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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6086 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes  1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 33 of 45 01 July 2009 at 11:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Just became member of mylanguageexchange.com. First time, too. I'm checking here to see if can build a partner base. I'm trying to improve my Japanese speaking level. pms, please. Maybe I should try the Skype thread...
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Belardur Octoglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5612 days ago 148 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2, Spanish, Dutch, Latin, Ancient Greek, French, Lowland Scots Studies: Biblical Hebrew, Italian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Korean | Message 34 of 45 21 July 2009 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've used palabea.net and gleaned a few native-speaker contacts from it, but there's been an awful lot of uninterested people (and inactive accounts).
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| Helena22 Newbie Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5584 days ago 1 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English | Message 35 of 45 12 August 2009 at 8:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have been searching for good sites for a long time and I think that the following ones will be helpful.If you have questions, write or call me. Helen
FOR SPEAKING ON-LINE: 1.www.sharedtalk.com 2.www.livemocha.com 3.www.speaking24.com 4.www.kantalk.com TO STUDY: 1.www.learnenglishfeelgood.com 2.www.elllo.org 3.www.youtube.com/user/JenniferESL 4.www.voaspecialenglish.com 5.www.hugosite.com 6.www.howjsay.com 7.www.real-english.com 8.www.learnamericanenglishonline.com 9.www.englishtranscript.com 10.www.lapasserelle.com/mobile/index.php / -install into MP3 11.www.tvunetworks.com/ programs in English/ 12.www.china232.com 13.www.bbc.co.uk/worldsevice/learningenglish 14.www.ilearnwords.com Best regards. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Deji Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5441 days ago 116 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Hindi, Bengali | Message 36 of 45 23 January 2010 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | ||
Make sure you can see when the person was last on. Some sites have people listed that became inactive years ago. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Deji Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5441 days ago 116 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Hindi, Bengali | Message 37 of 45 23 February 2010 at 11:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm very happy with livemocha.com. Especially since I use their site for a language they don't support, but I can
find Bengali speakers there--lots of them !. I also like the fact that you can tell a lot about the other member's activities. Like, for example, how "fresh" they are (italki and others may have no dates). What do they do on the site? lessons? chats? have they taught a lot? Who have they corrected and how? ("ur English composition was gr8!" Who are their 'friends" (only cute young women, for example?? Uh-huh). Be aware that on some sites you may be messaging someone who has dropped all this years ago. Also...it takes patience to find and work out relationships. And people are very changeable. They take up languages and drop them. I continue to find nice people and to work with them, but there are a lot of people among my "friends" who are inactive after the initial contact. I want to exchange Bengali for French, for example. I have had to realize that I can find people, all right, but the Bengalis that I work with are mostly starting from zero french, and I have to be prepared for that. No one responded to my letters in french because they couldn't READ them. (When they wrote that they were beginner, they MEANT it) My initial floods of enthusiastic french scared the hell out of them. I had to realize that my first real exchanger needed, not just a known french language universe, but a known french "asteroid" of his own before he could dare to talk french. My impression is that most people do NOT expect to meet in person. And I am often surprised at how many people are quite shy...esp. women from India and Bangladesh. Well, no big surprise there, I guess, but I would have thought as a sixtyish woman, that I wouldn't freak out other "ladies". I am going to have to post on my profile, though, that if you write to me and say you "wanna" meet me (especially if you want to LEARN English--for business, yet!), then I don't "wanna" meet you!! This is an excellent thread. Very helpful--as so many others. Even if I do waste more time on this site.... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kyssäkaali Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5554 days ago 203 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish | Message 38 of 45 23 February 2010 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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If anyone's thinking of trying lang-8, just know it gets pretty boring after a while. I joined once in like September of 09 and wrote journals for maybe a month, then quit for 4 months and went back, wrote journals for another month and a half and then quit again.
You basically write a journal about something no one cares about, and you have a 50/50 chance that someone will respond and correct it. Most users who write in English, for example, end up with 0 responses. People basically treat you like an animal performing tricks for them as they're correcting you btw. "Say this word! G'BOY!! Who's a good boy? Want a treat???" Then if you dare to correct other's journals you'll get private messages and friend requests out the whazoo, and you don't want to ignore them because you don't want to be rude. So you end up logging in with the intention of writing a journal or correcting some journals and instead spend an hour explaining to a middle-aged Japanese man when the best time to visit Disney World is. You'll also get non-native speakers of your target language who are also studying the language PM'ing you and wanting to basically be your penpal, but chatting with someone with incorrect grammar and broken speech is only going to hamper your learning process. The idea is fantastic and I won't lie, I did learn a bit from having native speakers correct my gibberish. But the site really gets on your nerves after a while. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Belle700 Senior Member United States Joined 5697 days ago 128 posts - 143 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 39 of 45 25 April 2010 at 10:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am thinking of changing my language exchange sites that I belong to after using and evaluating some for a while. Some I have had great success and others, not so much. I am curious to know what everyone else thinks of italki.com?
I belong to SharedTalk - and I also think that the email system really needs to be changed on that site. Otherwise, a great site (backed by Rosetta Stone) and it's for free. Very easy to use. Definitely for serious language learners. MyLanguageExchange is another I use, good site. You can also see when users last logged on so you are not messaging people who don't use the site anymore. Babbel is excellent - and they also have a great online language learning system. Seems to be a very active site. I also use lingozone, that one is okay. I don't like the email messaging system they use, and if you are stuyding multiple languages at the same time, you can only use the site for finding language exchange partners for one language at a time. If you want to find language exchange partners for another language you are studying, you have to change your profile. It's just a bit awkward to use. It's ok. Some sites are great for some languages and not for others. I am studying Hindi, and it's difficult to find a site where you can write in Devanagari and not Romanized Hindi. The only site I can do that on is MyLanguageExchange.com and lingozone. Some sites seem to me to be more active than others: there are plenty of language exchange partners for the language(s) you are studying and you get good success with responses. I was thinking of maybe trying italki.com instead of lingozone. On lingozone, I get some responses, but I also get these automated messages from people asking for money, and of course the email system bugs me. So, what do you think of italki? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Piotr1981 Diglot Newbie Poland Joined 5234 days ago 26 posts - 27 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishC2 Studies: Spanish, Italian | Message 40 of 45 04 August 2010 at 12:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been using lang-8 for a few months and I can definitely recommend it if you search for a place where you can improve your writing skills. The languages I've been writing in most often are Spanish and Italian and in a vast majority of cases I received feedback after 24 hours or less. In fact I've written around 160 entries and only 2 of them remain uncorrected.
Obviously, the quality of corrections varies considerably. Some people simply correct the most glaring grammatical or spelling mistzkes and leave it at that, while others go to great lengths to explain why the option A is better than the option B and basically re-write your sentences to make them sound more natural. From the learner's point of view the results of the latter approach may seem rather discouraging at first when you find almost all of your sentences re-written, but I think this is really helpful. While the site is replete with the Japanese and the foreigners learning the Japanese language, you can also find help with many others, sometimes rather exotic languages. One major exeption to this rule seems to be English. i don't know if it's because of the abundance of entries or rather the dearth of natives who are willing to help, but usually when I see an entry without corrections it turns out to be in English. At the beginning I mentioned that out of 160+ entires I'd written so far, only 2 or 3 remained uncorrected. In fact, all of them were in English. Anyway, I do recommend this site for those willing to work on their writing skills, vocabulary, spelling and grammar. Edited by Piotr1981 on 04 August 2010 at 3:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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