How to Use the Web to Learn a Foreign Language

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[I publish useful, how-to articles by site members. This article first appeared as a post on a forum. The author prefers to retain his anonymity.--Gary North.]

Check out the Spanish-language TV stations online.

http://wwitv.com/

I don't know Spanish, but after a year of watching 45 minutes of German news daily, I'd improved my German so much that some Germans I write to online won't believe that I'd only been to Kindergarten there. Of course, I'd been speaking it all my life, and had no problems with the pronunciation, but it had been at a very primitive level.

I had to really concentrate for a few months, but now it's a breeze.

I probably went from a 2 to a 5 on this scale during that year:

http://www.berlitz.co.th/aboutus_03.asp

Getting from 0-2 like you still need to may be much harder than that!

But there are also 3-credit, graduate-level courses like "German for Reading Knowledge" that apparently do take you from scratch. They're for people who want to read foreign-language technical journals, and I was amazed to find out that many professional translators can't even speak the language they translate from.

Also, get one of those laminated idiot-sheets that summarizes the grammar.

http://www.curriculumconnections.com/zencart/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=90&sort=20a&page=2

Every mistake you make is just a repeat of one of those rules.

Then get a software-based dictionary. This one

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_sw/103-1553029-2670219?url=search-alias%3Dsoftware&field-keywords=oxford+spanish&Go.x=4&Go.y=10

gives you an instant translation for any highlightable text, in both directions. You will be looking up THOUSANDS of words, most of them more than once. You don't want to spend 3 minutes lifting and paging through a dictionary each time.

Here's a great online dictionary I use daily.

http://dict.leo.org/ende?lang=de&lp=ende&search=

I'm sure there's something even bigger and better for English-Spanish.

German classes never did a thing for me. A lecture is mostly just a text file, conveyed in the most expensive and cumbersome way I can imagine. They apparently make their livings by reading you their secret lecture notes, having you transcribe them into your notebook, and testing you on what you've written down. 80% of my energies expended in that direction were for collating the various materials into a learnable form, and of course paying for, driving to, and suffering through the classes.

I guess all that frenzied activity, and the resulting accreditation (ain't it the greatest thing? - you can Feel The Glow long after you've forgotten the material!), inculcates to the students that they have undergone some terribly important and profound process, so they never look back at a class and think, "I could have learned this in a much more efficient manner. What a crock."

I agree with Otto Scott, who once said he thought you could "learn to read, and take it from there." It's too bad that his advice is so hard to follow, since there exist precious few "learn x on your own" courses of studies - and everyone demands the "piece of paper". I wonder if I could start a website that collects and disseminates lecture notes (MIT's odd course material project is a start, but is far from giving you a complete do-it-yourself alternative). That would really put the profs to the test, who swear nothing can be understood without them first reading it to you.

As for immersion - aren't you lucky enough to be within range of any number of restaurants? :)

I wish I had such a resource, but I do have one more advantage. I know a German who is as full of questions about the US, as I am about Germany. I forced myself to always ask and respond in that language, so it was definitely a matter of "learning by doing." I've actually known him for several years now, but the big jump in my skills took place the first year, and I'm now making myself study more challenging material. By some measures, I'm probably at a 6 now.

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