how will this work with texting as you talk on the phone while driving at the same time as youargue with you GPS which just told you to turn right sending you onto the LIRR tracks.
more dead people... but on the bright side it could put more jobs on the market.

Until someone develops an A.I. with human-level intelligence, there is no way to automatically translate languages. Even languages that are closely related, such as English and German (both of which I speak fluently), can't be properly translated by software like Babelfish or Google Translate.

Current translation software might be able to tell the difference between "the wedding rings" and "the phone rings", where "rings" means two circular pieces of jewelry in one case and the act of emitting an annoying noise in the other, but as soon as you feed it a phrase like "his message rings loud and clear", you end up with complete nonsense. It simply can't be done at this point.

But I can see its usefulness.

It is certainly interesting and useful, but nothing can really replace the learning and the knowledge of a language.

Interesting stuff and we are living in an interesting time. Google also has a car that drove 40,000 miles without a driver.
But language changes so fast, with so many idioms and colloquialisms(sp?).

It's actually over 40,000 now, it's still in use

Nah.

Most definitely not -.-.

love how these come out 2 months AFTER i graduate. smh lol

The glasses sound sort of like the universal translator from Star Trek!

No computer or set of glasses is ever going to make communication as easy as two people speaking to each other in the same language.

how are you gonna read the words if you don't study the language? you'd sound like a dork. lol

Still have to wait for the universal translator.

While this is cool, you won't be able to walk around and slap this thing on a complete stranger or even a bunch of complete strangers every time you need to speak to someone in their language. For crying out loud people take the time to LEARN SOMETHING!

Now don't get me wrong, for languages that aren't international this thing really would have a use. English, French, and Spanish should be on anyone's shortlist of languages. These are the most international languages.

Who knows ?technology has made lots of things obsolete.

Only a babblefish will do that. :-)

I heard someone say: 'Text without Context is Pretext".
I'd like to add: "You need a(n organic) Cortex to decipher (the) Context" & nuances of other languages.

There was a story about some programmers that developed software that would translate English<->Chinese. Whan asked for a phrase to translate, on of them came up with

"Out of Sight, Out of Mind"

and it was run through. Since none of them could read read Chinese, they sent it through the other direction, it came up as:

"Invisible Idiot"

They don't honestly think everyone on the planet is going to have these thing, do they?

it's a start

All tech works this way, computers where around in the late 40s and 50s and not everyone had them, give them time to perfect it then find a way to cheaply mass produce.

She was speaking that Spanish FAR too slowly to properly gauge its transliteration abilities. I also doubt that it takes into account regional dialects, or slang.

probably not but computers can do lots of things today they couldn't ten yrs ago. Give it time like my instructors used to say in electronics school 'what we learn today is obsolete tomorrow. Now it's obsolete 5 min ago.

We'll see.

well I know not everyone will buy those and I'm sure the program won't be as flexible with unfamiliar grammatical structures, slang, multi-meaning words in weird contexts, and dialects as a learned human translator.

Don't know why you got so many no answers when obviously it will happen .

Not unless everyone in the world gets those glasses.

Always good to learn another language.

I'm waiting on translator microbes for that. ;-D

As in Farscape?

Yush!

haha, YES. Farscape is awesome.

Never caught the closing season on that. :-\

oh, I wonder if you can finish it on Netflix. The last season ends abruptly because the show was cancelled at the time. So be sure to watch the movie "Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars," which is also on Netflix. That helped close everything up. I love John and Aeryn, I wish it had been on longer.

I think Netflix has The Peacekeeper Wars on DVD but not download.

oh yes, you're right. :)

Since most of the effin foreigners who come here don't want to speak English we need something to take there ability to conspire openly.