Tagged: learning languages

Top 10 best websites in the past year…

The best in the online world over the past  year:

Categories:

1. Music and video – The Winner:

VIMEO

Vimeo is for the creative community. They upload their movies/ animation and add to the growing pool of original content and innovative ideas online

2. Sports – The Winner:

Sports- Reference.com

The site compiles statistics and game results for seven sports — baseball, football, basketball, hockey, college football, college basketball and the Olympics — linking the past with the present for every franchise and athlete. Plus, it’s updated on an in-season basis, bringing the latest facts and figures to your computer.

3. News and Info – The Winner:

The Guardian

No other newspaper has embraced the digital age like the UK Guardian.

Not only can you read up to 1 Million articles online for FREE, but the site also has a great design and provides applications for users to reshuffle the paper’s extensive content to suit their needs

4. Financial & Productivity – The Winner:

Mint

The site allows you to simultaneously track every major bank account: checking, savings, credit cards, loans and investments. Mint also empowers you to break down your spending habits, tracking where each dollar goes.

5. Shopping & Travel – The Winner:

Groupon

This is an American site which generates great deals on shopping and travel. The savings are redeemed in coupon form, by purchasing online and through accumulated group buying the prices are staying down as consumers are given more choices.

The companies equivalent of Groupon in Australia are:

Living Social   and    Scoopon

     

6. Health & Fitness- The Winner:

Keas

Keas aims to provide tailored health programs for individual users by combining personal medical data with general health advice. Companies like Quest Diagnostics have teamed up with Keas to input personal data, like blood-test results, to the site. You can sign up for various plans, including ones focused on cholesterol, diabetes and blood pressure, that give you tips and reminders, and Keas will give you personal status reports with individual goals

7. Social Media – The Winner:

Gowalla

The new social networking platform. Hasn’t quite taken off in Australia yet, but it allows fun features such as checking in with your smart phone device and sharing your places with friends. There are brightly coloured badges and a funky interface you can be a part of. Its probably the funnest passport platform out there.

8.Games – The Winner:

Kongregate

This site will keep you occupied all day, so be careful not to get sucked in! :)

Game addicts will find a rich variety of games online and the ability to level up will entice all to return.

Game designers also have an incentive to get hooked as there are competitions for best game designs on a monthly basis.

9. Education - The Winner:

Livemocha

It’s a social approach to learning a language, and one that’s cheaper than pricey software like Rosetta Stone — basic courses are free, and utilizing the community costs only a small monthly fee. The site has over 6 Million members, and offers exercises in over 30 languages to get you going.

10. Family & Kids -The Winner:

Design Mom

Gabrielle Blair ( an interior designer) juggles her career and 6 kids. Blair’s posts are about motherhood and designing in a kid friendly way. There are plenty of exciting ideas to keep you entertained, from cut paper art to redesigning your foyer.

Learning Spanish!

Learning a language is a great hobby, an awesome pass time and a motivating way to drive to and from wherever you’re going.

Just stick a language course into your CD player or download to your ipod and off you go!

I find that with the technology available today, its never been easier to become bi or multi-ligual.

The programme I first started using for spanish is called Rosetta Stone  www.rosettastone.com
It’s interactive, it works in a way like no other language course you’ve ever experienced.
As an adult, its much harder to absorb new information. We are mostly visual learners past the age of 18.
So what’s the best way to expand your foreign language vocab? With pretty pictures and not a word of translation.
Suddenly you are immersed in the world of images and colour and remembering new words has never been easier.

Just plug in your headphones, connect a microphone and the programme recognises your pronunciation and  works at your own pace. I encourage anyone who is starting to learn a new language to try this programme. It will revolutionise the way we learn foreign languages.

Once I got my vocab up to speed, however I needed more sentence structure learnings and more conversational phrases useful to a tourist.

So I got hooked onto another language course called the Pimsleur method. I got started on a couple of CDs which are now permanently in my car stereo and ipod.

The lessons start off with a brief conversation and go on to interact with you with new words in the conversation and then useful phrases.

After having gone through a few lessons, you’ll feel confident enough to book your ticket to Peru or Argentina. I am dying to practice my learning already!
In the first few lessons there is a lot of “beer” talk. “How much does a beer cost?” “Do you like beer?” ” I want to buy a beer” etc. followed by “Where is the bathroom?” – very useful conversational language for a tourist!

Still, since I am so impatient, I feel the need to mix the methods up a little. So off on a quest with my good friend youtube I go…

Type in ” spanish language cartoon” and lots of clips of Spanish cartoons will come up in your search.
Pick your best one. I quite like the short series of El Pero Y El Gato ( the dog and the cat)

Its useful watching cartoons which teach you the language of your choice, as that is how we used to learn when we were kids. This method still works with me! I guess that means that I am one big kid on the inside. One of my good friends used to say “Getting old is compulsory, growing up is a choice”

Hope this gets you started on the language learning endeavour of your choice!

The brain needs exercise, and there is no better way to achieve this than to learn something new.

So, mi amigos, you have nothing to lose!