Studying Foreign Languages

 

Ive studied 2 foreign languages (English and Spanish), both quite different from my native language (Russian) and also rather different from each other. Both of the languages I studied mostly on my own. The English classes I took at school, university and English First helped me with English but not nearly as much as what I did outside classroom. And yet Ive been successful at studying and practicing the languages all by myself, although I havent reached the levels of profundity and fluency necessary for being indistinguishable from native speakers or for writing novels or poetry. What Ive reached is enough for understanding others, speaking, reading and writing. And Im going to share with you the details of how I learned the languages, what worked and what didnt, what was useful and what was not.

 

How It All Began. English

I began studying English at a public school, some 15+ years ago. I studied it for about 5 years there, and I cant say I learned much. By the end of the school I ended up knowing about 50 irregular verbs, and as many words as could fit in a couple dozen of pages of a pocket vocabulary. And I had all the usual problems: I didnt know how to pronounce vowels, where to put the accent in many words, how to use the tenses properly, and how to correctly construct sentences any more complex than I went to the movies on Saturday.

 

The reasons for the failure of the public school to teach me English are manifold.

First, the teachers kept changing because the country (USSR) was being torn apart, and people were left to battle for their survival, trying to do anything they could to earn just enough for themselves and their families. The teachers, those people who never seem to be rewarded well for what theyre giving to all of us, were looking for better opportunities than miserable salaries in schools. Many left the country. Many found their places in the new kinds of businesses that worked directly with foreign clients or were Russian subsidiaries of foreign companies. The language skills were necessary to do the work and people who had good language skills found better jobs and abandoned schools. My English teacher changed three times then. The last two were quite old and spoke English better than Russian. No, they werent native speakers of English. They were from the Caucasian part of USSR, so they didnt know well any of the two necessary languages.

 

The second thing was isolation. We only used our textbook to learn the language. We wouldnt use anything like movies or radio to listen to the real speech. Everything used to broadcast in Russian. Well, in some former USSR republics in the native language (e.g. Ukrainian), but nothing like English, German, French, Spanish, you get the idea. We were disconnected from the rest of the world. Computers and internet that help us these days effectively didnt exist back then. Only in the early 90s we got our hands to play with home computers and that was it, playing the games, no educational activity. To be honest, I must mention that in the USSR days there used to be this educational channel on TV that would attempt to teach one the very basics of European languages (English, German and if Im not mistaken some roman languages like Italian, French, and Spanish). But that couldnt be taken seriously because what one would learn from it wouldnt be any more useful than what the kids show Sesame Street would teach. It was too basic. And one could only watch and listen and not participate actively in what was going on in the program.

 

The third was the time. Too little of it was devoted to the language. Whatever we were learning, we were easily forgetting without constantly practicing it and building on top of it.

 

The fourth and perhaps the most important flaw was the total indifference. The teachers couldnt teach well and didnt care. The kids (including myself) as always couldnt care less and would prefer to do anything but study. We can now blame the time and the system, but we couldnt change what was happening back then and so we needed to continue or start almost from scratch.

 

The university didnt improve my English. I still struggled with tenses and lacked vocabulary despite one or two more years of studying the language there. Even though I kind of was interested in English, most of my questions (like why is this so, whats the rule, what are the exceptions and patterns to them) were left unanswered. As I understand it now, back then my curiosity was aiming far beyond what the teachers had studied or were ready to teach. My questions made them think, scratch their heads and say something like Uh, I dont know or Well, its just so, memorize it. Perhaps if I went to a dedicated language school, Id get plenty of information to keep me busy and satisfy my curiosity, if not almost drown me in the overwhelming amount of facts and details.

 

So, there I was, 19 or 20 years old with pathetic English skills as result of the lousy teaching and without a hope to ever speak English well. The free language education didnt seem to work for me.

 

The Miracle of the Internet

But it wasnt hopeless and helpless. At the time I was very interested in computers and used to spend many ours learning about the computers and trying to program something. The brain was full of the new ideas in the completely different field, I was curious and wanted to know more on the subject, as much as I could. So, half way through the university I already knew 4 or more programming languages, including the ones specific to a few entirely different computers. While searching for more information about those bits, bytes and what not I started to read the official documentation supplied with the software. It was painful at first and I guess in the beginning I was more guessing and figuring out the meaning of the texts than actually translating. If youve ever tried to translate from a poorly known (or completely unfamiliar) language by using a regular dictionary, you can understand why it was that way. In 96 and 97 (or was it a year earlier?), the internet broke the grounds in Moscow and little by little various organizations started to have internet connections in their offices. The FIDO network had appeared earlier and for a while was competing with the internet and also was quite useful but soon the internet started to push it out. So, at one of my first part-time jobs in 97 I got to play with the internet and the first thing I did was searching for anything related to computer graphics in the Altavista search engine.

 

A bunch of web pages that Altavista found for my query had lead to the recovery of my English, something I didnt yet know at the time. I greedily began to read everything I was finding on the subject of computer graphics, explanations of the graphical algorithms, mail threads with their discussions, sample programs using them and so on and so forth. There was one particular web page that contained a number of graphical demo programs drawing various things with special effects in 2d and 3d and every demo program and every algorithm used in it was explained in simple English, perhaps the simplest I ever read to date. The documentation was written in an entertaining and breathtaking way. I ended up reading all of it despite the fact that I could understand things from the programs source codes and the fact that I still occasionally needed to use the dictionary to understand some things. When I had been done with that I noticed how easy it was to read and understand, something that never happened before. Of course, part of this ease could be attributed to my interest in the matter and certain redundancy because there were the code and the documentation, not just one of the two. Nonetheless, I noted this fact and decided to carry on and continue reading in English.

 

I found a number of web sites of other people eagerly learning the computer stuff and sharing their ideas and programs with others. The sites contained links to other similar sites and so there always was something interesting to read, one just needed to follow the links or use Altavista to find more. Soon I discovered the existence of news groups, a service mechanically working pretty much like the regular e-mail, except it wasnt just between two people (or everyone on the TO and CC lines); it was between all members of a group and there could be hundreds or thousands of the members. Everyone could read everyone elses message or post their own and everyone else would see it and possibly reply back.

 

In about 2 years of reading off of the internet and communicating with others over e-mail and in news groups I had greatly improved my English. I grasped most of the grammar and extended my vocabulary nicely, although not without a skew towards technical and computer terms. :) Initially it used to take me half an hour to an hour to compose an e-mail or a post to a news group and the message only consisted of a dozen of sentences. And it still contained mistakes despite me trying to avoid them by carefully choosing words and grammatical constructs familiar to me. But in just 2 years of doing that repeatedly I went from a few messages like that a day to reading several dozens of messages daily and writing similar amount of my own, some times for several days in a raw. Wasnt it great? Oh, boy, it was! I was learning what I was interested in. I was sharing with great minds. And I while doing that I was also learning what I needed later and couldnt learn well before. I was learning English.

 

The 2 jolly years almost passed when I knew I was gonna go to the US after graduation to continue my education there. To help myself a little I went to the English First school and spent there several months. It did cost dearly. What these months gave me in return for the money was some more grammar and vocabulary and practice of speaking live, listening to some educational records and watching educational videos. It wasnt really much, but it made me speak more freely and easier not fearing of making mistakes or sounding oddly. It just gave me a nice kick on the butt and the impulse from it made me moving faster in the viscous waters of the foreign language.

 

Surprises Abroad and why Native Teachers Suck

The first time in the US was full of the new and surprises, not all relevant to English. And then there was the language shock. I realized that I still didnt know enough vocabulary, people spoke fast and occasionally used unfamiliar slang phrases, and their pronunciation was completely foreign in the sense that I had never thought some words would be pronounced the way they were. The last fact also meant that a great deal of what Id learned to that date was wrong and had to be corrected.

 

And so I started to work on my English. All the classes were in English, all the entertainment (e.g. the TV) was in English and there was no escape. It was nothing less than a full immersion into the language, something some language classes and software titles claim to provide but really dont.

 

The classes were OK. I could understand most of what teachers said. Besides, a lot of information was either already known or seemed familiar, since it all was mathematics, physics and computer stuff, the things Id studied before. The TV on the other hand was completely incomprehensible. The speech was too fast, sounded odd and there were quite a few words I didnt know. So, I was just staring blankly at the screen, trying to recognize where the words began and ended in this continuous stream of sounds erupting from the box. It was that bad, almost as if I knew no language at all, not a single word of it. I could only guess what they said on the TV. But watching the TV for a few hours a day for about 2 months made the trick. I actually started to understand the speech, not guess. At this point I started to pick new words because they were in frequent use on the TV. I also started to see better where Id do pronunciation mistakes. I started looking at how vowels were pronounced and where the accents in the words were. It was very painful to undo all the damage that had happened to my pronunciation due to the negligence on the teachers part. They never taught me to pronounce correctly. I literally had to unlearn and relearn. To correct the situation I used to repeat the familiar words in their proper articulation, every word that I found sounding different from what I had thought it shouldve sounded like. It was unbelievable. No wonder why so many people who learn Russian dont pronounce words correctly, even if everything else (e.g. grammar) is correct. They all have experienced the same educational flaw. In Russian the accent location is irregular, its never indicated in the text, and it moves as the words change their form. Only practice and memorization can help here.

 

As I was making the progress with English, talking on the phone became easier. You can imagine what it was for me to talk on the phone when I had just arrived to the US. I couldnt understand the darn TV, let alone the phone! And on the phone theres nothing else: you cant see who youre talking to and you cant show anything to that person either. All has to be done by means of speech.

 

I spent almost a year in the US the first time. It was a great experience and helped me with English unlike anything. If you can go for a while to the country of the language, by all means go. Itll be both interesting and useful.

 

The second time I went to the US, which was 4 years later, I took English classes from a native teacher (here by native I dont mean an American Indian who would be the most native American one can ever find:). I wanted to improve and polish some things. The guy wasnt bad, but I was asking him way too many questions to which he didnt know logical answers. Its just that we never question irregularities and oddities of our native languages; we never try to classify them as scientists would. We simply absorb the language the way it is. And so many times questions about those weird things in the language would not find the kind of exhaustive answer we want. And lets face it: native speakers arent the best teachers of their language. They have this captivating feeling that they know the language. After all, dont they? And they miss a lot of the peculiar details like those irregularities because to them they arent irregularities at all. They cant point at them beforehand, but they will immediately spot a mistake in your speech or writing. That is, they wont tell you what to avoid or to do differently before youve made a mistake. Theyll do this after. Its the way they are. However, on the upside, over the time its possible to practice the language to perfection with native speakers. It just may need much more time than you actually have. Think about the kids. It takes them several years of constant communication with the parents, other children and the childcare personnel to master the grammar and learn basic vocabulary. And dont forget that at this early age learning (well, memorizing) is the most effective than at any later point in our lives. So, to master the language this way in adulthood one would need to spend a lot of time talking the language. And if a lot doesnt sound like much, think 3-5 years minimum. Now thats a lot, isnt it?

 

Learning 2nd, 3rd, etc Foreign Language

So, if youve already learned one foreign language (or studied your native language in depth), heres what youre likely to face when learning another one. If you use some standard text book, it will seem to you boring and lacking details. Itll happen not because the book is bad, but because you already know what to expect in the new language, youll already be familiar with many concepts and constructs the book describes because those are shared among several languages and you know some of them from another language. So, you wont need all those repetitious detailed explanations and numerous examples just to understand what you already know or to get the idea of a foreign language being very different from your native and the fact that one generally does not translate word for word. And thats a normal thing to happen.

 

The way out? Look for a good grammar reference thats nearly complete, where the information is presented in a well structured manner (with diagrams, tables, cross references), which covers common irregularities and provides patterns for those irregular things that cant be explained by a precise rule, but can be quickly recognized as suspicious (if one knows what to look for), be checked with a dictionary and learned correctly. For example, we know that in many English words the pattern ea (as in the word eat) reads as the e letter of the English alphabet. But therere also words where it reads differently. Compare eat with weapon, great and caveat. Got it? Now you know what to do when you see a new word with ea in it. You need to look it up in the dictionary and memorize the pronunciation along with the spelling. If you dont learn about this ambiguity from a book or some other place, youll probably learn it the hard way. See if the book points at such suspicious things. Also get yourself a vocabulary. Start with a pocket vocabulary with about 2-3 thousand words. Well, it may be more practical to start with a smaller one (100-500 words) but youll grow out of it quickly anyway. Learn the grammar and several hundred of words. The vocabulary can be studied almost indefinitely due to the enormous amount of words in a language, but the basic grammar is quite compact. So, get the grammar straight, study the grammar reference from cover to cover. Read it whole several times until you understand it all and it looks familiar enough for recognizing. In the mean time memorize the words from the vocabulary. 500 to 1000 words would be a good start. I think fluent language skills correspond to three to five thousand words or more. Obviously, we dont use all of them daily. And which ones we use depends on what were talking about. This article, for example, contains about a thousand unique words. When youre finished with the grammar, you can turn to books, newspapers, and web sites. The learned grammar and basic words will be enough to begin reading and build upon. Youll learn more words and touch up your grammar in the process. Writing is also useful, so finding a pen pal for language exchange and writing to each other can be a good exercise. Or you could find an interesting newsgroup (or forum) on the internet in the language youre learning and get involved in discussions. Also start with audio-visual aids such as radio or TV. In the beginning it may be much like listening to a continuous flow of sounds or just noise and trying to decipher and guess. But dont worry, itll get better as soon as you know enough words and are accustomed to the speech.

 

Engineering the Success

If youve got a bit of ingenuity and arent afraid of technology and learning new and cool stuff (which, I suppose, you dont if youve embarked onto learning a foreign language and are reading this), consider making a good use of your computer to help yourself. If youve already used electronic dictionaries, flash card programs and other educational software, you can make a big step forward, if not a giant leap and exploit the technology to provide you with additional services you could only dream of.

 

So, youve been making your flash cards (I hope you have or at least planned to) by hand in a text editor or in the flash card program of your choice. Its all right to do this once or several times, but the more words you need, the more time consuming this is going to be because of the limitation of the tools (the editor or the flash card program). The user interface may be not good enough or it may require you to constantly switch between the keyboard and mouse. Or there can be no simple functionality like search and replace a complex pattern of text or simply to sort or randomly order your words or cards. Its sad these basic things arent readily available. But theres a way out. It may be not for the faint-hearted to do what Im gonna suggest, but it truly pays out.

 

Learn how to make basic script programs in Perl. Perl is either already available in your computer if youre using Linux or Unix or some similar Operating System, or it can be freely downloaded for your Windows. Its been made available for many OSes and chances are youre a few if not less clicks away from getting it onto your computer.

 

Perl is a very powerful tool for all sorts of manipulations with text. Its easy to search for text and its easy to replace text with Perl. Its possible to specify a complex pattern of symbols instead of trying various combinations and Perl will find the text matching the given pattern. And it will do replacement based on the patterns too. Youd be able to sort the words/cards or just randomly order them. Youd be able to find unique words or duplicate words. And the best thing about this is that these operations become automated. You no longer need to spend minutes and hours of your precious time on just editing, copying & pasting something. Youd be able to do things like distinguishing verbs, adverbs and adjectives from a list of words; an input text file and your smart Perl script will do it quickly and efficiently. Knowing some basic word morphology and using the regular expressions can do the trick. At times you might need to jump through the hoops because of the language irregularities and ambiguities, but hey, this is precisely what engineers deal with on the regular basis. Be one of those great minds, be smart and do cool stuff few people do!

 

Suppose, youve already studied the language grammar and youre reading your first book in the new language and you need to learn many new words from the text and you plan on making use of your flash card program to memorize them. Open your electronic dictionary. You must have one already. Instead of opening the flash card program and making the cards on the go, open your text editor. Make the cards in the plain text form in your editor. Use one line per pair of words, like so:

 

information;información

black;negro

ocean;oceano

frequently;frecuentemente

abandon;abandonar

 

Save this file as Unicode (UTF-8, in particular). Youll be able to make flash cards out of this file at any point later. Just compose the list of words you need and their translation. Use some unique non-letter character to separate the words in the two languages. A semicolon can be used. Less apparent but also suitable could be the tab characters.

 

Now, what you really want to do while learning languages that have the notion of gender in the grammar (such as Spanish and Russian) is to mark somehow the gender of nouns. In Spanish this could easily be achieved by simply placing the definite article in front of the noun. That way youll learn not just the noun but also its gender and never confuse. So, the list would be now like this:

 

information;la información

black;negro

ocean;el oceano

frequently;frecuentemente

to abandon;abandonar

A note of caution to the learners of Spanish and perhaps similar languages: while the above technique works perfectly most of the time, therere rare exceptions regarding the articles:

  • the same word may have a different meaning with an article: el guía=a guide (a male person), la guía=a guide (a female person or a book)
  • due to the pronunciation issues the article can mismatch in gender with the noun: agua=water is a feminine noun but its written and spoken with the singular masculine article: el agua (trying to avoid la agua and lagua in speech) but with the plural feminine article: las aguas.

 

Now, if you have this list, its easy to figure out which word is what part of speech. All Spanish nouns are denoted by the definite article. All Spanish verbs end in ar/er/ir/ír (except ayer, which is an adverb). Most single-word adverbs in Spanish end in mente (except despacio). Unless you put entire phrases into this file, prepositions or some new kind of word, the rest are the adjectives (and they in Spanish normally end in o/a/e and less often in other letters such as l/n/r/s/z). You can write a Perl script to search this list for the appropriate letter patterns and generate from it another list that contains, say, only nouns or only verbs. You can now choose what part of speech to concentrate on. Can your flash card program help with this? I bet not. And even if it can, most likely it wouldnt be this flexible. The application of the above idea will, of course, vary from language to language. If its hard to employ morphology, you can still come up with some markers such as the definite articles in front of English nouns and the preposition to in front of English verbs. You can guide the automation with these markers. For Russian instead of the articles (which are non-existent in the language) one could use the personal pronouns such as she, he and it for all 3 genders (the 3rd is neuter). Adjectives, verbs y adverbs can be easily recognized from a simple morphological analysis.

 

What else can you do? For the fun of it or for educational purposes, you can combine the words into something more meaningful. Suppose, you have this list:

 

kimono;el quimono

white;blanco

 

Knowing which word is what part of speech, couldnt you combine them like so?:

 

white kimono;el quimono blanco

 

You could. And this would allow you to learn words not individually but together, several at once. Or you could easily generate cards with conjugations of regular verbs. Or cards with numbers from 1 to 99. You get the idea.

 

Now, lets get back to actual flash cards. From a text file with a list of words with Perl you can easily create flash cards that are also effectively text files (txt, html, xml, etc). If your flash card program works with flash cards in a text-based file format, you need to find out what that format is (look at some available cards in a text editor or if you have none yet, create a card in the program and then analyze its format). If its binary (with lots of weird symbols), check if you can easily import your lists into the programs cards. If the program supports only the binary format and has no easy import function, dump it. Find one that operates with cards in simple almost plain-text format (Pauker is almost that thing: the xml flash card files it uses are additionally compressed with the standard gzip file compressor). Then write a script to make cards from your word lists and enjoy learning the way you want. And by the way, there exist word lists which can be helpful too.

 

Flash Card Tips

Therere a few things we may do inefficiently while using flash cards that can be done better.

  • Make cards for cognates and familiar words too. If you dont and you only limit yourself to memorizing new unfamiliar words, chances are you wont be able to remember those familiar ones, just because you never bothered to memorize them well.
  • Mark familiar words with some special character so that later on you can split the words into 2 different categories and work with them individually. Or put the familiar words on a separate list. You probably dont need to spend much time on the familiar words, so you can put them aside and touch infrequently. Keep your options open.
  • If you have a few cards with synonyms, it might be helpful to embed a hint into the card such that it would give the first letter of the synonym, or its ending, something unique for that particular word. It could be something like:
    the car (el co*);el coche
    the car (el ca*);el carro
    Obviously, the above example works if youre shown the English side of the flash card and youre asked to enter the Spanish side. In order to do this exercise the other way around, from Spanish to English, you need a different flash card, without the hint or with the hint on the other side. Or maybe you want a proto flash card with hints on both sides such that from it through automation you can generate in seconds the appropriate card for actual use.
  • If youre learning words of such language as English, in which the accented vowel cant always be determined by a simple rule, then on the back side of the flash card surround the accented vowel(s) by some special characters, like this:
    mach+i+ne
    and let your flash card program not only verify whether or not the word in your answer is correct, but also whether or not you know the stress location in the word. And thats at a negligible cost to you. The same can be done with silent letters, e.g.:
    dum(b).
  • If in the language youre studying therere things like English phrasal verbs (e.g. get up, get back, get away, get around, get by, etc) or Russian verbs with prefixes (essentially, with the same special function of the prefixes as the particles in the English phrasal verbs, to alter the meaning), so if therere those seemingly minor variations of the same word, consider making cards for those variations too (not just the verb to make from the previous example), else youre risking to miss some important details.
  • Although prepositions often can be translated exactly, there usually exist a number of exceptions and some verbs require prepositions different from what we can naïvely expect based upon knowledge of our native language. In those cases it makes perfect sense to create cards with those irregular pairs of verbs and prepositions. For example:
    comply with;acatar
    soñar con;to dream about
    pensar en;to think about
  • If youre reading a book and therere many unfamiliar words, but you kind of understand the meaning anyway, you need somehow to learn them. Use a pencil to mark the unfamiliar words in the text. Also, you can create flash cards as youre reading the text or you can make them afterwards (one paragraph, page or chapter at a time). If youre making the cards as you read, you may have a feeling its all too slow and you get distracted from the text. On the other hand, if youre making the cards at some later time (once youve read another chapter or the whole book), it may feel less disturbing but also kind of boring to go through the same text again. Try both, see what the most appropriate balance for you is and stick to that. As you progress, you may change the amount you read before you make new cards.
  • If youre making flash cards based on the text you read, consider getting yourself whats called a book holder or a book rest so you can free up your hands from holding the book for typing.
  • It may be helpful to use flash cards in the languages, neither of which is your native. If you have learned some language already and know it very well, using flash cards in that language and in the language youre currently studying will not only let you learn the new words of the new language, but also improve your vocabulary in the language you already know.
  • You could try automating the process of word extraction. You could try using a scanner with text recognition software to build a list of all words in the text. Or you could try this neat gadget, a scanning pen, that youd use as if it was a yellow (or whats your favorite color) marker to scan on the go each word, phrase or sentence you want and then dump the scanned words into your computer. Actually, some of these come with built-in dictionaries and can be used for immediate translation, which may be very helpful too.
  • You can find on the internet word lists. There exist a number of lists containing first several thousand words of many languages. I was able to find English, Spanish, French and some other word lists. Frequency lists can help you to see what words belong to the basic and extended vocabularies and you may identify words that you need to learn first and next.

 

Resources in a Nutshell

For grammar and vocabulary:

  • Grammar books
  • Bilingual vocabularies
  • Word lists
  • Picture vocabularies (AKA pictionaries): I suspect theyre good for nouns and not so good for verbs, adjectives and adverbs because its easier to represent an object with a still picture than its property or an action.

For reading practice:

  • Bilingual/dual-language books
  • Books adapted for students
  • Children books
  • Local newspapers available in the language youre learning (not available everywhere)
  • Web sites such as news websites, websites related to your hobbies or Wikipedia articles

For reading and writing practice:

  • Find a pen pal and do language exchange with them over e-mail. Read and write in both languages, have each other correct each others text. Unfortunately, I havent had good experience with penpals. It seems like mine were quick on the promise but short on the delivery. You both need to make a commitment. If you dont have enough time for this on the regular basis, just dont do it. If your pal takes too much time to answer for no good reason, just dump them.
  • Find other people with the same interest as yours. Search the web for sites about your hobbies in the language youre learning, look for foreign newsgroups. Subscribe to the newsgroups and actively participate in there. Communicate with someone more personally over e-mail.
  • Translate articles to and from another language. Therere plenty on the internet. Just find something interesting.

For listening practice:

  • Radio: search in all wave ranges, not just Frequency Modulation(FM)/High Frequency(HF) (ultra short waves), but also in Amplitude Modulation(AM) (short, medium, and longs waves). Its very likely youll be able to find something in the short waves range as these waves travel all around the globe and so you can find some radio station broadcasting from another country in the language you want. However, dont expect good sound quality from AM. It may be very difficult to understand (compared to the phone), so it may not be something to start doing from the very beginning. Anyways, if you do it and keep doing it even if you dont understand much, itll still help, not immediately, though. For English there used to be Voice of America and BBC, and many people have listened to those in the former USSR and Russia.
  • TV and Movies: get a satellite dish or subscribe to channels in the language. Find and rent movies in the language. However, dont expect subtitles (also known as closed captioning) to be there, to be correct and even repeat exactly the same text as spoken in the program. I was disappointed to find that in one movie in which everybody spoke Spanish the subtitles barely matched the speech. In many others there were no subtitles at all.
  • Internet telephony: therere programs like Skype and SIP-clients which will turn your computers microphone and speaker (or headphones) into a telephone. Use this with your pen pal.
  • Internet radio/TV: I almost forgot to mention these. Some radio stations and TV channels are broadcasted over the internet. Some of these are offered as a free service and some have to be paid for. The quality, however, may be much better than that of an analog radio receiver. Of course, these need a fast internet connection, not the kind youll get with a dial up modem. The same applies to the internet telephony.
  • Additionally, if you still lack the speaking practice or you have nobody to talk in the language, you can take some intermediate or advanced language classes. Some colleges and universities offer inexpensive non-credit language classes.

 

Some Useful Links

Flash card programs:

 

Flash cards:

 

Grammar books:

 

Word lists:

 

Bilingual books for reading:

 

Pen scanners:

  • QuickLink-Pen
  • Wizcom InfoScan/Quicktionary
  • Iris IRISPen

 

Verb conjugators:

 

 

March 2008

Alexei A. Frounze



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