Learning a second language - what does new technology offer?

a reply to: CJCrawley

I just remembered "spicy butt" when I had to learn a few words in Russian.

:-P

OH, and before anyone runs out and spends a ton of money on Rosetta Stone software, the website Livemocha. It's basically the same thing as Rosetta Stone but free. It's also a social site, and members from the country whose language your learning can help you out.

It's pretty awesome. It's sad that someone from another country (non-US citizen) had to mention it to me. It seems many US citizens are so American-centric we forget that most people in the world speak more than one language.

a reply to: ArMaP

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean.
(as you see the method is not perfect)

That's OK, I can reword what I said.

So, you watched television with subtitles turned on to learn English. Could you give a description of the process that you went through using this method?

a reply to: LewsTherinThelamon

In Portugal only the TV shows and movies for children are dubbed, all other TV shows and movies (either on TV or in cinemas) have subtitles in Portuguese, so I learned English by listening to what was being said, reading what appeared in the subtitles and watching what was happening.

Not having anyone to speak with made it a very slow process, but it worked. After that I started reading in English, but although I could read and recognise the words I heard on the TV or movies, in some cases I didn't (and still do not) know how those words should be pronounced, as I never learned the rules.

I hope that answers it.

PS: this was before having access to the Internet, sometime during the 70s.
PPS: that's the same method I used to learn a little German, Italian and Japanese.

Wow,
Lots of great responses,
Live mocha and the language learning forum look good.
I have enough credits from audible to get the first set of 30 pimsleur classes.
The big problem with that is that I can't hear the enunciation of the constants because of hearing damage.
I actually read lips a little bit to put together context when it's really noisy.

I hear the pimsleur method works but I can't really hear all of the syllables very well.

I wanted to try rosetta stone but can't afford it right now. The live mocha might be a good alternative.

I did find an app that has the top 100 used words, then the next 100 and so on up to 1000.

The first 100 words include a lot of articles, conjunctions, prepositions and so on.
It's hard to hang a memory hook on a lot of them and most of those words have multiple meanings.
I'm having trouble memorizing most of them.

Thanks for all of the suggestions so far.
I never heard a lot of these websites.

try Cram.com for learning any language. They have flashcards with audio pronunciation for languages like French, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese and many more.

a reply to: LisaMc

It may work for somebody, but I tried 3 different browsers and, besides not understanding what am I suppose to do in the tests, some options do not work.

Also, I found a spelling error in a Portuguese word, so I don't think that's a good option.

originally posted by: MystikMushroom
OH, and before anyone runs out and spends a ton of money on Rosetta Stone software, the website Livemocha. It's basically the same thing as Rosetta Stone but free. It's also a social site, and members from the country whose language your learning can help you out.

.

Sadly it looks like rosetta closed them down