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The Web Way To Learn a Language
theodp writes "Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, you can now sit in your underwear in Omaha and learn French from a tutor in Paris. The NY Times has a round-up of ways to learn a language over the Web. 'We offer modern-day pen pals facilitated with voice over I.P.,' said Tom Adams, CEO of RosettaStone, whose learning options include RosettaStudio, a place where a user can talk to a native speaker via video chat. TellMeMore offers a speech recognition component that analyzes pronunciation, graphs your speech, and suggests how to perfect it. Free-as-in-beer offerings include BBC Languages, where you'll find varying levels of instruction for 36 languages, with features including audio and video playback and translation. Things have certainly come a long way since the PLATO Foreign Languages Project of the '70s."
I have found that two of the best free ways to learn a foreign language online is to listen to music in that language as well as watching stand up comedy in it.
The music gives you something catchy to repeat and will allow you to memorize certain words, common phrases, etc. while the comedy will give you more of an insight into the culture (and culturally applicable words) since most comedians criticize or magnify people's behavior, discuss current topics and issues and usually use good vocabulary.
Youtube can generally take care of those two.
If you can also find websites that cover a topic you're interested and have a background in (e.g. programming or math) in that language, it won't be as harsh of a transition as you'll know about the topic before hand or you'd be very interested in it which allow you to translate your knowledge in that domain, gaining you more vocabulary/grammar.
This obviously doesn't work across the board and you may need a book or some formal training for the basics to be able to distinguish between slang and proper use of the language. But if you're already on your way (and with the abundance of free online dictionaries) it can be a huge push forward.
IRC or other online chatting systems can also help validate what you have learned and help you improve your conversation skills.
If you can't mod them join them.
How do you say "the Party is always right" in Chinese?
I found this for myself a few weeks ago, and have been slowly working on learning Scottish Gaelic.
It's a lot more fun than when I was forced to learn Spanish in high school.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
and
Poor foreigners with languages that people want to learn. They hope to teach people the delights of their own language rather than being forced to speak American (or even real English - that's what we speak in England ;) ) and end up having a webcam foreign languages session with some guy in his briefs!
I have a friend that is writting a greek learning tutorial... in greek. It follow the philosophy that to learn X, you start using X.
Here is:
http://sites.google.com/site/mathainoellenika/home/1---kalimera-1
He just started, so is just the first steps...
-Woof woof woof!
i think we all kno how the web way to learn languege turns out from lookin at how the young netizen ppl write n speak today lol its a desaster
I've also found it useful to change every interface that I use into the language that I'm learning. For instance, I've changed my PS3, iPod, and various websites into my desired language. For Asian languages it helps a lot with reading, and I've already increased my reading speed as a result. I would say it's a good supplement to a standard language course.
You learning speed sky-rockets! The only problem is that most of you vocabulary limits to make-up and fashion and things you don't have to do.
Dear
This is a great article for me. Thanks /.
I've been wanting to learn German language for reasons that will probably only seem important to me.
I talk to myself incessantly, yeah, I'm kinda mental. I want to do it in German to add to the confusion of others.
I really do get a strange feeling when Mexican folk switch from English to Espanol in my presence and would like to throw some German into the mix to let them see how it feels.
Lastly of course, I have a German \ Italian heritage and would someday like to travel to Germany and be understood. Italy too, but that is a different matter and some Italian could be easily deciphered by Mexicans. Right now German is on my mind, so first things first.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
HTTP 1.0 has almost nothing to do with voice (or video) over the Internet.
One of the best options for free is www.livemocha.com. They have a lot of languages and you can have peer review and everything!
Oh I don't know ... Fall of 1979, sitting in the darkened computer labs at U of I learning languages off the orange plasma displays ... that wasn't so bad. And the best part was you could always drop into a game of Empire when you needed a break. Try that with these newfangled web technologies ... those were good days, my friends ....
"Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, you can now sit in your underwear in Omaha and learn French from a tutor in Paris."
Um... I'm not sure how well this will work, I can't really stick my tongue in the monitor and since it's a touch screen I might accidentally tongue the close widget in the upper right corner of the screen. Not to mention the possible shock hazard, some how I feel like that kid that was dared to stick his tongue on the flag pole in winter.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I've been quite happy with Coffee Break French.. That company has lots of other language podcasts as well.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
From my experience (I speak 5 languages, only one of which is my mother-tongue), past the very beginning, the best way to learn a language is to go live in a place where people speak it.
Second best is to go there on long (at least 1 month) vacations and try to speak the language all the time (the natives usually appreciate the effort).
Third best is to expose yourself to that language is a day-to-day spoken form. For example, watch non-dubbed TV and/or listen to radio in that language. (For a while, most of my English vocabulary was learned from Satellite TV)
Fourth best is reading books/newspapers in that language.
Both of the last two can be done using the Internet (using things like YouTube clips in different languages, foreign TV channels online, foreign newspapers and such).
Being taught a language is only really worth it when bootstraping your learning, after that being taught a language is highly inneficient simply because, unless you're doing a high intensity course (i.e. several hours a day, everyday for several weeks), in between lessons you forget most of the words you learned in each lesson. This was my experience when learning Dutch while living in Holland - the 1h-lessons twice a week were only really effective for the first 2 or 3 months: beyond that you really need to learn the language by speaking it in your day-to-day. (that said, Dutch is considered a difficult language, toch!!? ).
The good news is that once you learn a language from a given family it's a lot easier to learn other languages of the same family due to the similarities in the grammar, words and even whole expressions. I can now understand some German because of knowing Dutch.
1) Go to http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php and get the free classes you want.
2) Study words using a free software like http://ichi2.net/anki/
3) Try to live as much as possible in the language studied. Listen to music in that language, TV shows, movies, etc.
4) Make friends on a website like http://lang-8.com/ where the goal is learn new languages. If you want to learn French, French people will correct you and speak with you over Skype and you do the same by helping them learn English.
Have fun!
I guess you've never seen Def Jam?
This site is pretty well done for learning a language (Esperanto in this case): http://en.lernu.net/ For Japanese, there's this game: http://lrnj.com/ Haven't tried it, but I like the idea. :)
at but one was interested. The only discoverable interests was towards those major languages. Who knows maybe it's better that way, as eventually all can communicate with almost anyone using just a handful of languages.
Well the article sucks. Most of the iPhone things mentioned are next to useless, as is Rosetta stone as soon as you pass the first few levels.
Sadly, language learning is something you *have* to do in a class to do properly, since it involves human interaction by it's very nature. Also, non-college classes are of vastly varying quality, so better to take one at a community college instead of your local "entertainment" school.
On the other hand, learning new vocab can be done online easily, and smart.fm is one of the best sites I have ever seen for doing that, *and* it's free.
Who wants to learn French from a tutor over a webcam?! I want that French tutor in the same room with me, baby!
Busca las canciones que mas te gusten, traducelas con un diccionario :)
o busca alguien que te ayude y ponte a cantar y veras que rápidamente
aprendes, yo aprendí Ingles de esa forma, pero Ingles es fácil
When he went to Brazil and discovered that his Portuguese was not as good as he hoped, he was asked "have you found a sleeping dictionary yet?" (apologies to any Slashdot readers who conform to the stereotype.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I recently started using the Michel Thomas method to learn french and can attest that it's an incredibly efficient way to learn the language -- as long as I spend a couple hours a day practicing or listening to french radio (BBC Afrique is great for this). Early on dedication is really important -- skip a few days and you lose a lot.
Facts have a liberal bias.
7 Years ago, I moved to France to work, not speaking a word of French, and I'm now a fluent speaker. The internet was instrumental in my learning French, but maybe not in the way you might expect...
First, I used the net to search for and buy a program called Linkwords (I don't think it exists anymore, it was a crappy VB program). The software sucked, but the principle worked. It was a sort of flash card system that had you using vivid imagery as a mental aid. My vocab hit around 2000 words in the first couple of weeks. It was useless for learning to speak French, but the perfect lifesaver for reading signs, product packaging, etc.
Then, I used P2P programs to find MP3s of Pimsleur French. For those not in the know, Pimsleur was a Harvard professor in the 60s who developed a system for learning languagues that mimics the way children learn. It's all about stimulating the memory at programmed intervals and it is one of the best ways to learn to SPEAK a language. (While there is writing materiel supplements, they're relatively minimal). These are quite expensive (you can spend up to $1000 for the complete set) because they work. You need to have about 1 hour a day to devote to it, and it must be somewhere you quiet that you can listen, and speak. (You need to hear yourself speaking for it to work).
Next came my traditional phase, where I spent a lot of time reading BDs (the French equivalent of Manga. BD is Bande Dessinee (accents ommitted) which means comic strip. There's a very large adult BD culture in France). From there I progressed to Harry Potter (which is a surprisingly difficult read in French, lots of flowery speech, wordplay, etc.).
After this, my French was halting, but I constantly tried, and was always asking the meaning of words from my colleagues.
Then I started watching more French TV. At the time, the number of shows that were subtitled was depressingly dismal as compare to the US (though it has gotten a bit better). Again, computers and the net to the rescue, because I was able to download DVDs (the whole multi-language, multi-subtitle feature is a godsend for language learning). What you might not realize is that a lot of understanding a foreign language is based on context. If you know it, it's much easier to guess what is being said. In a conversation, if you miss something, you can ask the other person to repeat. Watching TV or movies requires you to pay closer attention. You can rewind, but you can never get the speaker to express the same thing using other words, so you really have to understand whats being said.
Finally, thanks to the internet, I was able to find about speed dating events in my area where I met my wife. My wife speaks English (she's an English teacher) but her family doesn't, so that got me into social situations that required me to practice speaking.
Now, I had the benefit of immersion, but I think it's important to realize that the internet is not a magic bullet for learning a foreign language, no matter what companies that sell internet based language services say. That being said, however, if the internet makes learning materiels more readily available, as well as practice opportunities, I'm all for it..
Is still the best way to learn any language. Watching media, listening to music, talking with people, reading and writing the language... doing anything that increases your daily exposure to the language. Naturally going to that country is your best bet, live with a host family, and do your best to forget your mother tongue for a year. A Chinese friend of mine speaks perfectly fluent German, simply from living there for a year with a family, despite not evening knowing "Guten tag" upon arrival (she didn't even have much background in English to help with Germanic language grammar).
As someone else mentioned, music*, books, movies, comedy.... and just meet people from that country/region. A computer will only be effective if you use it for absurdly long amounts of time. You can never learn a language effectively for an hour a day- live the language, breathe it, and most importantly, USE it. At first you'll be learning to say "How do I say, 'I'm late' in X?" and later be wondering how to make complex philosophical arguments in said language. It's a process of natural acquisition, at any age.
*Music not recommended for Chinese or other tonal languages. You get the sounds, but not the tones.
"Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, you can now sit in your underwear in Omaha and learn French from a tutor in Paris."
this is disgusting. i'm not sure what "learn french" is slang for, but i have a clue since its done in your underwear "in omaha": obviously some variation on shibari japanese rope bondage. how puerile. and i don't think slashdot needs to be the place for yet more attention for that whore paris hilton, no matter that there is a tutor in her, or whatever is in her, has anything or anyone not been in her?
and i don't know who this Tim Berners-Lee fellow is but he's obviously some sort of pornography-addicted pervert. yet more proof the internet has been warped form the noble intentions of whoever started the internet. probably some nice science fellow working trying to better mankind with some sort of high minded science research, not this Tim Berners-Lee degenerate mentioned here
how can we stop this madness?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
FTFA:
you can now sit in your underwear in Omaha and learn French from a tutor in Paris
With the advent of Skype's video support, I'm pretty sure that the "in your underwear" part is not appreciated by said Parisian tutor.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Particularly if your first language is Spanish or English and you live anywhere in the Americas.
I think that once you learn a second language, for whatever reason, you're going to at least be comfortable with exposure to other languages. Once exposed to other languages, you tend to already know what's utilitarian.
I play WoW in French and it has done wonders for both my formal reading (Quests), informal reading (chats - gotta learn stuff like LOL in french [mdr = mort de rire], etc, etc). and informal writing (chat stuff).
I have leared some very rare vocabulary which comes in useful from time to time. But it's a great confidence builder.
My wife is a ESL teacher and doing her thesis now... i'm convinced this way of learning language is the future. Not necessarily WoW, but something very much like it where you PLAY to learn.
Other than that, the best way is to move to the country and get a girlfriend/boyfriend... 100% guaranteed to become very proficient very quickly.
This is probably one of the more interesting services offered... check out Languagelab.com. It uses Second Life... pretty cool!
I can heartily recommend this site : smart.fm It has lots of Japanese, but other languages too, and is free like in no money.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Note that this doesn't work for languages like Japanese, where the forms of the words depend on the gender of the speaker. You end up using the female forms and sounding like a girl, which everyone around you will find hilarious. For other languages, it works well; it's the only reason that I know any Spanish...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I have found that my local public library (in the US) has great language resources. I can get pimsleur CDs for free (the complete courses for some languages), they used to have a free subscription to Rosetta Stone online (now switched to mangolanguages.com), language books, DVDs, etc. It's really an invaluable resource for free language learning.
Another thing about it is that they will probably have a particularly strong collection on foreign languages that are common in your area. For example, my town has a significant Cambodian population, so they have Cambodian resources in the language section of the library, in addition to the usual Spanish, French, etc.
How many of you reading this are thinking about picking up Japanese so you don't have to wait for the subbed version of your favorite anime/manga?
My webcomic
You realize that Spanish has gender t--....actually, nevermind. Good luck with the language lessions, chica.
Ride the skies
Then you need a boyfriend. Tough luck.
Dear
I've been meaning to get through some more rosetta stone mandarin lessons...
If you're interested in mandarin in particular, this guy also has some cool info including a list of the 3000 most used characters, ranked by how common they are. Supposedly 3000 is the magic number for reading your average Chinese newspaper. http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html
Some of the software or websites mentioned are good (I would also add ChinesePod to the mix if that's your language of choice) but the article failed to emphasise the amazing opportunities the internet provides to make friends and language partners, for free, from motivated learners overseas. I have studied several languages, and made internet language partner friends who I have visited and had a great time, as a bonus to getting daily language practice. These language partners can be better (and definitely more cost effective) than the paid teachers on offer.
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
Spanish has genders, but they are associated with the words, not the speaker. A man and a woman will use the same word and the same sentence structure for describing the same thing. This is not the case for Japanese.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's very good advice. I'm currently learning Latin. With any hope, I'll dig up a girlfriend who's also a native speaker in a few years. Goodbye. There is no time for me to waste.
One of the interesting things happening online that this article doesn't touch on is the way in which minority languages (which have traditionally been quite poorly served by the market, because they are not large enough to justify much expenditure on course development) are using the internet to offer better quality courses - usually a lot cheaper than the big players like Rosetta Stone.
One example is a course for learning Welsh called www.SaySomethinginWelsh.com which I put together with some friends of mine. We're language activists, so we wanted to provide new materials that aren't otherwise available in Welsh - and the internet makes it possible for us to distribute them more or less for free. We give a 13 hour oral course (similar to Pimsleur or Michel Thomas, although of course we'd like to believe that it's a bit better!...;-)) for free.
Our server costs are covered by a small number of people who pay a few pounds a month for access to daily practice sessions - but we give a couple of practice sessions away for free each week as well.
It's going to be interesting to see if more minority languages follow in this kind of direction. I don't think anyone ought to have to pay 100s of dollars to learn another language...
Does it work with wives as well? My wife is Malaysian, and she just gets frustrated and switches to english. So far, the main phrase I know how to say is "The cat goes Meow" in Malay