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:Discovered for myself a few weeks ago... (Score:2, Interesting)
A lot more fun, perhaps, but a lot less useful. It is estimated that there are only about 50,000 speakers of Scottish Gaelic left.
I am Scottish myself and was obliged to learn Gaelic in a similar way that you were obliged to learn Spanish. I cannot stand it.
Re:Music, comedy and something else of interest (Score:5, Interesting)
Movies are even better. When you are a novice, subtitles help you know what to listen for, and for everyone the action on the screen can act as a cue to what is being said.
Re:Discovered for myself a few weeks ago... (Score:3, Interesting)
Working on learning Irish myself, spent over ten years learning it in school and never put any effort in, now I'm regretting it just months after I've finished :P.
Worst part about these languages is the difficulty of finding people to talk with in them IMO, it seems easier to find a fluent Spanish/French/German in Ireland than an Irish speaker.
The best way to learn a language ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Old meets new... (Score:5, Interesting)
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..