Teledata’s Favourite Links Of The Week: Learn A New Language

Gone are the days of painful group lessons with heavy out-of-date textbooks when you are trying to learn a new language.

Whether for work, travel or just a bit of fun, there are many apps and websites out there to help you learn. Do you want to learn some French? How about Cantonese or Dutch? There are about  6,500 spoken languages in the world today. However, about 2,000 of those languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. Have a look at these links to get you started on learning a whole new way of communicating.

Learn a new language with this addictive app

Duolingo is good at pestering you to do your daily practice. This app is for iPhones or Android, and there are 27 different languages that English speakers can choose from. It’s all about keeping the iconic owl happy by doing your daily practice.The app will teach you words and how to use them in a sentence, tell you to translate from one language to the other and also how to pronounce full sentences back to it. You work in levels, earning points as you go. For extra competitiveness find friends also using this app and share your results.

Online lessons with a tutor

Italki is an online language learning service that connects you with language teachers from around the world. You just look through all the teachers and choose the best one for you – you should choose someone who is a native speaker in the country you are focused on, so you get a better idea of how people speak there, like how English varies across the world, so does French and Portuguese.

This site says it hosts over a million language learners and more than a thousand language teachers, studying over a hundred languages. Hundreds of thousands of paid language lessons have taken place on italki via Skype or other video chat. 
As the website states, historically learning a language was expensive and inefficient, and only people who studied abroad could gain fluency. But now all you need is an internet connection.
With this website, you can scroll through all the different teachers and get a feel for their rates. They charge hourly and they really vary, so if you are on a tight budget you can still get some online lessons.

 

This polyglot will inspire you to learn 

 Fluentin3months.com will inspire you to dedicate time to learning a new language, and show you its ok to make mistakes. The founder of the site, Benny Lewis speaks seven different languages himself. His website is a community and learning resource for language learners all around the world.
The more mistakes you make, the faster you become a confident language learner, he says on his site.
He offers a free Speak in a Week email course which you can sign up for on his website. 
He also has plenty of blog posts, tips, and tricks on how you can learn a language.
Benny is Irish and used his techniques to become fluent in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Esperanto. He also speaks Mandarin Chinese, American Sign Language, Dutch and Irish to a conversational level.