Today I will talk about what resources I use for my French, Spanish and BSL.
Here are some piccys of what I have on my bookshelf:
Flash Sticks post it notes :) good for putting onto books or the walls :P The colours mean if its masculine or feminine.
Here I have three French novels and one Spanish novel- two of the books have English on the parallel page. The 15min books are good as you can dip in and out of them and they have the pronunciations of words which I find useful- quick recap exercises for when you only want to spend a tiny bit of time on them or if your in a hurry. I also have (but its upstairs on the bedroom table) French/Spanish First Readers books that have random sentences that build into a mini story- preview and review of this later in blog)
Here are two BSL dictionarys and some workbooks (the white notepad with black dots is my braille notepad)
French newspapers and magazines on the coffee table!
Mostly I use online study methods.
Online study:
I use Duolingo and Memrise mostly and if I dont want to type or write anything just to listen I use Coffee Break (Spanish and French) where they have many short lessons so you can pick and choose.
Duolingo is like a game where you can set your xp of the day and do a lesson to gain that xp- you then level up after a while. You have to work your way through the course and each topic can have a few lessons in it- once you have done all that topic it turns gold (but keep practising or the owl will get sad and the topic turns back to normal colour) if you miss a day your "streak" goes back to 0 (the fire symbol at the top corner).
(Duolingo front page)
(xp setting)
Memrise is like duolingo but can pick and choose what you want to learn- can get repetitive but each time you understand a word or sentence a plant grows till you get full plant (I guess planted in your memory bank idea) there are speed rounds (unlike duolingo where if loose 3 hearts you fail) and again you level up.
With both you get written translation questions, speaking questions,match the word, listen and write questions so a good mix to keep you on your toes!
BSL is abit more tricky - I try to watch See Hear, any signed news or cbeebies programs for help with receptive. To see a new sign in action I go to bslsignbank.ucl.ac.uk. I have been to deaf club twice but now aim to go frequently.
I also belong to a language forum where I get to chat to other language learners- it is called forum.language-learners.org that have a great bunch of people online :)
So they are my resources that I use - I have a variety so I wont get bored of learning the languages. I need to start speaking more in the languages so thinking of testing out italki- anyone use this?
What do you use? What is your favourite method of studying?
Many thanks for reading!
x
