Useful something to boost your language learning

  Use music, TV, movies, radio and the internet to ingrain your target language in your brain   The following is a guest post by Susanna Zaraysky, author of Language is Music. Susanna speaks seven languages (English, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Serbo-Croatian) and has also studied Hungarian, Hebrew, and Arabic. She has taught English in Argentina, Bosnia, and the United States.Who remembers a TV commercial jingle from their childhood better than what their spouse or parent told them to get at the grocery store yesterday? We can all remember certain melodies and songs better than we can rattle off a list of vocabulary words or pronunciation rules our teacher taught us in French class this morning. I broke my CD player replaying the difficult guttural sounds from my Al Kitaab pronunciation CD for Arabic. I had to press rewind so many times to hear the letters and pronounce them. I would have been better off listening to a fun Egyptian Arabic pop song by Amr Diab and registering those sounds to a melody rather than learning them in isolation on my CD player. Music imprints sounds in our memory much better than a pronunciation lesson in class or a CD that ends up breaking our CD player from overuse. Music is an essential element of the human condition. Neuroscientists have shown that music engages more parts of our brain than language. Some stroke survivors can sing and dance to music but can barely speak. Music gets deep into our psyche and memory. It sticks. Conjugation charts and vocabulary lists don’t stick. (Read Dr. Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia for more information on how music effects the brain. This book made me realize how I learned languages using music.)Harness the power of music to make foreign languages stick. I know how powerful music is because I studied 10 languages and speak seven (Russian, English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, and French) with perfect or almost perfect accents. I was able to do this because I listened to language like music and internalized the prosody and melodies of the languages. I also studied grammar, but it’s a lot easier and more fun to study grammar rules when you actually like the language you are learning. Plus, you remember the grammar rules better when you know verses from songs that display these rules, irregular verb conjugations, idioms, etc. Unfortunately, many foreign language classes focus primarily on written exercises and rote memorization. Some people who try to learn on their own bury themselves in grammar books only to find themselves unable to speak well and comprehend native speakers. I’ve met people who have spent more time than I have studying in a language class or on their own. But when we were in the country where our target language was spoken, they were almost inept at speaking and understanding, while I was conversing freely with native speakers. Why? I used music and media in the target language to make the language part of my life. Below are some suggestions from the over 70 tips in my book, Language is Music, on how to put the fun in language learning using music, TV, radio, movies, the internet, and other free and low-cost resources.

Shut up and listen!No, this is not your mom speaking. When we are babies, we listen for almost a year to our mother tongue before we start speaking. As adults, we are too eager to start speaking as soon as we delve into a new language. Give yourself time to just listen. Let the language sink in. 

Relax and Listen to Music in Your Foreign LanguageFind music in your target language that you like. Write the lyrics of the songs while listening. You will have to pause the music and rewind or repeat many times to get the words down. Some words will be hard to write because they may be idioms or slang that you have not learned yet, but just write as much as you can understand.

Compare the lyrics you noted with the original song and see how well you were able to understand the song. Some CDs come with the lyrics inside the CD case. You can also find lyrics online on websites like Lyrics.com, A-Z Lyrics Universe, SmartLyrics,com, eLyrics World, or Yahoo! Music. Once you have your version of the lyrics and the original, you can see how much you were able to understand from listening to the song. Use your dictionary to translate the words you do not know. 

Listen to the Radio or Podcasts in the New LanguageWhen you start listening to radio broadcasts, the radio announcers may sound like they are emitting a stream or storm of sounds and not individual words. In time, you will hear familiar words repeated and will learn to distinguish them. You can actively listen to the radio attentively and take notes, listen to it in the background or just close your eyes to listen without straining yourself to understand. 

Find YouTube videosGo on YouTube and find music in your target language that you like. Some videos even come with subtitles in the target language or in translation. Look for the lyrics of the song by doing a search online. Type in the name of the song and “lyrics”. The videos may also help you understand what the song is about. This is especially important for visual learners. 

Watch TV Daily! Let's say you are learning Spanish. You have found a local Spanish language TV station in your area or you are watching the national Univision news. Even without knowing all the words, you will be able to get the gist of some of the news reports. The images and video footage of events already tell you what the news announcers are talking about. Tune into how they are speaking and the words they are using to describe the images on screen.

Even if you cannot watch TV all the time, it is all right to do things around the house as you listen to the TV in the background. Even though it is not at the forefront of your consciousness, your brain is still processing it and getting used to the flow of the language. 

Make your new language stick!

  The three milestones in learning a foreign-language accent   When learning a language, your accent will go through at most three stages, as shown here: In the worst-case scenario, you'll start with most of your speech being unintelligible, i.e., native speakers don't know what you're saying. This is more like if you're going from, say, English to Chinese than, say, Spanish to Italian. If your accent does start out unintelligible, it won't stay that way for long. Once you start speaking (and this should be happening early and often), you'll quickly reach the next milestone of most of your speech being intelligible, i.e., native speakers know what you're saying, even though your accent might very well be extremely strong. Then it's time to get settled in for a bit, because the path between merely being intelligible and sounding like a native is often a long one. Over the course of plenty of speaking, you should be able to push your accent forward. As you get closer to sounding like a native, you'll probably need more concerted efforts (as opposed to merely speaking) to work out the kinks, but doing so will get you closer and closer to the native milestone. That said, there's not necessarily a need to sound like a native. If you can do everything you need to do after the intelligible milestone but before the native milestone, then you could very will be happy with leaving it at that. 

  When and how to use paid online tutors for language learning   The following is a guest post by Milena Mitic, a native-Serbian speaker who also speaks English and is actively studying Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. In the comments to an earlier post, she noted how she has been making use of various paid online tutors for language learning. As I’ve never used any paid online tutors myself, I was interested in hearing about her experiences, so I asked her if she would write a guest post on the topic, and she kindly agreed.It took me a while to discover that something very interesting is going on in the world of teaching; although I’ve been a heavy internet user for many years, I found out about online tutoring just six months ago. It is comforting to see that I’m not the only one who was completely oblivious of this revolution in teaching; many people think, when I mention online classes, that I’m talking about recorded sessions and not live interaction with a tutor who just happens to be on the other side of the world. So, just to make it clear, in case anyone still has any doubts, paid online tutoring works just like paid “offline” tutoring; you just use Skype or virtual classrooms instead of going to evening classes or meeting your tutor face to face.These virtual classrooms are basically platforms offered on various online tutoring websites, like eduFire or WiZiQ, where you and your teacher can have voice and video chat, as well as sharing a “blackboard” and the presentations and documents that you are using during the class. Both of you can make changes to these documents (typing, drawing, highlighting, etc.) and both of you can see what the other person is doing. Some websites, like the Spanish-teaching 121Speech, use Skype + Google Docs for their classes, and this works very well too. You can then save the notes from the classes to go through them later. These virtual classrooms offer a possibility of one-on-one as well as one-on-many classes.Some of you might be asking why use a paid online tutor when you are already on the internet where, as we all know, variations of everything can be found for free ☺. Well, in my opinion, there are situations where paid tutoring is a better choice.For example, if you are a native speaker of a language that is not popular and free language exchange websites do not work well for you, then paid tutoring seems like a good solution. If you want an organized and structured course of studying, then paid tutoring again seems to me like a better choice (this is, of course, possible to do in a free language exchange, but it is easier to find among paid tutors). Also (and I know some people might argue against this, but this is my experience), at the end it comes to a somewhat sad truth that, when you pay for something, you get better service. Take, for example my favorite language tool for an intermediate level of language knowledge, LingQ. For a 15-minute paid conversation with the tutor, you get a detailed report of the things you struggled with during the conversation—words you couldn’t remember or things you said wrong. What I’m usually getting from free chats with native speakers is “Hablas muy bien!” or “Очень хорошо!”. That’s encouraging but not as helpful…Now, someone also might ask what are the advantages of online over the “offline” tutoring. Well, there are quite few:You do not have to go anywhere to have your class. No time lost in transport. Also, you can organize your classes to completely suit your time; if you feel like having a class at 11 p.m. and your tutor’s time zone permits it, you can do it.It is cheaper. It is SO MUCH cheaper than offline tutoring. And it is easy to see why it is so. In my small town, for example, the concentration of, let’s say, native tutors of Mandarin is certainly not very high. But if you go to eduFire, for example, there are many Mandarin teachers there competing for students and, therefore, prices are low. Of course, it usually works out so that “you get what you paid for”, but don’t forget that $10 has a very different value in U.S. than it does in Guatemala or Egypt, so you might end up with really good tutors for a price you would consider very affordable.If your tutor agrees, you can record your Skype conversations and use them later (this is how I’m currently working on my Spanish pronunciation with one of my tutors from LingQ).Some of these websites (at least this is the case for eduFire and LingQ) have a very strong and supportive community that communicates frequently on their forums, which could be very helpful to your studies.Finally, let me offer a few tips about choosing an online tutor. This doesn’t differ much from choosing an offline tutor; the basic principle is absolutely the same: you have to see how you feel about your tutor and decide if you are happy to work with them. That said, there are few things that can help you in the selection process:Look at the tutor’s rating. Most websites have some way for students to rate tutors. eduFire has a particularly good and helpful rating system. Pay attention to the number of classes/conversations the tutors has done, the number of students he or she has tutored, testimonials, numerical ratings, etc.Many tutors offer free trial session, so you can see whether you like the tutor through one of these (121Speech allows you to take the first class for free as well). Make use of these.See how you like the notes or the report you are left with after the class. Good tutors will make a lot of notes and you will have good material to study until the next class.On many websites, everyone can be a tutor; you do not need any qualifications to do tutoring (although this is not the case with 121Speech; all of their tutors have teaching experience). However, this doesn’t mean that someone with qualifications is by default better than someone without. In fact, most of the very good tutors I’ve encountered are not professional teachers.Keep in mind that it is easier to change your online tutor than to find another language course in your town. So, if you become unhappy with the course or have any other issues to the point that it starts to affect your learning, if you cannot resolve the issue with your tutor, you can just go and find another one.Here are a few comments about the the websites I’m actually using myself:eduFire: They have really wide range of tutors (for languages and other subjects). If you want to find a tutor for Bulgarian or Kiswahili, for example, try there. Also, their virtual classroom is very nice but sometimes can have trouble with the sound. This is easily resolved by talking through Skype while using the rest of their classroom functions.121Speech: Very, very competitive prices and very good teachers. “Unfortunately”, it is only for Spanish ☺. Two things I find a bit annoying are the lack of an automatic time zone converter for bookings (a link to an external time zone calculator is provided) and the lack of PayPal as a payment option.LingQ: I really like the way LingQ is organized and currently this is my main language-learning tool. Unfortunately, it is also the most expensive of these three.I have covered only those websites that I have used myself. There are other online tutoring websites out there that I haven’t tried and I’d be happy to hear from anyone who has used them. That would be all from me. I hope it was helpful. ☺Note: 121Speech offers one free class in exchange for mentions on websites like this, and Milena intends to take advantage of that. 

http://www.multilingualbooks.com/online-radio.html

Language learning by listening to radio. Just click on the country to want to listen to.

Description of the website: 

Those who are learning a new language need ways to exercise the hearing and comprehension of speech, and if they don't actually live in a country or area where the language is spoken, these sources are in short supply. For the absolute beginner, there are audio recordings and foreign videos and DVDs with which we can follow along and practice our understanding of speech, stopping and starting them to catch phrases that eluded us or focus in on nuances of pronunciation. But for those further along, what is needed is something more like an actual conversation - speech taking place in real time that is continually new, that conveys information that we are interested in. Fortunately, with the advent of the internet, there are now many foreign online radio stations, and so we have provided a listing of online news radio, talk, information programs, and music programs featuring music in the native language to practice your understanding of foreign languages.

Note: These stations require the Real Audio player, the Windows Media Player, and MP3 players such as WinAmp. If you don't have these already installed, all of these have free installations that can be found at the links above. Links with the (indirect) designation won't stream directly from this page, but send the user to the radio site's web page, which feature their own interfaces to play the radio station; these usually require ActiveX controls to be turned on in Internet Explorer.