The internet is arguably the most ground breaking invention in the last 100 years, providing a myriad of information in a click. However, with free transmission of information comes a lot of misleading or misinformed material.
Therefore, here’s a list of the top seven online resources (in our opinion!) for language learning via the internet:
1. Youtube
Youtube hosts a variety of great language learning content, generally not especially in depth though. It’s great for those going on holiday or just beginning, with tutorials from native speakers. It’s also good for more advanced learners, but they’ll have to be a little more creative with how they use it. In this case, for those with intermediate or advanced knowledge can simply find clips of television shows in their preferred language and use these to practice more natural (although scripted) speech compared with the extremely artificial speech in lessons.
2. Openculture
Are you a keen traveller? Or just like to try lots of new things? In that case the wide variety samples and sources serve as a great mini-encyclopedia of resources. This is particularly good for Arabic, Mandarin and English. It also focuses heavily on audio tools, great for those of you on the go to learn on the daily commute.
This site provides in depth material for Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, German, Chinese (not specified which dialect), Russian and English. All the material is hosted by the website so it’s relatively straight-forward to use but is littered with advertisements. So unless you’re dedicated enough to wait ten seconds each time you want to play an educational game or test yourself this isn’t for you.
4. Use your friends!
Ask a bilingual or foreign friend out for a drink and say you’d like their help. Of course, this depends on how entertaining they find teaching! But they can be a great resource for vocabulary information and with social networking can be accessed within seconds.
5. The BBC
BBC Languages provides language tutorials for English speakers. A good feature with this is that transcripts of TV shows and news is provided, allowing you to augment your listening and comprehension skills. However, this is obviously not accessible or realistic to all who are not already fluent in English.
This site provides plenty of useful lessons in a variety of languages, hosting for speakers of many languages also. However, similar to learnalanguage.com it’s very cluttered with adverts and not aesthetically pleasing. There is plenty of content though.
7. Word2word
This is a link host, check this out to be provided with a bountiful collection of links to resources in the language you’re looking for. This website includes less popular languages and many of the languages of Africa and some that are even obsolete! So for those interested in more obscure languages, this is a great place to look for help.
