While walking near Fisherman’s Wharf Friday evening, I spotted a souvenir book about the city available in several languages so I bought myself the French version. I still don’t understand every word, but I was able to understand a lot! I could draw from what I know about the city and what logically fits to fill in some of the words and ideas that weren’t clear.

I also found a free guide with maps at my hotel in French. I grabbed that as well, and used it in the same way.

Of course I always have my iPod along for the airport and plane. On the plane I listened to news podcasts in French and a couple of podcasts from busuu.com.

Keep your eyes open. There are often opportunities to work on language wherever you go.

This morning, I took my usual walk along with my ipod and Pimsleur lesson. I really like waking up my body and my mind together this way. I don’t pass too many people along my route, so I feel no shame chattering away with my lessons.

Also this week, I got another Facebook friend to exchange a few emails – he writes in English and I correct him, and I write in French and he corrects me. That works well. I’ve also been chatting a bit on Facebook with different French-speaking friends. Live chat is always more demanding and exciting, need to think on the fly.

Even out and about, when I have a few minutes, I can listen to a bit of a french podcast or check Twitter for 140 characters or less in French.

I hope that’s a little inspiration for busy people who really want to improve their language skills to sneak it in where you can!

This can be hard if you live someplace where nobody else speaks the language, though.  But of course, once again, the internet comes to the rescue!  The internet has long been a place to text chat with people around the world, and it is becoming easier and easier to use voice and even video conferencing.

You can go to places specifically aimed at learning languages, or you can branch out and try to meet native speakers who may share an interest with you on interest-based websites.  Here are a few I have used to meet and speak with.  For a pretty full-featured language site, I would recommend Busuu.com.  Even the free membership gets you basic lessons in English, French, German and Spanish, as well as a whole social networks of other people who speak many languages and are learning languages there.  They have live chat/voice/video included.  In theory, if you spoke portuguese and wanted to learn arabic, you could find a complimentary partner there to talk to.  I speak English and am Learning French, so I have found a lot of people to chat with there.  Sometimes it’s just a one-time chat, and other times te people become friends and I speak and write to them regularly.  Another place to go with voice capability is Second Life, a 3D world.  Second Life is not specifically a language learning place, but you can meet people there from all over the world and have a chat.  You can get free translators in Second Life, but be warned that they are sometimes inaccurate, and may also slow down your learning.  I have made a lot of friends there who are happy to let me try my French with them and are happy to get a little help with English from me, but it’s a big virtual world, and not everyone wants to get involved in that, nor do they all speak their own language very well.  There are some language schools within Second Life that build on the capabilities of SL, the best of which is specifically teaching English.  That would be LanguageLab.com.  Languagelab’s English City offers students a place to hang out and chat and have some fun in a supportive environment.  They don’t currently have a French program there, so I’m out of luck. 

There are a lot of social networks that have an international presence.  Lately I have been spending more time on Facebook, getting to know both French speakers and English learners.  Facebook’s text chat is a bit lame, so a lot of people who meet there end up using MSN, Yahoo Messenger, ichat or another application that has text, voice, and video to speak to each other.

You can meet people on a gardening website, book club, music site, whatever you are interested in.  This gives you built-in subject matter to discuss, too.  Use a translator to look up the names of some of your interests and put them in a search engine.  I’ve met people for years who are learning English in all the various places I have visited, so why not try the same?  It’s a little less direct, but you can follow your hobbies and improve your mastery of a language and make some friends in the process, then go on to try voice chat with them.

So get out there and just talk!

First, I used an online translator/dictionary to translate “games online” into french: jeux en ligne.  I typed that into google and found 4,410,000 pages – looks good so far.  I tried the first one, since it had several categories, and looked similar to game sites I have tried in English.  http://www.zebest-3000.com/

So here I was looking at a somewhat familiar format, and I was able to use a combination of the french I know and my familiarity with similar pages to figure out what everything was.  I’m happy to see “gratuits” – free games – here.  An interesting graphic catches my eye, and I read the description: Bienvenue dans le purgatoire.  Okay, that sounds interesting…

First I get a full-screen pop-up of a MMORPG game – free?  Maybe I’ll try that one another time, could be another language opportunity!  In case you haven’t figured out by now, I’m open to trying anything to learn languages.  For now I close that window and go on to the game I had selected.  And I find a problem:  the game itself is in English!

Now I go back to Google and try: jeux en ligne en francais (games online in french).  Still, many of the games turn out to be in English once you get into the actual game, but the instructions are in french before starting.  One page I visit as a list of various games, quizzes, word puzzles and the like, primarily in french.  http://www.liensutiles.org/jeu.htm.  There is a lot of variety here, and I plan to try a lot of these.

On that list I found http://europa.eu/europago/index.htm.

Europago

This seems to be designed for kids, but not so easy that it’s not wort trying.  Also, you can coose from a nice list of 11 languages to explore the site and play the games.  One quiz game I played gave me ten seconds to read and choose one of three answers in subjects like geograpy and history.  I didn’t do very well yet, but it was great to get me to try to think fast in french, look for key words, and decode.

I spoke with a friend in France and he said it is a problem, that many online games are in English.  However, if you want to learn English, you have many opportunities!  I am finding more and more games, and I will continue to play, and report back when I find something good, especially if it offers multiple language options.  Please add any foreign language games you find and think are useful in the comments section!

I love anything that helps me multi-task, and with my lessons on my ipod, I can exercise my body and learn french at the same time!  It’s probably not going to work too well if you are a swimmer, but I find it works great for brisk walks around my neighborhood.

a useful tool

I’ve been using Pimsleur, which is a nice audio program.  My lessons are roughly 30 minutes long.  I have the whole series loaded in a playlist.  I like to go through the lessons two or three times, until the new stuff starts to stick, then move on to the next lesson.  There is a side benefit to this – I have a double motivation to get out there and exercise, and if I skip it, I notice both my fitness and my french suffer.

I’ve also used the ipod when I’ve been waiting – appointments, in line at the post office, etc. – and also in the car.  I plug my ipod into the car audio adapter and make traffic educational!  I’ve also gone through a few language lessons on road trips.  I wouldn’t recommend these kinds of lessons on a plane, it would be annoying to your fellow passengers to hear you chattering away in such close company.

Here are some example of language lessons for ipods incorporating video:

Chinese:

Russian:

But for those times and places that you have free ear time, but are not able to speak freely, try other foreign language audio.  I have podcasts from a french radio station, and also french songs (more on songs coming soon).  Foreign language audio books are another possibility.  You can get into the whole world of video as well.

Variety is good.  The more voices and situations you can hear and comprehend, the better. I don’t understand all of what I hear, but I find it very helpful to learn how the language sounds.  Learning the “melody” of a language is very helpful for my pronunciation and comprehension.

If you have tried using your ipod for language learning, post a comment and share what you did and how it worked.

This is what I’m hoping to avoid:

One that I use a lot is http://www.wordreference.com/.  It won’t translate passages or phrases, but still I think it’s very good.  One feature I love about it is the conjugator.  You type in your verb, and there at the top of the page you can click “conjugator” and get every form of the verb with subject and tense.  They also have model verbs for the different types of endings, and irregular cases. I also enjoy the forums.  Learners and native speakers can post questions and opinions about use of words in various settings.  These are the languages included on wordreference.com: spanish, french, italian, german, portuguese, russian, polish, romanian, czech, greek, turkish, chinese, japanese and korean, with arabic coming soon. Spanish, french and italian are the most used and thorough dictionaries on the site.

Another one I have open a lot is http://www.reverso.net/ “Reverso.net, the free online translation service in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese” Reverso will translate whole passages at once, and I really like the little flag buttons with arrows to indicate which languages you are translating between and which direction you are going. Unfortunately, it suffers the same problem as most online translators attempting more than one word translations. It isn’t always right. However, it is usually a good way to get the idea of what something says.

The best translations come from people who understand the cultures and societies of both languages, as well as the context, but these people are hard to come by!  I sometimes dream of becoming one someday, but I’m not sure I’ll make it.  I am enjoying the journey, though.

I’ll keep adding to this list, and if you have one that you really like – maybe it translates a less common language, for example – please post it in the comments and I’ll add it to the list.

It’s nice to have the language popping up throughout the day.  At least one of the twitterers I am following has been posting links to interesting articles, too.  So when I have the time, I follow the links and try to read the articles.  Of course there are some words and phrases I don’t understand (je ne comprends pas!), so I look them up, or make a note of them, and try and figure it out from the context.  Of course, being a social network, thhere is also a great opportunity to learn about the culture as well.

I wonder how many people use twitter this way?  I think it’s a great addition to the tapestry of immersion possible through the internet.

Generally, news reporters speak clearly and use the official language.  I suggest finding the equivalent of National Public Radio from a country that speaks the language you want to  learn.  The great thing is that there are so many international stations streaming online now.

In my pursuit of French, I have found a great site that caters to French language learners, Radio France Internationale -  http://www.rfi.fr/lfen/statiques/accueil.asp  It’s an extensive site with many topics and a whole section for french language learners which includes “Journal en francais facile” where you can listen to the easy version of the news, or as I like to think of it, “french news for dummies.”

It may be helpful to familiarize yourself with the events of the day in your native language first.  Then, when you hear it in the other language, you can start to guess at what the unfamiliar words might mean.  At the very least, you get used to what the language is supposed to sound like.  But when used alongside other learning methods, radio news can really boost both your comprehension and pronunciation skills.

Happy listening!

I’m so excited to see the web being used by so many people as a way to learn, teach and share language!  I’m sure I’m not alone in my love of language.  I believe it comes from an innate desire to communicate.  I find it so rewarding to be able to understand ideas and to express my own to people who are not English speakers.

In case you are interested, I am currently working hardest on learning French, but also picking up some Italian and Portuguese, as well as occasional words and phrases in the languages of my friends from around the world.  Living in California, I also know a lot of words in Spanish, but I don’t know the grammar.

So that’s the seed, I’m sticking it in the virtual soil and seeing what comes up!