Whether you live in Bombay, Beijing, Brasilia, or Barcelona, this is a golden time for learning to speak a new language.
Without sitting in a classroom, anyone who has an Internet access can master a second language, if he’s motivated enough. Better yet, it may come amazingly cheap, if not completely free.
It’s all because of ever expanding Internet. Now, information flow and sharing are much more universal and efficient; the barrier and cost of communication among us are down to almost nothing. This is a sea change, as Amazon did to buying books and eBay to selling merchandise of all sorts.
It starts to having a major impact to language learning too. For a self-motivated learner, her daily routine can work out like this: read the news subscribed through Google or Yahoo News; listen to the podcastings at the BBC or NPR website; watch the online videos she enjoys at YouTube or CNN; talk to the friends she met at Myspace or KanTalk through Skype.
For many learners, it’s just more natural, and thus more effective, to pick up a new language this way. Sure, it still takes time to speak a new language well; learning a language is more like running marathon than 100-meter sprint.
It’s a lot easier to persist all the way through if you enjoy doing it as you go.
January 18, 2008 at 6:35 am
yes, it’s true. Nowadays there are less barriers in communication with a foreigner than it was before.
Yesterday I talked to a girl from Hungary, to a guy from India and a guy from Algeria. We’ve created a conference call.
The connection was not good, but I think we should just get accustomed to it.
Of course it’s easier to talk face to face. Because in the conference call somebody should be a leader.