NY Times article on language study & the web

[David Powelstock]

An article in today's NY Times "Circuits" section might be of interest
to some on this list.  The article's first sentence: "As an inexpensive,
decentralized way to connect people around the world, the Internet
presents a wealth of opportunities for students of foreign languages."
The article itself discusses ways to practice languages on the net
(chat, reference sources, IRC, etc.), including some web links.  The
article can be found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/19/technology/circuits/19ital.html?8cir


Best of holiday wishes to all,
David Powelstock
(PLEASE NOTE NEW E-MAIL:)
powelstock at alumni.princeton.edu



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December 19, 2002
For Foreign-Language Learners, the Web Unties Tongues
By THOMAS J. FITZGERALD




>From dipping into a chat room where the conversation is in Italian to
skimming a magazine in Japanese or translating a word from Hindi, the
Internet offers a trove of unorthodox but effective learning tools.

For geographically isolated and busy people, one of the biggest
obstacles to conquering a foreign language is finding people with whom
to converse and to practice. The Internet can eliminate that obstacle,
since people speaking all kinds of languages can be found on the Web at
all hours. Beyond interacting with other people, the language student
who ventures into cyberspace will find foreign radio and television
broadcasts, free tutorials, reference and translation sites and
countless ordinary Web sites in different languages.

A year and a half after a trip to Florence inspired me to study Italian,
I can say from firsthand experience that Internet chat rooms are an
excellent complement to conventional academic studies. Yahoo Chat
(chat.yahoo.com), for example, provides links to international chat
rooms from Western Europe to the Pacific Rim to Latin America.

To enter these rooms you need your own Yahoo user ID, which costs
nothing and can be created in about five minutes. Once registered, you
can use a standard Web browser to chat with thousands of other Internet
users gathered in rooms for people from specific countries. There are
hundreds of such rooms for countries all over the world.

Chat rooms are simple to navigate. When you enter a room, you are
brought together with 20 or so other chatters, usually grouped by topic,
and you can type messages to one another. In the Italian chat rooms,
everything is in Italian - the ads, the buttons, even the messages
telling you who has entered and left the rooms. As a newcomer to the
language, I was able to study what people typed, learning new words and
phrases along the way.

If you have a Windows-based computer, you can go beyond using your
keyboard in the Yahoo rooms. If your computer has speakers and a
microphone, you can monitor public conversations that take place
separately from the text chat you see on the screen, or, if you are
daring enough, jump right into the mix.

While chatting or observing in the public area of a room is useful,
chatting one-on-one, in voice or text, can be a more valuable learning
experience. With each encounter, you can push the limits of your new
language skills a little further. Yahoo Messenger, a free application,
lets you participate in one-on-one chats via audio, text and Webcam.

Beginning a private conversation ordinarily requires sending a private
message to another member of the room. Many users in international rooms
are eager to chat with Americans who are interested in learning their
languages. What is more, the rooms seem to attract lots of teachers, and
in several instances I have encountered teachers of Italian willing to
answer questions about grammar.

America Online and MSN also have international chat rooms along with
messaging programs that enhance one-on-one chats. Another option for
chatting is I.R.C., or Internet Relay Chat, with thousands of channels
and chatters around the world. Information about I.R.C., which is not as
easy to use as Yahoo, AOL or MSN, is available at www.irchelp.org.
Foreign radio stations and foreign television broadcasts are also useful
other study aids. Many media outlets now stream live broadcasts on the
Internet that you can usually tune in to by using RealPlayer, Windows
Media Player, or QuickTime. One Italian station that I found, Radio24
(www.radio24.it), is talk radio that covers topics like investments,
health, parenting, food, entertainment and sports.

An extensive index to live radio and television broadcasts is at
www.comfm.com. This site has links to more than 4,500 radio and 380
television stations around the world, from both large and small
countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe and Central and South
America. Other helpful links to international broadcasts are at
www.real.com and www.msn.com.

Then there is foreign print media. An index of foreign newspapers can be
found at www.onlinenewspapers.com, with links to thousands of them
around the world. Random tallies of publications yielded 130 links in
India and 21 in Greece. For links to foreign magazines online, a useful
site is www.metagrid.com, where you can run a search by typing the name
of a language or country in the search box.

There are also specific Web resources for language learning. Tutorials
at www.studyspanish.com and www.cyberitalian.com offer basic lessons at
no charge, while online dictionaries that translate to and from English
are available at several sites. One such site, www.yourdictionary.com,
provides quick translations and has links to many other online resources
like tutorials.

Of all of these resources, it is chatting with real people and listening
to radio stations that have been most helpful to me. While it is not
quite like studying abroad, the role the Internet can play in language
learning is likely to grow over time. Next I'm hoping to use it to help
learn Spanish.



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