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Multimedia Language Centre Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies
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Guidesheets

Are you looking for digital supports to help practice your language skills? Do you have an upcoming assignment to complete for class? Either way, you’ve come to the right place. MLC computers are equipped with several programs designed to help you enhance your speaking and writing abilities in nearly 20 languages. Find instructions and tutorials for these language learning tools below.

MLC language learning software includes…

  • Antidote
  • Audacity
  • Field Linguist’s Toolbox
  • GoldVarb
  • Higgins
  • Linguist’s Shoebox
  • Microsoft Word
  • MonoConc Pro
  • Praat
  • R by Datacamp
  • Sound Forge
  • Teach Yourself Swahili
  • WaveSurfer

Quick Links

Software Instructions & Tutorials

Antidote

Antidote is a reference tool that combines definitions, conjugations, synonyms, grammar, style, typography, punctuation, and a corrector all into one software for the French language.

  • Antidote 10 User Guide (PDF) – View the guide sections on pages 131-164 for instructions related to Antidote on MLC computers.

Audacity

Audacity is an audio recording/editing software that allows users to manipulate audio and make audio enhancements when needed. Its friendly user interface allows users to simply make changes with little to no challenges faced.

Field Linguist’s Toolbox

Toolbox is a data management and analysis tool for field linguists. It is especially useful for maintaining lexical data, and for parsing and interlinearizing text, but it can also be used to manage virtually any kind of data.

GoldVarb

GoldVarb is an application for carrying out variable rule analysis and associated data manipulations and displays.

Higgins

Higgins is an interactive instructional resource that allows users to practice phonetics.

  • Open Higgins on the MLC computer. You can also access it on MyApps by logging in with your Passport York information.
  • Click on the category you wish to explore. In each category, you have the option to listen to sounds that are similar, to record yourself or to take a quiz.
  • To go back to the main page, click on the rectangle button in the far-right corner of the screen. To exit the program, click on the red exit button.
  • For further instructions, follow the on-screen prompts.

Linguist’s Shoebox

The Linguist’s Shoebox helps field researchers integrate various kinds of text data (lexical, cultural, grammatical, etc.). It has flexible options for selecting, sorting, and displaying data. It is especially useful for helping researchers build a dictionary as they use it to analyze and interlinearize text.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is a widely used commercial word processor used for drafting documents.

MonoConc Pro

MonoConc Pro is a fast concordance (text searching) program with an excellent user-interface. It is used in the analysis of English or other texts (Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, etc.) for linguistic or language teaching and language learning purposes.

Praat

Praat is an audio recording tool that allows users to edit sounds by manipulating the intensity/pitch/duration of the sound. It is used to analyze speech and is an extremely useful tool in phonetics.

R by Datacamp

R is an elegant and comprehensive statistical and graphical programming language.

Sound Forge Audio Studio

SoundForge is another audio recording/editing tool that allows users to manipulate and polish the recorded audio. There are several features that can improve the overall quality of the audio.

Teach Yourself Swahili

Teach Yourself Swahili is an interactive course that is designed to provide you with an easy way to learn to speak, read, and even write Swahili words.

  • Open Teach Yourself Swahili on the MLC computer. You can also access it on MyApps by logging in with your Passport York information.
  • To get started, click on “Introduction” and then click on “About This Course” and follow the on-screen instructions.
  • Please note that clicking on words written in blue will provide the pronunciation of the word.
  • To exit, click on the “Exit” button at the bottom of the page.

Using Accented Characters

Typing accents is easy using the US international keyboard, which is installed on the MLC computers.

The apostrophe becomes a “dead key” so that it can be used in combinations to produce accented characters.

Below is a list of the most common accents and punctuation marks and how to type them. To obtain an accent on a capital letter, type shift plus the letter in question.

  • For the acute accent, type the apostrophe plus any vowel (e.g. é, É).
  • The circonflexe accent is located above the number 6. Type shift 6 followed by any vowel (e.g. ê, Ê). Note: this is the sign used to mark long vowels in Latin.
  • The grave accent is located above the Tab key, to the left of the number 1. Type the accent plus any vowel (e.g. à, À).
  • The tilde sign is located above the grave accent. Type it first followed by the letter, (e.g. ñ, Ñ)
  • The cédille is obtained by typing the apostrophe, followed by the letter “c” (e.g. ç, Ç).
  • The umlaut is obtained by typing the quotation marks (shift apostrophe) followed by any vowel (e.g. ë, Ë).
  • To obtain the German consonant “ß” hold down right Alt key and type the letter “s”.
  • To obtain inverted punctuation marks ¿ and ¡ for Spanish, hold down right Alt key and type ? to obtain ¿, and type 1 to obtain ¡.

WaveSurfer

WaveSurfer is an audio editor widely used for studies of acoustic phonetics. It offers an interactive display of sound pressure waveforms, spectral sections, spectrograms, pitch tracks and transcriptions.