When learning a language, eventually you’re going to need to actually talk to someone. The internet makes it stupidly easy to get in touch with new people (both for language exchanges and for conversation in general), but what are you going to talk about?
“I’m learning Russian.” “Why?” ”Blah blah blah…” lasts for about 5 minutes. Then what?
I’ve talked about using iMacros in the past. Basically, you click a button, a dialogue pops up and asks you “Which word do you want to look up?” and in 4 seconds, you have a Google Images link to the word, a Forvo.com recording, a bilingual dictionary entry and a monolingual dictionary entry. Magic. Typically, it’s a bit of a pain to set up, but in preparation for an upcoming workshop, I’ve decided to make it a lot easier.
After finally finding a grammar book that I can actually recommend, I’ve finished a Hungarian book reviews section. Just because not many people study it, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t get some love. For those of you who might be shopping around for a new language, Hungarian is not as hard as everyone says. I think it’s just a rumor Hungarians like to spread so that they can talk amongst themselves without being understood in trains. The language is extremely orderly - the spelling is as easy as Spanish, once you get a hang of it, the dreaded case system is much better behaved than Russian, there are no noun genders, and the grammar is just cool. Check this out:
a feleség (the wife) – a feleségem (my wife) – a feleségnek (to the wife, as in “He gave flowers to the wife”) – a feleségemnek (to my wife, as in “He gave flowers to my wife”). Awesome.
I’ve finished the Modern Hebrew book reviews/resources section! That means we currently have resource pages for the top 11 modern languages studied in the US (4 of the top 15 languages are American Sign Language, Ancient Greek, Ancient Hebrew and Latin). Eventually, I might include those, but not before I really have good recommendations for the main spoken languages!
Hebrew proved a bit difficult; there really aren’t many good pronunciation resources for the language, and the textbook selection isn’t fantastic either. But I’ve found some good books hiding at Amazon, and if you happen to have some recommendations, let me know and I’ll add them!
Just a brief notice that I’ve added a Portuguese section with a pile of book reviews and free websites to the Language Resource pages. Hebrew’s next!
Behold, we just added a bunch of translations to the entire site (and you can help)!
Don't Show Again |
Close Window