There are some subjects which, although very interesting and essential for helping us to understand the world, can’t be experimented and played around with outside of the classroom. So, for example, while you can study chemistry text books to your heart’s content at home, you certainly don’t want to be playing around with dangerous chemicals in your living room. One family of subjects that you can immerse yourself in outside of the classroom, however, is languages. Because, above all, the goal of learning languages is to be able to communicate. And as everyone knows, there’s a common place that everyone in the world uses to communicate nowadays: the Internet.
Because of this, the World Wide Web offers more opportunities than ever for learning languages. Online you can read about your favourite hobbies, watch comedy shows, chat to new people or do about anything you would do to fill your time in pretty much any language you want. So if you’re learning languages at school or university, or just want to brush up on your skills, online is the place to go.
Of course, the Internet offers far more than foreign-language sites and TV shows; it’s also packed with resources that are designed specifically to help foreigners learning languages. So if you’re not quite at the level yet where you can dip into the European broadsheets or watch Japanese cartoons in their original form, these sites will help you to reach that point. And, of course, if you’re learning languages for GCSE, A Level or university, they’ll also help you boost your grades!
Wordreference is probably the Web’s number one collection of bilingual dictionaries, covering the world’s major languages. But there are also plenty more features to it. It has a big community of linguists who help people out with grammar and vocabulary points, verb conjugators and even features games to help you learn vocab. Basically it’s on the bookmarks list of anyone learning languages.
Linguee is quite a clever tool if you either want to understand a whole phrase in a foreign language, or alternatively find out the correct way to say something correctly in your foreign language, neither of which you can do with most bilingual dictionaries. All you do is type or paste in the phrase in English or the foreign language, and then the site searches through its big database of documents that have been translated by professionals between your two chosen languages, before showing you the different ways the phrase you’ve typed in has been translated. If you’re one of those people who has tried to cheat on their languages homework by Google Translate (a trick that people almost never get away with!), this is a resource that’ll help you get to the expressions you’re looking for quicker while also allowing you to learn since you’ll have to think about putting your sentences together yourself.
You obviously know this site very well, and will obviously not be surprised to learn that it’s just as popular with speakers of other languages as it is with English speakers. But did you know that among its hundreds of millions of videos are tutorials and video lessons for learning languages? Whatever the language you’re learning and whatever your level, you’ll find something to help you improve.