Here is another really innovative concept for learning a new language:

Google Chrome has come up with a neat extension that allows you to learn a foreign language just by browsing the web. Here’s how it works:

1. You install the extension.
2. You choose the language you want to learn.
3. You choose the level of difficulty (e.g. beginner, intermediate, advanced)
4. You browse to a website where you read a text you want to read, and the extention will replace some words or phases of the original English text with words or phrases of your target language.

Watch the video to check this out for yourself:

It surely isn’t a way to completely learn a language, but might be a great way to get deeper into a language you are already learning!

Here’s the original description of the extension:

Experience a new language while you browse the web.

Language Immersion for Chrome is an experimental extension that aims to simulate the experience of being immersed in a foreign language. By switching certain words and phrases from English into a language of your choice, the websites you already visit can provide a way to experience the world from a different perspective.

Features:

- Choose from all 64 languages currently supported by Google Translate.

- Novice-to-fluent skill settings let you immerse at your own pace.

- Click on a translated word to switch it back to English.

- Roll-over a translated word to hear it pronounced.

Note: Language Immersion for Chrome is very much an experiment. That means the translations won’t always  be 100% accurate, and it probably won’t turn you into a language genius overnight. That being said, we think it’s pretty cool to be able see the web from a different perspective, and we’re excited for everyone to give it a try.

There is a cool article in Wired titled Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational.

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.

A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

One more reason to ramp up your language skills

One of the things many people do when they learn a new language is that they look up words in the dictionary. It is also commonly recommended in language courses and by language teachers to do so, and for good reason.
However, one of the most brilliant language teachers of our times, Michel Thomas, had a very different opinion on the use of dictionaries. In general, he recommended not to use them at all, with two main exceptions.
The first exception: Imagine a language student who is reading a book or newspaper or magazine, and he encounters a word that he doesn’t understand, but that is crucial to understand the whole sentence.
Pay close attention to the last part: crucial to understand the whole sentence.
Because oftentimes we encounter words whose meaning we do not actually know, but we can get an approximate understanding of them because of the context in which they appear. In written language, authors often use words that are rarely used in spoken language – uncommon words which aren’t really crucial to being able to converse in a foreign language.
As a language student, you really want to make the best use of your time and mental energy. Efficient learning matters, because we have a limited amount of time, and especially mentally focused time.
So to make the main point: only when a word is necessary to understand the whole sentence, to make sense out of a sentence, should you look it up in the dictionary. Otherwise, just leave it alone and be contempt with “guessing” it’s meaning because of the context in which it appears.
The second exception when you should use a dictionary, according to Michel Thomas, is when a word appears again and again, and you read it repeatedly for many times. This is an indicator that it is an important word which you should be familiar with.
Now whether you want to implement this advice or not is of course your choice – but keep in mind that Michel Thomas was a brilliant language teacher, and that this was one of his “golden rules to learn a language”, so to speak. So it might be well worth to check it’s validity for yourself.

When you first learn a new language, it’s good to learn the basics by listening and verbally repeating. Just listening and repeating- skip the reading / writing for now. It is true that this is a little more difficult at first.

Usually, if we learn a new word, we want to write it down so that we can memorize how exactly to pronounce it. And usually we like to write it down in a kind of “karaoke language” – meaning, the way it`s spoken, in a phonetic way.

While this is indeed helpful when it comes to memorizing vocabulary, it also manifests an accent right from the beginning. If you fine-tune your ears so much that you memorize words by listening, you will also memorize the way the language sounds, the tonal patterns and the subtle nuances that often make a foreign language difficult to learn.

Again – this is not the fastest way if you just want to pick up a few phrases to be understood. But if you want to be able to speak really good, and get to know a language on a deeper level, then it’s worth it.  And in the long run, this approach is much faster.

If you can, record yourself when you repeat a word or phrase, so that you can also listen to the way you say a sentence and the way a native speaker says it, and compare the two. Most of the time you will find that at the beginning, there are differences in the way you sound – and these are sometimes difficult to recognize when you speak, but if you listen to a recorded sentence that you spoke yourself, and then again to the same sentence spoken by a native speaker, this really helps.

An old Persian proverb goes like this: “Everything is difficult before it becomes easy.” And the same is true for beginning to learn a language. At first, it can be overwhelming, especially if you are learning a language that is very different to your own. If for example you are native English speaker, and you learn Spanish – that’s quiet easy compared to learning a language like Chinese or Thai, which are practically not related.

Think about the way kids learn a new language: they just listen and repeat the sounds they hear. And this way, they become naturally fluent.

If you want to learn a language, the best way to do it is to have fun with the language. Yes, you need discipline and you have to make a commitment, but you also want to play with the language.

Don’t make it dead serious. So many people feel frustrated when they make a mistake. Relax, loosen up, have some fun with it, and you’ll see this will help you a lot in mastering a new language.