So, I've been trying to brush up on (okay learn completely) French. I took it for 3 years in public school (grades 7,8 and 9) and it was always my least favourite class...next to gym, ahem. For some reason I just couldn't get into it and I always found it extremely hard. Even though my reading and writing skills gradually improved I could never understand a word of it (spoken) or say anything in class that I hadn't spent the night before memorizing (and I CANNOT memorize something to save my life, so that didn't work out too well). Needless to say I dropped that class so hard after I got my Ontario required grade 9 credit.
Fast forward to being an adult and wishing that I had applied myself when I was younger, and taken advantage of free French lessons all through highschool. I wish I was bilingual because 1) you are more mobile and can apply to a wider range of jobs and 2) it feels very Canadian - which I realize is potentially a weird reason, but I like being patriotic...and I have a verrry patriotic husband so he has probably egged on this side of me :)
I have tried many different language learning methods...but none for very long. Rosetta Stone I tried in German when I thought we were moving to Zurich....it was way too boring for me - and since the answers are basically multiple choice you can do it almost passively and not learn a thing. Next, I tried Rosetta Stone in Hebrew when we moved to Tel Aviv, and learned probably 3 words. I think I need to understand grammatical structure, and I'm way too much of an instant gratification person to slog through "flash card immersion" without feeling any sort of accomplishment along the way. I ended up taking Hebrew classes which were great, but the motivation just wasn't there to learn the language.
While googling "what is the best way to learn French" ...because google never fails me... I saw a brand new free online language software that I had never heard of before: Duolingo. I actually love it. Look how cute it is!
I don't know if I like it because I have a slight background in French so it's not totally new (like German or Hebrew) and so I can get into it, or if it just has a style that I like. But so far it has gotten pretty positive reviews. It was developed by a guy from Guatamala who got rich selling programs to Google, and then decided he would devote his time to making a free for everyone, awesome language software. It plays like a game (ie you have 3 lives to try every activity, you can test out of levels if you are more advanced, but you only get 3 lives for that too, you can connect to people on fb or g+ and compete against their progress, you acquire coins, you work your way through a skills tree...etc...) I also get it to send me little reminder emails everyday to keep my "days spent learning" streak alive. For a kid of the Super Nintendo generation, I love it. The following shows that I have completed the first "level" and am halfway through the second. There are four, and they get progressively longer and more challenging. I've only been playing for 6 days so I haven't gotten too far.
The basic premise is that you learn by translating. Each "achievement" consists of translating a certain number of sentences between French/English and listening to the computer reading and then transcribing what they say. There are a couple of multiple choice questions, but not many since the founder doesn't think that is the most effective learning tool. Also, you translate things from online documents (like wikipedia, or documents that companies have hired Duolingo to translate) and the translations are crowd-sourced so if you enter a bad one, someone else will correct it. This is how they make money. Basically the user is the worker (but your compensation is learning a new language!). You can watch the developer's TED talk here. It's a really interesting look at crowd-sourced enterprises.
So I think that eventually this will greatly improve my reading/writing skills, but I'm not convinced that it will have any impact on my listening or speaking abilities (the computer text-to speech bot is particularly awful for French but I'm hoping with increasing user feedback it gets improved). My plan is (once I have upped my reading comprehension) to watch movies (especially Disney :) ) in French, with the French subtitles on until I can understand without them. We'll see.
For now, I'm actually enjoying learning French for probably the first time ever. Sorry French, I don't know why I disliked you so much before... :( So if you want to try out a new language - try Duolingo! And add me if you do and we can be friends on the site :) My username is: LiseAsh.
Some of the things I really like:
1) It's super cute, and is continuously improving because it is very feedback oriented. There are also apps for phones and the tablet android app is coming soon. (I'm pretty sure there is one for ipad already). The android phone app just launched a few days ago.
2) There is a comment thread on each page, so if you have a question about anything you can ask it in the comments and hopefully someone will answer you. So far, all of the things I have been confused about have already been asked/answered by other users, and the threads are soo helpful especially for all those weird grammar rules..... De la, du, des, de anyone? ... although it would probably be helpful to have a grammar book on hand in case you don't trust users' answers. I've found that people are quick to correct others if they get it wrong though.
3) You can turn off the speech recognition part so that you don't have to talk to it (good if you are in public places!) I haven't used this feature at all because I don't want to sit here talking to my computer :)
4) It uses weird sentences sometimes because the focus is on word usage, but this makes it very entertaining. Some of my favourites: "I love you, but not a lot"; "My wife is not beautiful, but she is rich" ...
If you know English you can learn: Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portugese. And you can learn English if you can speak Spanish, French, Italian or Portugese. Apparently they are looking at adding new languages via crowd-sourcing also. No word yet on languages that don't use the latin alphabet.
Here is their cute promo video. (It's only 2 min long). Also a good tl;dr since this post is ridiculously long :)
Fast forward to being an adult and wishing that I had applied myself when I was younger, and taken advantage of free French lessons all through highschool. I wish I was bilingual because 1) you are more mobile and can apply to a wider range of jobs and 2) it feels very Canadian - which I realize is potentially a weird reason, but I like being patriotic...and I have a verrry patriotic husband so he has probably egged on this side of me :)
I have tried many different language learning methods...but none for very long. Rosetta Stone I tried in German when I thought we were moving to Zurich....it was way too boring for me - and since the answers are basically multiple choice you can do it almost passively and not learn a thing. Next, I tried Rosetta Stone in Hebrew when we moved to Tel Aviv, and learned probably 3 words. I think I need to understand grammatical structure, and I'm way too much of an instant gratification person to slog through "flash card immersion" without feeling any sort of accomplishment along the way. I ended up taking Hebrew classes which were great, but the motivation just wasn't there to learn the language.
While googling "what is the best way to learn French" ...because google never fails me... I saw a brand new free online language software that I had never heard of before: Duolingo. I actually love it. Look how cute it is!
(I have no friends :( someone be my friend!)
So I think that eventually this will greatly improve my reading/writing skills, but I'm not convinced that it will have any impact on my listening or speaking abilities (the computer text-to speech bot is particularly awful for French but I'm hoping with increasing user feedback it gets improved). My plan is (once I have upped my reading comprehension) to watch movies (especially Disney :) ) in French, with the French subtitles on until I can understand without them. We'll see.
For now, I'm actually enjoying learning French for probably the first time ever. Sorry French, I don't know why I disliked you so much before... :( So if you want to try out a new language - try Duolingo! And add me if you do and we can be friends on the site :) My username is: LiseAsh.
Some of the things I really like:
1) It's super cute, and is continuously improving because it is very feedback oriented. There are also apps for phones and the tablet android app is coming soon. (I'm pretty sure there is one for ipad already). The android phone app just launched a few days ago.
The owl cries when you fail a level :(
2) There is a comment thread on each page, so if you have a question about anything you can ask it in the comments and hopefully someone will answer you. So far, all of the things I have been confused about have already been asked/answered by other users, and the threads are soo helpful especially for all those weird grammar rules..... De la, du, des, de anyone? ... although it would probably be helpful to have a grammar book on hand in case you don't trust users' answers. I've found that people are quick to correct others if they get it wrong though.
3) You can turn off the speech recognition part so that you don't have to talk to it (good if you are in public places!) I haven't used this feature at all because I don't want to sit here talking to my computer :)
4) It uses weird sentences sometimes because the focus is on word usage, but this makes it very entertaining. Some of my favourites: "I love you, but not a lot"; "My wife is not beautiful, but she is rich" ...
If you know English you can learn: Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portugese. And you can learn English if you can speak Spanish, French, Italian or Portugese. Apparently they are looking at adding new languages via crowd-sourcing also. No word yet on languages that don't use the latin alphabet.
Here is their cute promo video. (It's only 2 min long). Also a good tl;dr since this post is ridiculously long :)
