Learn languages free online.

[Lord Percy]

https://www.duolingo.com/

Of course they're biased towards themselves, but somewhere on this website they say they did a load of comprehensive testing and found that learning via Duolingo is faster and more efficient than Rosetta Stone and even beat traditional schooled textbook education too.

It's free and they currently offer French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese.

There are stages along the way, you have to pass tests to get onto the next level, so you absolutely cannot learn more until you've got past the previous bit, so it builds really well.

Really awesome

[J.M.]

Throwing rocks at pigeons would be more effective than Rosetta Stone.
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2004 R1 & 2018 XSR900

[dydey90]

I tried this about 18 months ago, but got bored quite quickly.
I could do with some sort of self-learning cd that I can just bung on in the car, don't know if Rosetta Stone do that or not.
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This post is probably not serious and shouldn't be taken literally.
Past: CBR125,ER6f NINJA 650, ZZR600 Current: VFR750

[daemonoid]

[DrDonnyBrago]

You magnificent manbeast, I've been looking for a decent French tutoring thingy for a while, RS was horse shit .

[Rigga]

Why all the hate for RS? I didn't realise they were so bad?
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Current bike: Honda CBR 1100xx

[Tracey Suntan-King]

Yes it's good and the game-type format is absorbing.

I liked it at first but now that fecking green owl is getting right on my tits, emailing every morning, telling me I haven't done my homework today.

Green owl = my Mum = bad repressed memories =
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Whether you think you can, or think you can't, you're probably right

[Derivative]

M-m-m-monster necro.

I started with duolingo a few years back and gave up quite quickly, it's changed a bit since then - rather than failing out of a lesson if you get too many wrong answers, it just knocks back your progress.

Just finished the German tree. Far, far more work required to get to any sort of serviceable level, but it seems like a good foundation. (according to them I have a vocab of 2100 words, but half of those are probably conjugations).

I find it far easier to translate German -> English than English -> German, I'm guessing that's probably normal.

WRT 'self learning CD', there are some podcasts about, but like Duolingo it's only really going to be useful as one part of your strategy. I listened to 'Radio D', (Deutsche Welle, seems like a German BBC), but quickly got frustrated with the ridiculously slow pace and far too much English.

At least for me, it's going to take a lot of films, TV, books, newspapers, etc before my listening/reading is serviceable enough to go without a dictionary.

Writing might be doable with forums but then again if you end up on a foreign BCF you'll get laughed out For speaking I think you'd have to live in the country for a while.

[andym]

[RhynoCZ]

I tried the duolingo and found it pointless. The duolingo is for people that already know some stuff, but a complete beginer won't benefit from it, not that it helped me.

I tried to learn German using duolingo, I already knew some German, not much, and I gave up after 2 days. You can't learn a language you've never spoken before, using an app like that. You need to learn the stuff like:
I am; You are, He is, She is, It is....... not jump into a conversation where you are suppose to fill in the word ''Bread'' and then somehow do it again, but now looking at a picture of bread amongst other pictures.

What you can do is to buy a textbook for schools (pick a language), read that, do all the crap in the textbook, then you should have the basics (grammar, prepositions, conjunctions, numbers, colours, basic words, forming basic sentences, etc.). After that, join a forum of your prefered language and/or a hobby, expand your grammar skills and vocabulary, using the forum (reading/contributing). Lucky us, non native English speakers, there are crap loads of great films, books, tv shows, videogames and other content in English. Every time I watch a popular tv show, a film, browse the internet, use the BCF, I expand my vocabulary, practice the grammar and spelling and I even learn new meanings of the words you use, that no Eng to Cze dictionary would ever explain (slang and other local stuff).

TL; DR:
1) Pick a language
2) Get a school textbook
3) Read and learn from the textbook
4) Start using what you've learned
5) Well done, you now speak a foreign language well enough
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'87 Honda XBR 500, '96 Kawasaki ZX7R P1, '90 Honda CB-1, '88 Kawasaki GPz550, MZ 150 ETZ
'95 Mercedes-Benz w202 C200 CGI, '98 Mercedes-Benz w210 E200 Kompressor

[Derivative]

[Lord Percy]

[Derivative]

Looks cool! I don't have a phone it'll work on, though. Might be a good impetus to actually sort that out.

Then again, shouldn't be too difficult to find Germans in London, the problem is finding people who aren't fluent in English already

Recently I've basically fallen into just memorising vocab because it's frustrating to not be able to read a newspaper etc. I can figure out most of what's going on but have to look up every other word.

Memrise seems pretty good for this, I'm at 700 words now and recall about 95%.

[Rogerborg]

[skatefreak]

For anyone interested - duolingo now does Polish.
I married a pole (ohh errrr), in the early years I tried my hand at it but its a horrid language and after a few attempts and different approaches we gave up and resigned to waiting for her younger brothers/parents to figure out English

Any whoser, I fancy the challenge again so I started looking for Podcasts to listen to when cycling to work (1 hr each way!) but have not found anything decent yet :-\ (and Leeds would be much appreciated!).

Have done the first 3 'lessons' on duolingo, do like, seem's quirky and something I could do 20 minutes a day before work

Will report back once I've give up again

[RhynoCZ]

It somehow amazes me, that English native speakers would learn Slavic (dead) languages. I knew a lad, US citizen, who was here in Czech rep. for nearly 2 decades now and he still can't speak our language. He's a translator of legal documents and he also gives English lessons.

England once invaded and rulled 1/5 of the land mass of this planet. 'mericans made sure to make English the official language of many places as well. So, I don't quite understand the urge to learn Slavic languages.

I learned this English of yours only because I was too lazy to read subtitles, when watching a film/tv show. That is also why I never learned German properly.
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'87 Honda XBR 500, '96 Kawasaki ZX7R P1, '90 Honda CB-1, '88 Kawasaki GPz550, MZ 150 ETZ
'95 Mercedes-Benz w202 C200 CGI, '98 Mercedes-Benz w210 E200 Kompressor

[MCN]

[Lord Percy]