Tools:
@Ron can you speak more to this? Do you like this /these sites? How do you find yourself using them best?
@Sadelle I like to share some personal experience about using multiple language tools. My main target language is French. I am an amateur autodidact language learner. No classes, no compulsory exams anymore. I set my goals. I have been working with French for a long time and would like to reach a sound conversational level. Along the way, I realized that with studying French, the ability grows to understand more in other romance languages. I started to “add one language” in tools that operate in multiple languages. For me it has been Italian. Italy is a wonderful travel destination for me. Although my focus remains French, I pick up more and more of Italian this way. I started to use French as default language on language learning platforms to learn basic Italian. At the moment, I use “Mondly” and “50 Languages”. As a speaker of Dutch I do the same with the closely related language Afrikaans. I hope this has been useful for you. I should say give it a try to find out if this can help you commencing, maintaining and improving multiple languages simultaneously.
I’m intrigued by this idea! How much time you could save by studying from one language directly into another, cutting out the “middle man” of your native language!
I wonder what level you would need to be at for each language for it to be helpful rather than confusing, though…?
(I did do something similar by mistake recently - I downloaded a deck of Japanese/English flash cards made by a Finnish man. For his own reference, he had put in some Finnish translations - all of which I ended up passively memorising! )
Thanks Ron. I definitely find this intriguing. I had started bringing back my long lost Russian this summer, but am now back on a focused push to get my Irish to B2. I use a mix of learning methods, from a couple of mostly casual conversation based classes, plus occasional dips in online self-led courses to a couple of grammar books to my slowly growing collection of comprehensible input resources, podcasts, tv, radio, novels, audiobooks, etc. (I like to mix things up). I was thinking it might be nice to do a side by side collection of vocab in both languages at some point, so I may play with this. Though it would very cool to use for when I add Gaeilge na hAlbain.
Sadly, neither 50 languages nor Nice Translator offers Irish (or Scottish Gaelic). Oh well…
@ Sadelle, if you like the concept of “50 Languages” you should contact Goetheverlag (Germany) and talk about adding Irish. You definitely need one or two native speakers to build it. Maybe you know about funding resources from the government or EU to support learning of minority languages? I wish you luck to convince the editors to “add one language”. Online-Translators need a lot of available input of text material to be build. But it should be possible to provide this for Irish. Google translate offers more and more (minority) languages. There is Corsican, there is Welsh.
Thanks Ron… I’ll mention this within my networks.