In 2011, I spent 712 hours learning languages, compared to 615 hours in 2010. That’s a great success, and my goal for this year is at least 712 hours but hopefully 800!
Distribution by language, with quick summaries:
220 hours of Mandarin – started reading books in Mandarin
124 hours of Arabic – slowly getting somewhere
118 hours of Dutch – from scratch to quasi-B2
111 hours of French – mostly reading
47 hours of Modern Greek – developing a series for GreekPod101
31 hours of Italian – just maintenance
26 hours of Swahili – just maintenance
26 hours of Spanish – just maintenance
9 hours of Russian – a brief stint, quickly abandoned

Around the World in 25 Books & 10 Languages

I planned badly – I didn’t take into account that I would be flying without check-in luggage to see my family for the Christmas holidays and to the Junulara E-Semajno, so I was out of space to bring the remaining books with me and couldn’t finish them. I probably would have come up a bit short, but because of this, I’m actually 8 books short.

I read 17 books in 8 languages, missing only Esperanto and Latin (easy languages for me). I am still proud of this result because 17 books is a lot more than I’d normally read in 2 months, particularly when it comes to foreign-language books, which are always more of a struggle. And I am particularly proud that I finished my first originally-Chinese book for this challenge, a classic by Lao She called “二马” (Mr Ma and Son).

If you’d like to read my reviews of the books I read during this challenge, have a look at this special Goodreads bookshelf.

Mandarin Chinese
Currently, I can read a modern Chinese book if the style isn’t too literary and I’d understand what’s going on, but it’s not enjoyable for me. I can also have a 45-minute conversation in Chinese, but I’m often missing words, I stumble over words and make too many mistakes. By the end of 2012, I want to be able to do both in a more enjoyable manner.
Method:
* Reading “Confessions of a Shopaholic” in Chinese-English parallel and entering colloquial expressions from there into Anki
* Listening-Reading “Mr Ma and Son”, which I have already read but for which I now found an audiobook
* Reading or Listening-Reading the modern Chinese novels which I brought back from the USA
* Reading the Chinese-only novels I found in Berlin
* Watching episodes from the new Romance of the Three Kingdoms TV series and from 家有儿女
* Mastering the song 中国话 by S.H.E, which is fast and full of tongue twisters
* Hopefully lots of talking!

Finnish
Due to a challenge I couldn’t resist, I will spend 45 hours on Finnish in February, despite it being nowhere on my hit list. Right now, I have zero knowledge of Finnish and it will be interesting to see where I’ll be at the end of the month… and where the others will be.
Method: mostly Assimil in conjunction with Anki, occasionally talking to a tutor for confirmation, possibly looking over other courses, children’s books or videos in order to keep up interest.

French
I can read any piece of French literature, including really old stuff, and my listening comprehension is also really good, but I feel that my active usage of French is lagging behind. I would also really love to exchange my German accent for a Québécois one. So my goal is to develop a good accent in 2012 and to reach a mistake quotient of less than 1/100 words. I shall also keep reading French classics.
Method:
* Talking to any Québécois who doesn’t run away fast enough
* Writing texts on lang-8 where they can be corrected
* Learning to imitate at least one recording of fast Québécois French
* Reading at least one French book per month

Indonesian & Korean
These were actually next on my list of languages to learn (I only know the Korean alphabet, and did a few lessons of Indonesian some years ago), but for now they’re taking a back seat to Finnish and Japanese. We shall see if there’s time, maybe in the second half of the year. For Indonesian I wanted to try out a translation-based course I have, and for Korean I just got Assimil Korean as a Christmas present.

Italian / Dutch / Spanish
I can read all of these with ease and make myself understood in conversations, but it’s more a case of make-believe than actual ability at this point (my Italian is full of Spanish and vice versa). I’d like to find time to work on one of these languages in particular and acquire real fluency in it. For that, I first have to find a language partner though.

Modern Greek
I’m happy with my ability to read Greek novels, but my speaking ability used to be better. Hopefully I shall have the chance to re-activate it at some point in 2012.

Japanese
I know zero Japanese at the moment, and I would love to be able to understand enough spoken Japanese in order to follow along in “Hikaru no Go” without the subtitles. Apart from that, it would be awesome to be able to watch Japanese Go lectures or Go TV. I am not interested in learning the written language because it would probably interfere with my knowledge of Chinese characters, which were difficult enough to acquire.
Method:
* Studying a quick course called “Le japonais tout de suite”
* Memorizing 600 of the most useful words
* Watching anime
* Whatever else I can come up with

Swahili
To my greatest regret, I stopped studying Swahili after completing 100 lessons of Assimil’s passive wave and 50 lessons of the active wave. In 2012, I intend to complete the rest of the active wave, assess my abilities then for the purpose of the experiment, and then start wildly using any materials I can get my hands on. My goal is to be able to comfortable read my collection of Swahili poems as well as understand Swahili audio news.
Method:
* Completing Assimil
* Scanning “Essential Swahili” and other courses I have lying around
* Creating & using Listening-Reading materials on the basis of Deutsche Welle’s “Learning By Ear”
* Reading the “Little Prince”, some children’s books and my advanced reader in Swahili
* Listening to news broadcasts

Quick update on the challenge: I already finished two books, Egypt (Ramsès), which I had started to read before this challenge, and Turkey (Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran – fun insight here). Both of these were in French – even though I read English, German and Esperanto more easily than French, I tend to buy a lot of French books, because I hope that it will help me finally get my degree in French Studies. In other words, I ought to get better at French. And I do: when I started on Ramsès, my reading speed was close to 2 minutes per page, now it sometimes reaches 1 minute per page. The next book, which I started reading today, is a challenge though. One because it’s excerpts of Greek classics, including some poetry, so it is linguistically more challenging, and also because I’ve never done better than 4 minutes per page in reading Greek so far.

Enjoyment of a book depends on two factors: reading speed and the amount of interesting things per 10 pages. “Interesting things” may vary depending on the type of book (surprising facts in a non-fictional book, thrilling events or funny dialog in fiction) and of course depending on the reader’s interests. However, if you read very slowly, it is so much more difficult to stay interested in a book, because you don’t hit many interesting things when you read for 10 minutes. At that point you’ll sit back and think that nothing has happened or that you haven’t learned anything new, so of course you lose interest. If you’re a quick reader, lots of books suddenly become interesting that other people find boring, because within 10 minutes you find a lot more action or amazing insights.

What this means for language learners

As someone reading in a foreign language, your reading speed will initially be abysmal. You have several options to combat this and make reading fun:

• Do exercises to improve your reading speed. Your reading speed will naturally improve in time, but to get a quick boost, I found Tim Ferriss’ exercise invaluable.
• Choose an easier book. You can read faster if you recognize more words, but Easy Readers also tend to be more boring than regular books, so you might not gain much.
• Choose a thrilling book. Suspense and unexpected turns count as “more interesting things per 10 pages”, so that reading at slower speed becomes more supportable. Dan Brown for example is a great choice for this.
• Choose a book you’re dying to read. Again, there should be more interesting things per 10 pages. Ideally, you’d browse your favorite section of a bookstore in your target country, forgetting about the language issue and just picking whatever looks fascinating.
• Choose an “oldie but a goodie”. There are books that we like to re-read many times, delighting in discovering nuances and foreshadowing, or maybe using them as a basis for philosophizing. These books won’t be boring when read slowly either, and the foreign language will even help you see the content in a new light. “The Little Prince” is such a book for example, and also has the advantage of being easy. Among my women friends, “Pride and Prejudice” is also a popular re-read.
• Set yourself a challenge. No matter whether the challenge is to read “around the world”, to discover logical fallacies in the book or to find all the times the author uses a particular word, you will stumble upon more interesting things that make reading more fun.

If you’re not sure where to get books in your target language, try Bookdepository; they have a great selection even for obscure languages and they offer free shipping worldwide. If you click on “Advanced Search” you can search by language. Select “paperback” in order to weed out some mismatches.

I want to make a big dent in this pile in the next two months. My idea is an “around the world” theme. I picked 25 books representing 25 countries and all continents, and I will read all of them before January 1st. These books are written in 10 different languages, and I avoided German & English for the most part, so this will also be a linguistic challenge. Languages represented, in rough order of frequency: French, Esperanto, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Latin, Greek, German, English.

Journey plan:

Join me!

This is a great chance to discover foreign cultures and authors who are less known in the English-speaking world. Have a look at the books I will be reading, maybe something interests you as well, or maybe you also have unread books that you can use for your personal round-the-world trip. The details of my journey, following the path on the map:

Egypt: Christian Jacq – Ramsès, fils de la lumière (Ramses, the son of light). This bestselling novel about Ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II is written by an Egyptologist, meaning that it’s classes better than some wanna-be historian’s image of Egypt.
Turkey: Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt – Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran. Another French best-selling book about the Middle East.
Greece: Από πού έρχεστε; A bilingual Greek-German reader about Greece.
Italy: Dino Buzzati – Lascia o Raddoppia; bilingual Italian-German
Sweden: Merit Müller – Mara en de kleur van het geluk. This is originally a Swedish book, but I have it in Dutch.
Netherlands: Arthur Japin – De grote wereld
UK: Lao She – Mr. Ma & Son, a Sojourn in London; A bilingual Chinese-English novel that sounds funny.
Canada: Michel Tremblay – Les Belles-Soeurs. I am looking forward to the liberal use of Joual (Canadian French dialect) in this drama.
USA: Gustaaf Peek – Ik was Amerika. The story of a Dutch POW who was shipped to America. A chapter of history that I hadn’t heard of.
Mexico: J.M.G. Le Clézio – Le rêve mexicain (The Mexican Dream). Essays on the Aztecs, the role of Cortes, Montezuma etc. and how the Western world might look today if the Aztec culture had been allowed to survive.
Colombia: Patricia Lara S. – Las Mujeres en la Guerra. Women telling about their role in the Colombian conflict.
Peru: Mario Vargas Llosa – Der Geschichtenerzähler. This book was selected as this year’s Free Book to be given out all across Berlin, that’s why I will read it in German rather than the original Spanish (El Hablador), maybe re-reading it in Spanish later. It’s about a man who goes to live with the Native Americans in the Peruvian jungle and learn their stories.
Chile: Joan E. Garcés – Allende y la experiencia chilena.
Suriname and the Dutch Antilles: Dylan van Eijkeren – Witboi. Another topic I never heard of before: about the relations between the Netherlands and their former colonies, and what’s really going on over there.
Tunisia: Apuleius – Apologia. Apuleius was a Roman writer, but he was also a Berber(indigenous North African), a very interesting person. The Apologia is said to be one of the funniest Latin texts to survive.
(Various African countries): An anthology of notable works by French-speaking black Africans, “Conteurs francophones noirs”.
Chad: André Gide – Le Retour du Chad. André Gide is a well-known name in French literature, and I have read far too little about Africa.
Congo: André Gide – Voyage au Congo. Ditto.
Australia: Trevor Steele – Flugi kun kakatuoj. An original Esperanto novel about an Aborigene tribe and the arrival of Europeans.
Japan: Kenzaburo Oe – Insegnaci a superare la nostra pazzia. As I’m not studying Japanese yet, I don’t feel bad for reading the great Kenzaburo Oe in Italian.
Ancient China: Shan Sa – Impératrice. I love Chinese-born French author Shan Sa for her novel “La Joueuse de Go”, which was horribly mistranslated in “The Girl Who Played Go”. Read this in French or don’t read it at all. Meanwhile, I’ll try another one of her novels.
Modern China: Annie Wang – From Mainland to Mainstream. Despite the title, this book is all in Chinese and I hope I will be up for it.
Afghanistan: Oriana Fallaci – Inciallah. Oriana Fallaci is an Italian reporter and this book, which I had started on before and found beyond my level, is a really interesting read. She illuminates not just the current situation in Afghanistan but also the historic causes, the Syrian-Lebanese conflict etc., all in the course of a long novel. I’m dying to read this; hopefully I’m not throwing the book down in frustration again.
Russia: Mikaelo Bronŝtejn – Oni ne pafas en Jamburg. An Esperanto novel about the legendary youth movement in the 70s in Soviet Russia.
Siberia/Russia: Julio Baghy – Viktimoj. A classic of Esperanto literature, about life in a Siberian gulag, written by someone who has been there and who is counted among the greatest of Esperanto-speaking poets.

Reading all these books before the end of the year will be a tough challenge, especially as I still have to work and I will be traveling a lot within that time span (our annual trip to the USA and Christmas visits to family). However, I am also looking forward immensely to reading every book on this list, and to buying more books.

Post your recommendations, tips and comments below.

After the festival, I got sucked into the new 三国 TV Series, which is loosely based on the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. It’s not a romance at all, it’s about history and chivalry, and it’s considered one of the “four great classics” of Chinese literature. Considering how much literature has come from China, making it into eternal memory as one of the uncontested top 4 has to count for something, so I recommend anyone to have a look. Either way I’ve been watching a lot of Chinese video with Chinese subtitles and it’s helping. About a week ago, while hosting a Couchsurfer from France (yay French practise!), I first noticed a Chinese voice in my head. That is, whenever I was mentally phrasing something, the Chinese translation would pop into my head without any effort of mine. Before, I always had to translate and carefully plan anything I wanted to say in Chinese. This is a major milestone!

I believe I may have overdosed on vocabulary study for Chinese. Following my success bringing my character level up to 3000 in a single year, I’ve been religiously using Anki for Chinese, and I’ve taken weekly classes online with a private teacher. During class, we spent half an hour working with the Boya Chinese textbook and half an hour in free conversation. I do not think that I’m presently getting enough exposure though, especially when it comes to things modern people might say (as opposed to phrases that can only be used by time travellers, which I’m learning from 三国).

This is why I’ve decided to participate in the “Read More or Die” aka Tadoku challenge this April. It’s very simple: read as much text in your target language(s) as possible for one month and try to outdo the other participants in number of pages read. You can participate even if you know that you won’t place near the top; this is just a way to utilize your competitive streak for motivation. Time is running out to register – if you think you can out-read me, sign up quickly!

My stats from January 1st until March 31st:
49 hours of French
109 hours of Mandarin
2 1/2 hours of Greek (hope to remedy that)
8 hours of Swahili (need to work on that too)
70 hours of Dutch
1/2 an hour each on Italian and Arabic

Good news: I’ve already almost reached half of last year’s time spent on Mandarin and 1/3 of last year’s time spent on French. Very happy with that. Bad news: I really wanted to spend more time on Dutch and on my maintenance languages.

In April, I will focus on reading Chinese, Dutch and Greek. I may start dabbling in Spanish, because Spanish is next on my list of beginner languages to learn. I also absolutely have to squeeze in at least one month of Listening-Reading for Russian before July because I’ll be going to the IJK in Kiev and I want to see how far Listening-Reading can get me.

Chinese: 236 hours – Success!
I was hoping to work on Chinese a lot, and I actually did so. I practised all parts of the language, too, including pronunciation, speaking and writing – and I did lots of listening (Romance of the Three Kingdoms TV series) and reading. At this point I can sort of read “A Dictionary of Maqiao”, but long sentences tend to throw me off and it’s still not fun. I shall voluntarily continue with cartoons and Harry Potter first, or read “A Dictionary of Maqiao” in parallel with the English. Actually I read quite a bit of Harry Potter in L-R, except I got annoyed with having to invest as much time in aligning the text as in reading it, so I got side-tracked into writing a better aligner and stopped reading. Oh well. My active language usage has much improved, and I’ve learned more than 3000 new words this year. I will keep plowing ahead, but I hope that Chinese can be less of a focus in the coming year.

French: 140 hours – Success!
I read a whole bunch of classics, though not one-a-month as originally intended. I’m happy with the overall count though, because I also read two French-language fanfictions of 1700 pages (!) and 950 pages, both of them within the same two weeks. Reading French can be addicting when it’s not university-assigned stuff. I also completed about 40 pages of essays in French; in return I didn’t write much on lang-8 despite my good resolutions. The aligatorejo showed that speaking French comes more easily and naturally now, about as effortlessly as speaking English, so I’m happy with that. Writing French doesn’t feel the same yet, but I’m blaming it on lack of opportunity.

Swahili: 92 hours – Mostly success!
Staying true to the plan, I’ve used nothing except the Assimil course (and Anki, but no outside source of vocabulary) for Swahili. I finished all 100 lessons of the passive wave and I did a first pass over the first 50 lessons of the active wave as well, but I still need to enter a couple of them into Anki, the deck creation takes about as much time as the studying itself. Today I had my first Swahili conversation and it went
well. I gave a talk on Swahili at the Esperanto New Year’s event. Around 20 people attended the talk and I then found out there were 2 other Swahili speakers at this event. Annoying that they didn’t show up for the aligatorejo so I had little time to talk to them. Anyway, a quick test shows that I can understand 90% of the words in the “Little Prince” in Swahili and 85% of a random Wikipedia article; however, my
book of Swahili poetry is still incomprehensible except for a few phrases here and there. Even though it’s hard, I shall complete the active wave and do more tests before reading the little prince or studying any other materials in order to get the full assessment of Assimil. I am unhappy that I planned my time unwisely and didn’t finish the active wave yet. However, I spent a lot of time working on vocabulary and the
extensive Swahili grammar, so the active wave is going smoothly, it’s mostly an issue of entering all the phrases, linking the audio etc.

Italian: 13 hours – who cares anyway?
At first I delayed it because I wanted to do a 1 Month Challenge for Arabic, then later I couldn’t get into my books while finally finding the motivation to do more French, in other words Italian fell by the wayside. I did finish an Italian novel though and I greatly improved my reading speed so the next one should be more enjoyable. Hopefully
I’ll find someone interesting to practise speaking with too.

Greek: 91 hours – success!
I read the entire first book of Harry Potter, my first monolingual Greek novel, amongst other things, and I did so without consulting a dictionary. Right now, my reading level is definitely B2. My active language usage has improved a lot, too, but it’s still borderline B1/B2 I’d say, because I lost my tandem partner in the second half of the
year. I’ll keep working on Greek.

Arabic: 43 hours – cancelled
Started with a 1 Month Challenge, which was fun, but then my Anki was piling up too quickly and my textbook didn’t have nearly enough exercises for all the things it was throwing at me, so I got overwhelmed and burnt out, cancelling this in favor of more Chinese and French. Will try again in 2011 since I found other materials now; if all goes well, I shall focus as much on Arabic in 2011 as I did on Chinese in 2010.

Others – Success!
I spent 28 hours actively improving my Esperanto and Latin. For these languages I’m not counting the countless hours I spent talking/reading in them or even teaching them, just the time I spent studying and trying to improve myself. Another bright aspect is that I successfully avoided wanderlust this year – only 3 hours of Spanish, 3 hours of Russian and one hour of Maori all year!
All in all, I reached an average of about 12 hours a week of language study, including the time I was traveling or sick. It’s a good result, but leaves room for improvement, and that’s what I shall do next year, with the help of my new awesome spreadsheets. Took me a while to optimize everything, now I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do when everything is set up right right from the start (hopefully).

Well, I’m addicted to learning vocabulary. Yes, addicted is the right word. I can’t go a day without. It’s too much fun. How? I will tell you, but I want you to first promise that you’ll give it a try. I suggested this tip to many people, and most were skeptical at first, but those who tried it still randomly come up and thank me for it. It changed the way they learn languages.

The secret is Anki. Anki is a small, unprepossessing piece of software, open-source (though maintained and continuously improved by one Damien Elmes, who also provides awesome customer support) and available for all platforms including smartphones. Anki doesn’t look as fancy as some highly-marketed commercial software like BYKI, but in functionality it’s much better. Let me go over a few things I love about Anki.

For one, there’s the algorithm, the most important part of any SRS (= spaced-repetition software). Anki’s algorithm is well-honed, only asking me words when I’m on the verge of forgetting them, easily transferring them into my extra long-term memory. It’s also possible to tune the algorithm e. g. by giving different default intervals, or by specifying that forgotten words should be asked again right away / in 10 minutes / after 8 hours or the like. This makes Anki suitable for different styles of learners, as well as different subject materials. For example, I also study Go problems on Anki and these I don’t want to see too quickly again; while for pesky Chinese characters 10 minutes or less seems to be optimal for me to make sure I learn them.

Speaking of Chinese, one of the key features of Anki for me is the ability to have unlimited “sides” to a card. For Chinese there’s the issue of learning characters, pronunciation and translation. Using actual paper cards, I never know whether to put the pronunciation on the character side or the translation side. If I put it with the characters, I don’t learn to recognize the characters. If I put it with the translation, I don’t learn to build a link between the concept and the Chinese. This problem is not exclusive to Asian languages though. For example, for European languages I like to have another field for grammar, another field for related words, another field for a sample sentence, another field for a translation of the sample sentence… and then Anki allows me to test myself in any direction, not just word to translation but also translation to word, word to grammar, sample sentence to sample sentence translation (all automatically generated based on one-time entry)… and Anki allows me to specify what I want to see when quizzed in each of these directions, e. g. when I quiz myself on Chinese characters to translation, I also want the pronunciation of the characters to show up underneath the translation. When I quiz myself on translation to Chinese characters, I want to see the pronunciation underneath the characters, plus an example sentence or two. This flexibility is awesome.

Even more awesome is that Anki does auto-completion for Chinese, so I only enter a Chinese word and Anki will already try to fill in the translation and pronunciation for me, so entering vocabulary doesn’t take so long. There are also many awesome decks (for many languages) already available for free in the “Shared Decks” section (like a marketplace, but all free), e. g. a huge, well-made deck covering almost 10,000 Chinese words including all the HSK levels, and a deck with 20,000 Chinese sentences for those who want to try AJATT‘s 10,000 sentence method.

For Japanese there is also auto-completion but for other languages there is something almost as valuable: remembering keyboard layouts. So if I use a Greek keyboard layout to enter my Modern Greek vocabulary in the “Front” field, and then a German keyboard layout to enter the translation in the “Back” field, and I switch back to the front field to enter another word, my keyboard layout will automatically be set to Greek again. Same for Arabic. You can’t believe how much time this saves me!

Anki also has extensive plugin abilities. While I was studying Chinese characters last year, I really liked a plugin that told me how many characters I knew and how they compared to a) frequency lists and b) the HSK official character lists. I could e. g. see that I covered 95% of the HSK 2 list, and then click on it to see which characters I was missing. Click on any character to come up with a dictionary entry for it… awesome. Other plugins extend the kind of data Anki can handle, e. g. there’s a plugin for importing Smart.fm vocabulary, or one for viewing Go games / Go problems in .sgf format as part of the card. Anki natively already supports images, sounds (I made an Esperanto deck with every word recorded), video, HTML, LateX and clozes on cards. A good use for images is studying geography, e. g. learning to recognize countries on the map, also learning their capitals. My boyfriend is addicted to a deck like that.

Ah yes, addiction. The sense of achievement that comes from watching all those words wander into your long-term memory (hitting “Show next in 6 months” etc.), the stats underlining your progress, and also the simple, satisfying way of going over lots of cards at once in the 10-30 minutes I study an Anki deck every day. On the computer I use the numeric keypad 0-4 to rate cards, making the mouse unnecessary so I can go very quickly and lean back comfortably while doing this. Even better with the iPhone version, which I’ll use in bed, on the couch or (even better) on the subway and in the elevator, turning every moment into valuable language-learning time.

Get Anki and tell me about your experience with it!

… a continuation from part 1.

How to improve your…

Pronunciation: if you don’t know how to pronounce a foreign word, Forvo.com has a huge database of recorded words for many languages, mostly done by native speakers. If you however need to know how to pronounce a complete phrase or even a complete text, go to Rhinospike.com instead – there you can request that someone should make a recording for you (for free).

Reading comprehension: the best way to learn how to read foreign texts is – to read them. If they are beyond your level though, for example if you try to read a Mexican newspaper after only studying Spanish for 5 hours, use WordChamp (the “Web Reader” function). This will add translations to all words, so that you can rapidly move over the text and start to understand it. It’s much faster than looking every word up in a dictionary, and additionally this tool is able to understand conjugated words. There are also some browser plugins that will do the same thing. You can use these to read not just your own texts, blog posts or foreign newspapers online, but also lots of literature for example – this is a great collection of links to sites that have online literature in lots of languages, such as the Project Gutenberg. And if you prefer somewhat simplified texts, there are some websites for that as well, collected here. Also LingQ has simplified texts in a bunch of languages, and an in-built on-click translation system to boot. Parallel texts (here and here) are also very useful to beginner and intermediate students – there, one column is in the language you’re studying and another column is in your native language, but both feature the same text, so you can compare meanings and constructions across languages.

Listening Comprehension: first, there are podcasts that propose to teach you languages, such as GermanPod101, where I’m project manager, or any number of them available through a quick search on iTunes. Most of these are for beginners or lower-intermediate students. If you’re beyond that stage, there are foreign-language audiobooks (books that are read to you). Audiobooks are becoming popular now, but often they’re expensive. At Librivox.org you can find open-source free audiobooks in several languages, and there’s a more complete listing of such sites here. If your listening comprehension isn’t good enough yet though, you could try listening to an audiobook in a foreign language while reading along in your own language – a lot of words will become clear and they will enter your vocabulary with little effort. This method is called Listening-Reading (see explanations by the inventor) and some resources have been collected for it at Bilingual-texts.com, or you can mix & match your own with the literature and audiobook links above. If you’re a bit more advanced, you may also like to listen to something while reading along in the same language; for example some news sites offer recordings of the news as well as transcripts of them. Or you can watch videos in your target language with subtitles in your language – Dotsub collects subtitled videos online, or there are always DVDs. If your DVD doesn’t have the subtitles you want, you may find some at OpenSubtitles.org, and of course the internet is also your friend if you’re looking to get movies in your target language.

Writing: to get better, you should write a lot in your target language. That’s why I like the service at Lang-8.com, where native speakers correct your foreign-language texts for free. Busuu.com is similar, though it’s only good for a limited number of languages. In exchange, they offer courses and ideas what you could write about.

Speaking: even if you live in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, you can speak your target language every day. How? Use italki (or one of many similar websites) to find partners who will talk with you via Skype. They will help you learn their language and you will help him learn yours. Normally you speak half an hour in one language and half an hour in the other, but this can change if your level of language knowledge is different. If you however don’t have the time to do the exchange or if you’re still unable to talk at all, you should find a paid tutor at Myngle or Edufire. Compared to a random native speaker, who cannot explain things or empathize with your situation as a learner of his language, a tutor is often a better choice, especially if you’re not very advanced yet. The advantage of online tutoring is that you can easily find many native speakers of your target language and choose the best teacher from among them, while in your city there may only be one qualified teacher, or even none. I also like online tutoring because it saves me the time I’d otherwise spend commuting.

The rest: if you have a question about a language you’re learning, if you don’t understand the grammar, need help finding websites, are looking for a good textbook or don’t know how to learn efficiently, there are special forums about language-learning that will provide answers. For grammar or vocabulary questions about a particular language I typically recommend the Unilang forum because it unites native speakers and students of lots of languages, including very obscure ones. For questions about language-learning in general, new study methods or evaluations of textbooks / language programs, I recommend the how-to-learn-any-language forum. That one is Esperanto-phobic for the most part though, so if you speak Esperanto, join me for a more open-minded, more international language-learning forum.

Don’t forget to have fun learning languages!

P.S.: If you know other great free websites for or about language learning, please let me know!

First, to get a taste of a language, I normally read its article in Wikipedia and I look over the most important phrases in this language – http://travlang.com/languages/ is a great resource for that, even though it’s full of ads, because they have resources on lots of languages and even made native-speaker recordings. There’s also a much more complete phrasebook, which is almost like a course, available from 50languages.com. For the really obscure languages, this online “language museum” can give me a first impression of the language’s sound.

The internet is good for much more than just getting a first impression though. You can also learn languages completely for free online; there are lots of free online language courses. Of course those are often not as good or not as complete as commercial courses, but there are also great and really complete courses online, for example the course in Modern Greek from Kypros.org with more than 100 lessons, the German course by Deutsche Welle, or this Korean course put online by Sogang University. (This blog post won’t try to be a comprehensive listing of available good online courses, my other site tried to do that.)

Sometimes there are even online courses that used to be (or still are) sold commercially. For example, the American Foreign Service Institute allowed many of its language courses from the 60s to be published online at this site. And there’s an awesome commercial multimedia course in Modern Greek (including video!) here, made available for free. LiveMocha is a website that offers courses for a whole bunch of languages, but they are pretty bad. The best webpages are those that only teach one language, for example Lernu for Esperanto – this has to be the most awesome most complete free language site ever! Would that more languages had sites like this!

Apart from complete courses, the internet also offers great tools. I shall list them according to their learning goals. If you goal is…

A bigger vocabulary: www.yourdictionary.com/languages.html lists online dictionaries for all languages. You don’t want to learn all the words of a dictionary though, so have a look at the Unilang.org basic wordlists with around 600 of the most common words for any language (select category “Unilang Basic Wordlist” and choose your target language). There are also various topical word lists. If you’re not sure how to use a word, or how to say something correctly, www.tatoeba.org is a multilingual database of phrases, in which you can search your word. For memorizing words, definitely try out the free open-source software Anki, which is much better than commercial programs. It’s cross-platform and even available for mobile phones.

Grammar: There are online grammars (for example the complete official reference grammar for Esperanto) just like there are courses, but there’s not one page good for all. Let me just mention Verbix.com, which can conjugate any verb in more than 50 languages.

In my next post I shall look at ways to improve your pronunciation, your reading comprehension, listening comprehension, writing and speaking, and also some misc sites. Meanwhile, you can already tell me: what are your favorite language resources online?

Update: part 2 now available at http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2010/09/03/learning-languages-online-part-2/ – and my app Intense German has been approved for the app store! Yay!

Here’s the evaluation of what I did in the second quarter (May to July 1st inclusive):
47,5 hours of Chinese
28,5 hours of French
13,5 hours of Swahili
57 hours of Modern Greek
15 hours of Esperanto (only counting studying, not using the language)
4 hours of wanderlust (Spanish & Russian)

With regards to progress towards my goals, see this detailed post on the language-learning forum.

According to plan, my focus languages should be Arabic and Italian now, though I’m loathe to leave Greek now that I can finally enjoy Harry Potter in Greek! It seems I’m quite close to my goal there. With Swahili I’m progressing much more slowly than expected though, and even my Chinese and French haven’t benefitted as much as I had hoped, so this year will remain challenging.

For the next quarter, I’m tempted to see how far I can get by tackling Arabic intensively for one month before going back to my routine. I like the idea of a 30-day challenge that might help me discover new things about myself.

I’m also thinking of trying to go completely vegetarian for 30 days, because some people have reported significant increases in concentration and productivity from that. I’m already eating mostly vegetarian as I don’t like to cook meat. I only eat meat at restaurants, when invited somewhere or occasionally lunchmeat on bread. I wonder if eliminating it completely would have any effect – anyway I don’t think I’d miss it. If you’ve gone vegetarian, please let me know what your experience was.