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Monday, May 16, 2016

Easy German, Italian, Spanish

I searched on the internet for my daily dose of duo lingo German and up popped a site discussing how effective it was to learn by this method. The writer of the blog post had done the duo lingo course in German. He found it very effective for learning vocabulary quickly, less effective for understanding spoken German or speaking it.

I thought the way you could click on the sound was quite useful. I can see that putting together a sentence might be harder. But I wasn't expecting everything form the course. As far as I was concerned, anything was better than nothing.

I have Earworms discs in several languages. They give you whole sentences spoken. You can follow the text or just listen to the repeats of the disc. The text is in very small font.

For me the great advantage of the duo lingo system is that you have to concentrate. (I suppose some people would prefer to hear a disc in the background.)

My problem was I'd given up all my other courses. the duo lingo is in such tiny chunks that you can do a couple of minutes each day, however busy you are.

However, to address the rproblme of learning to understand the spoken language, I followed the recommendation of one of the comments. They suggested using Easy Languages on You Tube which is in several languages including German, Italian and Spanish. It's quite entertaining. I watched one on Mexican phrases or proverbs.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, researcher, English teacher and tutor.

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