Monday, November 17, 2008

Potluck #49: L'amore di lingue - Love of Languages

It's kind of funny how the topics of iHCPL seem to coincede with the activities of my household very nicely. October 26th was my oldest daughter's 18th birthday and one of the presents she asked for and received from her grandmother was Rosetta Stone's Language Program for Learning German. Although she's in her 5th year of German in high school, she feels that due to the way the class is structured this year (they have German 3, 4 & 5 all in one class) she feels she isn't learning anything new this year. Although that decision has already been made it is interesting to check out these online language programs too. I personally would love to learn Latin, German and Russian.


Livemocha
I agree with the Livemocha philosophy - "We believe that books and self-study programs are important, but to become truly proficient and conversational you need to work with actual native speakers." Nice format here but the emails telling me that I am "falling behind" are over the top.

Mango Languages
Most of everything I investigated on this site it seemed I would have to purchase, however it might be a good place to start and figure out if you want to seriously pursue a language. If you are just wanting to get some basics it will suit those needs but I'd recommend something else for more in depth study.

Wikibooks
I am not sure this would be helpful until one has achieved some proficiency in the language they are attempting to learn. I certainly don't know enough about the languages I am interested in learning to make Wikibooks in German or Russian work for me at this point.


After my investigations I would use Livemocha as my primary language instruction tool but would supplement this with Wikibooks.

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