Columns 
| 37 - Dave Sperling's Webwanderer |
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Dave Sperling begins a new column and takes us with him on a journey through cyberspace in search of the seemingly limitless riches of the internet.
My passion for foreign languages began as a child when my father took me on an excursion to Europe and the Middle East, and I fondly remember being exhilarated by the intriguing sounds of Italian, French, Hebrew and Arabic. I studied Spanish in high school, and later took classes in Japanese and Thai while teaching overseas. My foreign language ability, however, had been steadily declining since I returned to California over a decade ago, so I set off to determine if the internet could help revive my forgotten Spanish, Thai and Japanese. Here is my story. Choices First stop on my journey was omniglot.com, a website devoted to every writing system imaginable, including alphabets, syllabaries and abjads (consonant alphabets). A search for Thai brought me to pages that revealed its origins, notable features and visual alphabet. I also found links to online language courses, so take your pick: Ainu, Albanian, American Sign Language (ASL), Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Assyrian Aramaic, Basque, Breton, British Sign Language (BSL), Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Cherokee, Chinese (Cantonese), Chinese (Mandarin), Chinese (Shanghainese), Chinese (Taiwanese), Cornish, Cree, Czech, Danish, Dehong Dai, Dutch, Esperanto, French, Finnish, Georgian, German, Gothic, Greek, Gwich’in, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Khmer, Kiribati, Konkani, Korean, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Manx, Marathi, Nahuatl, Nepali, Norwegian, Old Church Slavonic, Old English, Persian/Farsi, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Welsh. Courses For Japanese, I chose japaneseonline. com, a website providing free Japanese language lessons. After clicking on Japanese Language Lessons, I was taken to an online course of 16 lessons that taught Japanese language and culture through the experiences of an expatriate family living in Tokyo. All the lessons featured a dialogue, vocabulary and grammar, all of which had both text and audio components. The quality was excellent, and I was able to rediscover many long-forgotten words and phrases. For Spanish, I used Spanish.bz, which provided a free and extensive 45-lesson course, complete with audio, worksheets and quizzes. Lesson themes included People Words, Verbs, Spanish Plural, Pronunciation, Family and Tech Words, and within a few days I was able to review and learn a lot of Spanish vocabulary, phrases and grammar. For Thai, I stumbled upon learningthai.com, a website of over 1,000 pages of free resources. Lessons included Useful Phrases, Speaking, Reading, Tones, Writing and Listening. The section on reading was especially useful because I had never properly learnt the Thai alphabet, so I was able to learn both visually and auditorily how to write each of the Thai letters. Resources To improve my listening comprehension, I decided to utilise streaming audio and video. Radiotower.com is a resource for exploring over 6,900 stations from 139 countries and over 70,000 radio and television programmes. A click on Japan, for example, brought me to a page of five radio stations that included Rock, News and Talk. Another excellent resource was wwitv.com, which featured over 3,000 live feeds and audio streams. I was now improving my listening skills and I was having fun, too! Communication Practice makes perfect, so my next step was to find a way to actually practise communicating. Luckily I discovered mylanguageexchange.com, an online community of over 230,000 members from over 130 countries, practising 115 different languages. A search for Thai gave me a list of over 2,000 individuals. Membership was free and I quickly located a Thai language partner living in Bangkok. We exchanged a few emails and soon we were actually speaking to each other with a program called Skype, a free downloadable, real-time voice and text chat communications program available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. Installation was easy and the voice quality was excellent, with no noticeable lag in the conversation. Wow! I’ve been a long-time advocate of students using the internet to improve their English language skills, but I never had the opportunity to practise personally what I’ve preached for many years. Thanks to the internet I was able to rediscover my love of languages by using free online language courses, streaming audio and video from around the globe and actual voice communication with a Thai speaker halfway across the world. Want to learn a new language? Log on to the internet! www.omniglot.com/links/courses.htm www.japanese-online.com www.spanish.bz/learn-spanish.htm www.learningthai.com http://radiotower.com http://wwitv.com www.mylanguageexchange.com www.Skype.com |
