My New Years Resolution

I'm usually not one to make a New Years Resolution, but I felt it was right this year. I struggled to come up with a New Years Resolution that I could keep. It needed to be something related to language learning. But what, exactly?

Should I vow to get over the hump and become fluent in Spanish? Bring back my dormant French? Finally commit to learning Swedish? Or Cornish? I came up with a solution that solves all of that (potentially). My New Years Resolution is to go back to school and get a language-related degree. I don't know for sure whether that will be linguistics, comparative philology (I don't even think anyone offers that as a degree anymore) or some other degree, but I've made the vow.

I have my school in mind and a back-up if I need it. I'll be spending much of this year preparing myself financially. I've gone to school before while working and it's no fun. I'd like to have a stronger financial base this time so that working won't interfere with school.

You may not be as interested in languages as I am, but you can make a simple resolution to make a commitment to study your target language(s) at least a little every day. Listen to music, read books, read websites, listen to news, study grammars etc. Apply yourself every day. It's a journey of 10,000 steps and each step brings you that much closer to your goal.

Transparent Language Blogs

Transparent Language not only publishes language courses for language learners, but they also provide lots of additional free content. They publish BYKI, which is available in a free 'Lite' version, and also offer a Word of the Day feature for many languages. One new feature they offer is a blog for learners of Spanish. I have found this blog to be very useful, as there is often some vocabulary or idiom explained that I have just seemed to have run across. I also subscribe to their Swedish blog, but find that one a little less useful (so far) but more interesting with lots of tidbits on life in Sweden. They also have blogs for Chinese, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.

New Video for Language Learning Advisor.com!

I've found a very cool website where you can produce short and full-length videos. I've tried out a few things on it, it's a great tool. I'm sure I'll come up with tons of ideas for videos, but for now, I've only finished two short videos. Both are just a simple promotional video for the website. I'll have to go open a YouTube account, but for now you can see the first one on my site - http://www.language-learning-advisor.com/language-learning-advisor-news.html

A Nice Article on Language Learning

I know I don't need to promote the learning of foreign languages to readers of this blog or visitors to the website, but I've just read a short article on the subject that sums up a few points beautifully.

I've been dumbfounded by some people actually being proud of the fact that they only speak English and have no desire to learn another language. This is actually 'pride of their ignorance.' In this article, there is one comment that mentions that the understanding of languages "... has always been, for the last 2,000 years or so, the hallmark of the educated person.”

In addition, those same people usually mention that 'everyone speaks English, so why should I waste time learning another language?' Everone doesn't speak English. It is foolish to think that way. Another comment in the article says "Thinking that all communication should be in English is a sort of cultural and linguistic imperialism.”Amen.

The article also mentions the advantages and difficulties in learning a few key languages - French, German, Russian, Japanese and Arabic. Read more http://ocolly.com/2008/12/02/now-you%E2%80%99re-speaking-my-language/

LivingSpanish.com

One great thing about having a growing website is that people will actually contact me and inform me about websites, services and products that I haven't discovered yet. I was recenty contacted by http://www.livingspanish.com, a site for learning Spanish.

While there are tons of sites to learn Spanish, this one has a few qualities which make it a little unique. They have many of the same features of other language learning sites, but their approach is very practical and includes a real understanding of the everyday needs of the language learner. Their good sense of humor, use of slang and pop culture (like in their Word of the Day feature) stands out a little form other sites. I like their approach and I hope they are successful.

iKnow.com

iknow.co is a language learning community for learning Japanese (or for Japanese learning English), but has plans to expand to many more languages. Most of the features are fleshed for learning Japanese (courses, wordlists etc) but they claim their learning tools will be helpful in learning 188 languages.

Included in these features are courses, personalized wordlists which can be shared with other users, a vocabulary tool, and a game called Brainspeed to test your vocabulary retention which can actually be played on your Wii!

This is another of a wave of language learning communities that are sweeping the interent and I just read of one more that will be coming out of beta soon.

I don't know how many more of these language communities can co-exist on the internet. There are already so many of them, the market might be getting saturated. We've already seen that Friendsabroad is being absorbed into Babbel, and others are for sale. Which one will be next?

A Few Pimsleur Updates

Here are just a few updates on Pimsleur. Simon and Schuster has been consistently expanding their product line. Hungarian I (Comprehensive), Romanian I (Comprehensive) and Greek II are all recent additions.

When they finally add a comprehensive level product for a language, they also add a Quick and Simple or Basic level product (the first 8 lessons of Comprehensive) and an Instant Conversation (the first 16 lessons of comprehensive). The Instant Conversation is usually for a pretty good price considering for about $50 you get half of the $200+ Comprehensive set. But, if you want that full 30 lessons, you have to pay for it. That's why I think Instant Conversation is a (relatively) cost-effective intro to the language and the Pimsleur method.

Upcoming Comprehensive products include Croatian (Jan 2009), Eastern Arabic III (May 2009) and Hebrew III (July 2009).Here is a link to another reviewers thought son Pimsleur Spanish : http://gearheart.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/learn-spanish-with-pimsleur-a-review/

Rosetta Stone Version 3

Rosetta Stones new Version 3 has been out for many months already. At first, only the 'major' languages were released in the newer version. But, I see now that many of the other, less commonly learned languages, have also been upgraded.

I was excited to see that Farsi, Dutch and Swedish have been released in Version 3. And I must point out that all languages that are released in V3 are complete to all 3 levels. So that means that Rosetta Stone goes as far for Swedish as it does for German or French! That's a big deal, because all too often language learning products are produced for the major languages that go into intermediate and advanced levels of learning, but for those less commonly spoken languages barely get past the basics, if they make anything at all.

The only reason companies do this is because it is simply not very profitable to invest in developing a product that won't sell as much as another. And Rosetta Stone has been guilty of this as well. I found it infuriating that there was only a level 1 for Swedish, but 2 or 3 levels for other languages. Even now, they have not upgraded their Danish, Thai, Welsh and some other courses. It looks like they will upgrade those as well, but I haven't seen any information on that.

I still don't have a copy of a version 3 Rosetta Stone product. I'd like to get my hands on one in order to spend some time with it and do a proper review. When the opportunity presents itself, I'll share my experience with it.