I've been living in Argentina now for about 2 years. I spoke pretty good Portuguese when I arrived, and had a year of introductory Spanish under my belt.
During my time here my comprehension has improved tremendously. My grammar...not so much. Especially the written word. I struggle with spelling, mixing Portuguese and Spanish words, confuse pronoun gender....my four and six year old children are leaving me in the dust.
They spend all day at school studying in Spanish while I go to an office and hang out with Americans.
Today I stumbled across a great free resource for improving my Spanish...it's called LiveMocha.com.
Registration is free and there is a broad range of languages you can register to learn. The site allows you to self-select your language level and complete lessons that help you to expand your vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and reading comprehension. It combines audio video and text.
LiveMocha is a community-based site where people who want to learn new languages connect to each other to study pre-set lessons, comment on each other's writing exercises and practise conversation.
The site allows you to befriend people who are looking to learn your mother tongue, and who are willing to coach you in exchange. Tonight I completed two lessons online, and submitted two writing exercises. Within minutes, I had feedback on the writing exercises in my inbox, complete with scores and comments.
All my coworkers pay around $50.00 pesos an hour for private lessons, plus the cost of text books. I'd been thinking of doing the same.
Interested in learning English, or practising your Spanish or Portuguese online? I recommend you give LiveMocha a try. Look for me (Prune Danish) on there, and add me to your friendlist.
http://www.livemocha.com
Bonus Language Tool
For a quick vocab workout, you can subscribe to the Spanish Word A Day rss feed widget at
http://www.braser.com/spanword.php
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment