Wait-learning refers to learning that takes place while a person is awaitingthe completion of some other task, for example, learn some new words whilewaiting for the elevator.
“边等边学”指利用等待其他事情完成的时间来学习的行为，比如，等电梯的时候学几个新单词。
The average person spends 10 to 15 minutes a day waiting for texts andinstant-message (IM) replies, according to an analysis by Carrie Cai, a PhDstudent at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).
据麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室的一位博士研究生Carrie Cai调查发现，人们每天等待短信息回复的平均时间为10到15分钟。
What if you could be more productive during those idle moments? Cai is on thecase.
如果能将这些闲散的时间利用起来做一些事情，会怎么样呢？Carrie Cai就在研究这个。
A CSAIL team led by Cai recently developed "WaitChatter," a GoogleChat extension that delivers foreign-language vocab quizzes right to yourchatbox any time the system detects that you are waiting for an instantmessage.
Carrie Cai带领的计算机科学与人工智能实验室研究团队最近研发了一个基于谷歌聊天的扩展程序，能够在你等待聊天信息回复的时候，直接在你的聊天会话框中发送外语词汇小测验。
"Given all the time that is wasted due to waiting, we wanted to explorehow to use these moments as opportunities for learning," says Cai, whopresented a related paper at the Association of Computing Machinery's ComputerHuman Interaction Conference (CHI 2015) in Seoul in April. "Thisintegrated approach, which we call 'wait-learning', is far less likely to beperceived as time-consuming or intrusive compared to using a separate learningapp."
"People who say they want to learn a language often try an app likeDuolingo and end up feeling that they have to 'make time' or invest extraeffort for it," she says. "Users generally don't want to have toclose a window or switch apps, which means it's important to incorporate thelearning tool right into the programs they use."