Some Links For German Students

Let me just say this now: EXTRA CREDIT to anyone who comes to class next week
wearing a Dirndl or Lederhosen!

Hi to everyone, but especially to my German students! I enjoyed our class this evening, and I'm excited that we'll be learning more together in the weeks to come. To help you study outside of class, I wanted to pass on a few links for you today:

Basic German

-One good place to go is this site on about.com. It really is a free, basic German course, but there are a lot of text ads along the way. There's not many pictures, either. One good thing about the site is that you can listen to any of the highlighted phrases just by clicking on them.

-A second option is actually the BBC's German learning site. It's got quite a lot in English, but it's a good way to move into German bit by bit.

-Finally, Deutsche Welle (which means "German Wave") is a famous international broadcaster based out of Germany. It has some basic German courses you can use online. Here's an "audio trainer" course with the instructions in Spanish (you can also find instructions in English or German).

About German and German-Speaking Countries

-There are many, many internet sites about Germany, the German language, and the German people, but two that seem pretty good are Germany.info and Young Germany. The first page is from the German embassy in the U.S. so it's in English. If you prefer Spanish you can go to the German Embassy in Costa Rica's page.

-If you want more information about tourism in Germany, check out this site.

-If you want to know more about "Die Schweiz," then try Swiss World or about.ch.

-If you prefer to learn about "Österreich," head to this page for general information or this page for tourist info.

-If you want to learn about Liechtenstein, that small country we mentioned in class, check here.

A lot of the information on those pages is available in English, German, and sometimes also Spanish.

Dictionaries, Verbs, the Alphabet, and Changing Between Keyboard Languages

-The dictionary I mentioned in class is LEO. They also have apps for smartphones, but it's probably easiest to get them by searching through your phone's store (like the Apple App Store or the Android Market).

-If you want a quick site for verb conjugations, this one is pretty good. It's a little weird about German letters, though. For example, if you want to find "heißen," you need to use the ß... it doesn't seem to recognize "heissen." 

-If you want to add the possibility to easily type German letters on your keyboard, there are directions here. Just so you know, your keyboard will obviously look the same, but if you normally have an American English keyboard layout, the Ä key is the apostrophe (') key, the Ö key is the semi-colon (;) key, the Ü key is the left bracket ([) key, and the ß is the dash (-) key. If you have a Spanish keyboard layout, Ä is the accent key, Ö is the Ñ key, Ü is the weird downward accent key (`), and ß is the apostrophe (') key. 

That sounds pretty confusing, but if you set up Windows to change between languages, it's really fast and easy once you get used to it (just click "Left Alt + Shift" to change languages in almost any program, including Word and web browsers like Firefox or Chrome).

-If you want to practice the alphabet, check out this site for pronunciation and this site for pronunciation plus a few songs. Here are the numbers if you want to practice them.

German Magazines and News

-Two of the most popular news magazines in Germany are Spiegel and Stern. Both are obviously in German, so they may be difficult if you're just beginning, but at least they have nice pictures and you can see how some world news is reported in Germany (it's also a good chance to notice many German-English cognates when reading headlines). 

-Deutsche Welle has a news page in Spanish (and many other languages... just use the drop-down menu at the top right to select the language you want).

-Additionally, Spiegel has a good English site. It's good if you're looking for more English practice!

SO! That's a LOT of links. I'm sure that if you want to practice German, you'll be able to keep busy at least until next week. If any of the links are good, bad, or don't work, please tell me. Also feel free to mention any other links that you may know of, so that I can share them with the rest of the class.

Thanks, and have a great week!

Two Recommended Websites For General English Practice

As I mentioned a while ago, I often have my students complete practice logs. It's a good way to encourage them to practice, and it's also a good way for me to find new language-learning resources that I can pass on to other students. 

This week my student Henry included two good websites in his practice log, and I wanted to mention them here. 

The first is apparently called Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab (although the URL is simply "esl-lab.com," which seems much easier). As the name indicates, it's got a lot of listening exercises with audio, partial scripts, quizzes, and vocabulary highlights. It's even got cultural tips in some of the sections, so the site is pretty great. The topics are very diverse, from pizza delivery to how to behave in a Japanese public bath. There seem to be between 200 and 300 different pages with different topics, and they're conveniently arranged according to difficulty. Check it out!

The second link my student visited was engvid.com. It's also got a self-explanatory name, as it's mainly focused on videos. If you scroll down on the home page, you'll see different topics like business English, grammar, pronunciation, and even my favorite, idioms. The grammar section alone has 105 videos, so there's plenty of material to keep you busy for a while! Check it out, and enjoy!

Thanks for reading, and if you have any additional suggestions for online practice, please leave a comment. Have a great day!

Open Your Brain!

I recently read a book called The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau (click here for a short review I wrote). I liked the book, and I wanted to mention an idea that the author talked about. One of his pieces of advice for improving understanding of the world is to read a new Wikipedia article every day. He says:

"Set your home page to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage. Over the next year, every time you open your browser, you'll see a different, random Wikipedia page. Read it. Cost: $0."

Actually, that sounds like a great idea to me if you want to learn English! This trick works with other languages, too, but the address would be slightly different. For example, you can try a random article in these languages:

Danish

German

French

Spanish

Swedish

You can apparently do this with any other language that uses Wikipedia, if you know where to click; another option is to simply open Wikipedia and type [alt-x] to get a random article.

Finally, if you're learning English, did you know that there's a "simple" version of Wikipedia? You can find it here. It has shorter, more basic versions of articles. If you want a random, simple article, click here.

So, have fun exploring a bit! If you find anything interesting, tell us in the comments. Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

Two Useful English Links

Good afternoon, everyone!

I want to share two more English-language links with you. The first one is called "China 232." Despite the name, it's actually a site with English-learning podcasts. The site has two areas: "normal" and "VIP." The VIP part costs money and has more resources, but free normal section is also quite good. The site is done by two Canadian brothers living in China, and their English is very clear. Typically, they pick a topic, present a short dialogue, and explain some of the important vocabulary in the dialogue. Their latest topic was Facebook, actually.

My coworker Lidio showed me another site a few days ago. It's called "Qwiki," and it's a sort of interactive Wikipedia with videos, pictures, and spoken text. The voice you hear definitely sounds robotic, but it's still interesting to check out, and a good place to start if you're looking for information or just curious about new things. Here's an article about Niagara Falls to get you started. Check it out!

So, good luck with these links. If you have comments, questions, or other good links you want to suggest, please tell us!