Language 101 classes are truly the devil. First, a TA who is fresh out of their undergrad classes and usually has no teaching skills whatsoever is at the front of the class. To add on to that, so many people are taking these classes, you are more than likely going to be taking it at 7:30 a.m. Finally, foreign languages are some of the hardest things you can learn. They require hours of dedication just to memorize the vocabulary, let alone learn the grammar and pronunciations.
Don’t worry: technology has finally advanced to the point where you can pretty much learn a language without ever setting foot inside of a classroom. Let me be clear though: go to class. Even if it is only for an hour, class will help you immensely by interacting with other students and asking the professor questions. These tools should be used as aides on top of your normal classwork and book assignments (I know they're terrible, but you have to do them anyway).
Supplementary Courses
Livemocha is an online language course repository that supports 35 languages. The site works by having you work through a class that mirrors a basic college course. The grading of any of the work you do is then crowd-sourced to a native speaker. For example, your Spanish composition would receive feedback from a native speaker, while you would be asked to grade English assignments and recordings. Everything you do on the site feeds into a metagame that tracks your course progression, your rating as a grader/teacher and other random things that you can do on the site. There is also a progress bar that tracks how far you’ve gotten, which just adds to the whole video-gamey feel. The basic version of Livemocha is free for most languages, with the option to license the advanced version for $19.95.
tl;dr – Livemocha, an online language course, has a decent amount of resources, a clean interface and a great sense of community.
Extra Lectures
Sometimes you aren’t going to get the material on a first pass and you are going to need a refresher in that area. That’s where some OpenCourseWare solutions come in. OpenCourseWare is a Creative Commons licensed program that archives free college courses for the public to use. An easily accessible way to get these courses is through the iTunes U center in iTunes. ITunes U has a huge selection of podcasts and videos from universities, including ASU.
OpenCulture has a list of some of the best free iTunes feeds and free lectures on the Internet.
tl;dr – Use iTunes U to get free online courses.
Translators
According to your professor, online translators will ruin your education, destroy your life and are horribly inaccurate. I agree that if you use translators for every possible assignment you are not going to learn anything. But in a pinch translators can help you learn vocabulary way more quickly than looking something up in a book. Google Translate has come a long way from the days of getting you a garbled message. Google Chrome even has a tool built into the browser to translate foreign language websites. Using Google Translate as a tool allows you to quickly translate passages and work on your vocab. Forvo is a translation tool that has real pronunciations of the words from native speakers. You can use this tool to get your intonation down and work on those hard languages where the inflection could mean entirely different words.
tl;dr – Use translation tools to work on your vocab and intonation. Don’t just copy it!
Any language 101 class is going to be tough. Make your digital plan of attack to supplement your in-class work and you’ll be asking more than just “Donde esta el Bano?”
