To be bilingual can open many doors and provide countless more opportunities to one's career options than I had ever imagined. Here I am at 28 years of age learning French! Oui, Français! Very shortly I will be relocating to Montreal and in all the excitement that comes with learning a new city, neighbourhoods and people, I realized that my job options could be drastically limited if I remain English speaking only. With one month to learn French, I hit the shelves of Indigo searching for the fastest proven method of acquiring proper grammar and conversational French to start. What I found was an overwhelming amount of books, DVDs, and audio Cd's. After half an hour of humming and hawing, I left with a beautiful black cable knit blanket. Now although I can proudly say that I am Internet savvy, I still proceeded to a bookstore first. I will always love and appreciate the way concrete information feels in your hands. You can physically hold it and it makes me feel like a student again. As I snap out of my thoughts of years gone by, I turn to a more obvious and powerful tool. The www.com. In my search, I came across a social network service called Livemocha. A growing online learning language community. I created an account for free and began learning. I was very much impressed with the direction of the online lessons. As an educator, I have had much experience teaching young children how to read their first words. Phonic can be very tricky. However, there are numerous programs educators such as myself use with great success. Livemocha is quite similar in its approach as it blends four progressive exercises: Learn, review, write and speak. In the first exercise, you are presented with a picture, the written word in English and your chosen language as well as an audio. In the next exercise, you are given an opportunity to review what you have learned by matching pictures with audio and the written language in random order. The third exercise asks that you write simple sentences in the chosen language describing people places and things. All words and sentences that you learned in the previous lessons. Once you reach exercise four, you should be prepared to read a short paragraph in your chosen paragraph. Livemocha will record you and share it with someone else in the community for review and criticism. Here is what makes Livemocha fantastic: not only is it free, it is also a community where you can connect with people all over the world and benefit from each others mother tongue. A person in the community from Hong Kong might be learning English and you have an opportunity to listen, read, review and critique their learning. In return, someone in the French speaking community will be reviewing my audio and grading me. I just finished the first of a series of lessons. So far I love it! I will let you know when I am fully bilingual.
Check out their website for more information.
http://www.livemocha.com/