Learning Something New

We live in an age of information.  There's a ton of information available to us that was never so easily accessible.  Some of it is crap and some of it is gold and the trick is to find resources that are usable and effective.  I'm going to do a short series on some sites that can be used to learn some new things or get better at something we know but haven't yet mastered.

I have a lifelong fascination with languages.  If I could, I would spend all my time learning new languages and going to the places where I can use them.  Alas, I've got a smattering of several languages with varying degrees of fluency.  I used to be very fluent in Spanish (when I lived in areas that I used it on a daily basis) but I've lost much of it.  So to improve, I have  been getting books on tape in Spanish and that's helping me build up my fluency again.

I've also been flirting with French for quite a few years now.  At one time, I could read quite a bit but I've never gained spoken fluency and I've lost much of the comprehension that I had.  So I've signed up for short time with www.newsinslowfrench.com to work on improving my fluency.  For the sake of full disclosure, this is a subscription site but you get transcripts of the recordings as well as the reading in slower speech (though not irritatingly slow) and readings at normal speed.  For me, that's helping build the areas that I need the most help on.  Since it's not always easy to find spoken French that also has the translation, I was really pleased to find this site.

They have similar sites for Spanish and Italian.  I'm using the Intermediate option but they also have a Beginner option so if you've ever wanted to learn a language, this could be a great option for you. Honestly, if you've never learned another language, I would encourage you to start with Spanish as I think it's probably the easiest language to learn (you always pronounce the letters the same way every time and the majority of the verbs are conjugated regularly - that means easier) and it's so widely used, you can most likely use it right away.