Tuesday, May 18, 2010

100 ways to learn a language

Increasingly, it is beneficial to speak more than one language.

Online Degree Programs recently posted an article featuring 100 different resources aimed at helping people learn languages online. These include courses through specific schools; online dictionaries; phrase-based tools; translation services; online language communities; games and quizzes; and all manner of other resources.

Languages on offer range from the more common French, English and Spanish to the less widely known Kurdish, Marathi and Romanian.

They also list resources for Mandarin, a language that has been earmarked by many as one to master by those who wish to benefit from the increasing global participation of mainland China in corporate ventures.

2 comments:

V Yonkers said...

As this is one of my areas of expertise, I was ready to hate the resource as many of these "lists" are nothing more than commercial ventures. However, many of them are very good resources that I have used my self in developing two online courses (one in French and one in Spanish).

The next thing that needs to be written is how to learn a foreign language online on your own. I was fortunate enough to take a course in how to learn a foreign language. All of use needed to find our own tutors, and then we were guided in how to "self-teach" using the tutor as a resource. There were about 15 different languages ranging from Thai, to Malay, to local Indonesian languages, to Spanish, and Portuguese. We, the learners, were the curriculum developers, the instructional designer, the instructor, and the learner. I studied Dutch. But later, when I moved to Costa Rica, I was able to learn Spanish on my own using the tools I had learned in this course.

The upsycho said...

@V_Yonkers Your reaction mirrors my own. I linked to this list precisely because it wasn't that, because it includes a wide variety of resources that enable an individual to pull together their own mix of learning experiences exactly as you describe.

One thing I didn't find among the resources listed was sign language. I am hoping to learn BSL (British Sign Language) over the next few months and would have liked to find something that could help me there.