How could internet help you to learn new languages?

Most linguist would agree that the best way to learn a new foreign language is by actually using it. Memorizing vocabularies and grammatic rules are good things to do to pass the respective foreign language test such as TOEFL (English), HSK (Mandarin) or Noryoukushikan (Japanese). However if you really want to hone your linguistic skill, you will have to actually use it.

Fortunately for us who live in information age, we have something called internet. Internet is a world wide network capable of connecting people from different countries across the globe. Having a connection to the internet means that you can always connect yourself to people whose native languages are different from you.

First, we have to realize that mastering a language means mastering four different skills related to our daily use of languages. Those four different skills are reading, writing, listening and speaking. This article is going to focus on how internet could help you to develop those skills.

Reading Comprehension

Learning reading skill for a particular language using the internet is actually the easiest thing to do. Most materials in the internet is already in written form, so you will have no difficulty finding material to train yourself. The easiest would be to open a Wikipedia article about some subject that you have interest in. Then simply look for the same article written in the language you want to learn.

If your vocabulary is not so developed yet, you may need to use Google Translate to find the meaning of certain phrases (just google up "Google Translate" to find it). It have to be noted though, that Google Translate is not suitable for translating phrases and sentences. You may want to break up the sentences or phrases into several words and translate them individually.

Of course, it have to be noted that there are going to be serious cultural difference between two culture that speak different languages. If you are not sure about the meaning of a sentence you manage to translate by yourself, you may want to use Yahoo!Answer to ask real people about it.

Writing Skill

To start learning how to write in foreign languages, you will have to start by asking people in Yahoo!Answer how to translate a particular sentence in English into sentence with equal meaning in the language you want to learn. For beginners, you will need to ask simple questions such as "How to say 'I have a pen','I buy a pen' and 'I buy television' in Japanese?" By starting from these simple example, you can try to look for sentential patterns in the language you want to learn.

After you start to get how simple sentences are structured within the language you want to learn, you may try to change the either the subject, the verb or the object within the sentence with other possible words. If the word you want to look for is common words, use Google Translate. If the word is subject specific, you may want to ask someone in Yahoo!Answer again.

Listening

Learning Listening Skill using the internet is a bit harder since most information is stored in written form. But it is not impossible. You will have to find some media file containing speech using the language you want to learn. It is advised that you first learn writing skill before you try to learn listening.

To find media resources containing speech in the language you want to learn, what you have to do is search it using Google. You will need your writing skill (or more precisely sentence making skill), since you will have to do the search in the language you want to learn. Make sure that the search you do was targeted to sites specializing in storing media files such as YouTube.

Speaking

Honestly, learning your speaking skill in a foreign language language via internet is something hard to do. But it is not impossible if you have some online friends who happen to speak the language. If you have no friends speaking that language, you will have to learn your writing skill first. Simply try to socialize with foreigner in social networking sites such as FaceBook or Friendster.

When both of you already being friend with one another, you may ask whether you can contact him/her via messengers. Messengers software such as Yahoo!Messenger have to audio streaming capability that would enable you to speak with each other. Surely friendship and trust are not going to be build in one day, but then neither your linguistics capability. Try to make a lot of foreign friends when you learn your writing skill and you should get one or two good friends when you need them to learn your speaking skill.

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