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Tuesday, December 17, 2019

How Wikipedia and Duolingo can help you learn languages, Spanish and 300 other languages


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Wikipedia
First read in the English Wikipedia about the language you want to learn. If you want to start with words you already know, look for the pages on loanwords.

Then read Wikipedia in that language. Yes, you can read an article in a foreign language. i discovered this when I started looking for Spanish.

Flag of Spain

Open any Wikipedia page and pick languages from the column on the left hand side. Just spin downwards to the heading languages. Astonishing.

You can read Wikipedia in more than 300 languages.


    This page contains a list of all 309 languages for which official Wikipedias have been created under the auspices of the Wikimedia Foundation. This list includes 10 Wikipedias that were closed and moved to the Wikimedia Incubator for further development, so there are a current total of 299 active Wikipedias.

    When you want to return to English, spin down the left hand side again and select English. Or another of your favourite languages.
    the languages with the most articles and readers are (alphabetically): Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese.

    Let us just take Spanish as an example. You can find a Spanish Wiktionary, an article on Spanish, and books in the Spanish language such as the classic Don Quixote by Cervantes.

    Wikiquote has sayings of Cervantes from the book in the original Spanish and in translation.
    Wiktionary
    Spanish edition of Wiktionary
    English Wikipedia has an article on:

    Duolingo
    I am learning Spanish on Duolingo. In addition to the free language lessons, offering multiple choice, Duolingo has a series of stories to read.



    Memrise is designed to store the memory aids you have created for words.



    Now you know what to do and where to go to learn more.

    Useful websites
    duolingo.com
    memrise.com
    wikipedia.com
    https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

    About the Author
    Angela Lansbury is a travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. She teaches English to adults at colleges and businesses as well as other languages. Please share links to your favourite posts.

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