The Web Way To Learn a Language 165
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."
Re:Music, comedy and something else of interest (Score:3, Informative)
Can you give examples of English songs that someone should be listening to? If I turned on the radio, I don't think hearing Beyonce/Eminem/Green Day/Metallica/Jay-Z/BrittneySpears would help me learn english.
Sure. Norah Jones, Dido, Celine Dion (works for French too), Elton John, Duran Duran, Robbie Williams, Stevie Wonder, the list goes on.
The goal would be to find a song that you like that's catchy enough for you to repeat it. It's not the be-all end-all method of learning a language, but it will help.
I can't imagine trying to pick out Farsi with a singer who's using a voice synthesizer.
Go back to the classics and listen to older generation songs that are clearer and aren't computerized. Again, the goal is to enjoy the process and pick up the pieces as you go from as many sources as possible.
How to learn a language (Score:5, Informative)
1) Go to http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php [fsi-language-courses.org] and get the free classes you want.
2) Study words using a free software like http://ichi2.net/anki/ [ichi2.net]
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/ [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!
Re:A very geek way to learn greek. (Score:2, Informative)
> least a transliteration of the characters
> from the Greek to Latin alphabet.
For language learning, transliteration is usually a bad idea.
You may think, "I need this crutch", but what you actually need is to learn the native writing system of the language, and transliteration is a way of putting that off, which actually costs you time and effort. Transliteration almost invariably distorts the language in ways that make it harder to learn.
There are exceptions, but they mostly revolve around languages that have a shared heritage and are so phonetically similar that the fact that they have different writing systems in the first place is the result of some historical external, non-linguistic force (typically, politics). For example, transliterating Urdu into the Devanagari script doesn't distort the language very much. But this is the exception rather than the rule.
For instance, transliterating Greek into the Latin alphabet obscures the distinction between short and long vowels (particularly epsilon versus eta and omicron versus omega), which would make Greek morphology *really* confusing. Transliterating between writing systems that differ to a greater extent (such as attempting to represent freeform-syllable stress-timed English in one-consonant-per-syllable katakana) is worse.
Or did you mean, an explanation of what the different characters mean? That *is* quite helpful, perhaps essential. Definitely essential if you don't have direct access to native speakers.