SubJeff on 14/1/2013 at 18:36

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I've been using this web based language school thing called (http://duolingo.com) Duolingo for the past couple of months now and I'm so glad I found it. I'm still doing the first stage (of 3 in Spanish) and I'm on present tense verbs. Its the brainchild of the guy who created Recaptcha - (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQl6jUjFjp4) - and so the benefit to the creators is that part of learning is translating and the crowd sourced translation power of 1000s of people is being harnessed. It's an amazing use of the crowd.

I've wanted to learn Spanish for an age but the hassle of finding and going to a class after work always put me off. The convenience of being able to do as much or as little as I'm able has been great and its actually fun to learn this way. It's almost a gamification of learning process and not only does it work for me but I'm into this idea bigtime.

There is another learning thing called Memrise that also offers some language lessons but imho the lack of depth renders most of the lessons useless, and that includes the non-language lessons.

The Spanish on Duolingo is, I believe (from the comments on the site) American Spanish and not Spanish Spanish, iyswim. So I'm learning nosotros and not vosotros, and learning the -mos endings. But I'm sure small things like this won't matter too much in the end. I get to test out my paltry Spanish in the Canaries in a couple of days so I'll soon know!

If you've been interested in learning another language, and at the moment there is Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and German I think, this is worth checking out.

Kolya on 14/1/2013 at 22:46

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I tried the English to German version for a bit. I didn't see any mistakes early in, but it repeatedly throws you small sentences whose verbs haven't been introduced before and asks you to translate them to English.
Short of previous knowledge or looking up the verbs elsewhere I don't see how that's supposed to work.

demagogue on 15/1/2013 at 01:16

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Rosetta Stone (& some textbooks) has been working for me for Japanese.
I know its system by now, so it's worth just sticking to it for me.

Speaking of translations, the Google translation has gotten much better over the last few years. Still far from perfect, not even really "good" yet, but if you already studied the language it can get you halfway there and make the rest of translating it easier for you.

demagogue on 16/1/2013 at 01:47

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You can get an old version for dirt cheap, and I don't think even that much has changed to the system in the last 15 years except polish. You can learn the language just as well.

Ulukai on 16/1/2013 at 09:01

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So I learnt, "Mein name ist Duo!"

Will definitely check it out. My French isn't bad at all, so think I'll assess how good I think it is with French before I try and start learning any more German.