Can people learn another language from
the internet, I’m sure you may have to
pay a fee?
Do you mean a language like Spanish or a language like HTML? The former is much easier.
I’ve seen some self-paced spoken language instruction, but face-to-face still works better.
Html?
If this doesn’t work then what do you
think is the best way to learn a language
and master it?
BobT: By “the former is much easier”, you mean that learning Spanish is much easier than learning HTML? If so, all I can think of is: Wow! HTML took me maybe 10 minutes to learn, tops, while I took 7 years of French (probably comparable in difficulty to Spanish) and still struggle with things.
Any markup language is trivial, really, especially compared to any human language I’ve ever seen, where it seems the norm for non-native speakers to work for years to get it.
k0myers
I guess what I meant is that it is easier to learn HTML on the web than Spanish. The statement looked confusing in retrospect.
Depending on your age and other tendencies some people might find it easier to learn Spanish than HTML. I am proud to have a half-assed knowledge of both.
AOL runs language courses. An example is Spanish for Health Care professionals, which meets for 1 1/2 hours every Sat. morning x 8 weeks. Cost $40.00. There are numerous other Spanish courses, but then things drop off rapidly…
Sue from El Paso
members.aol.com/majormd/index.html
I don’t know if there’s any place you can learn an entire language and get certified for it over the internet, but there’s some sites where people have put up grammars, basic lessons, even audio recordings of common phrases or whole lessons! And all free! All kinds of languages too. Check out:
The Human Languages Page, http:\www.june29.com\HLP
A Web of Online Grammars
http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/rbeard/grammars.html
They are lists of sites with free language lessons. Not all of them are complete, and some are very basic, others very advanced (i.e. assume you’re a linguist), but at the least they’re interesting to look over and you could write the author with questions. Or even try doing a Netsearch with “French language lessons” or the like, it’ll give you other possibilities. Eventually, you’d need to have some class or face-to-face conversation to REALLY learn a whole language, but online is a good place to try one out, learn the basics and see if you want to continue.
Etwas was ist wunderbar ist ein’ Kuh mit Pferdehaar.
Und haette sie kein Pferdehaar, dann ist sie nicht wunderbar.
YOu can learn american sign language for free on the net at lots of sites. They show it thru animations.
I am an instructor for the Free Esperanto Course. Check the website at http://207.175.251.100/esperanto/course/
I have been interested in learning American Sign Language & Espranto until I found no one to use it with. I did learn German to swear at my Austrian wife! Learning another language is impractical if one can’t use it. Aramaic is next so when I meet Jeasus, I can tell him about all you sinners in Cecil-land! (I’m not sure that He knows our language) BTW, why does everyone in the Bible speak in 16th century English?
Zymurgist
Carl, can you say “King James Translation”? A certain hack with the initials WS is sometimes alleged to have helped with it–anyway, some of his contemporaries were certainly involved.
I’ve been playing about with an Alta Vista site called “Babelfish” (Douglas Adams fans take note!) It will translate sentances or whole web pages back and forth between five languages, but it does have problems with syntax and slang (which can be fairly amusing). I like to call up European newspapers and try to muddle through an article as far as I can, then translate it and see how wrong I was! When the B-fish is stymied, it’s pretty obvious.
–Alan Q
What, you missed the two million worldwide Esperanto speakers and the 421 000 American Deaf people (yes, I know not all Deaf people sign and vice versa)?