Hey y'all!
I just found a fun site called
Duolingo (duolingo.com) and I thought I'd share.
About Duolingo:Duolingo is a free-to-use site that helps you learn several different languages using simple "quiz" type games (well,
I consider them games
), such as:
choosing the word/picture to match the English word (assuming you chose English as your language),
typing what you hear (they let you replay the audio as many times as you need - and there's even an option to play it slowly), and
translating sentences into English - and vice versa (they let you "cheat", too! You can hover your cursor over a word, and it gives you a list of meanings + some other useful info. Like for instance; whether a word is "masculine", "feminine" or "neutral"). There's a few others, too!
Duolingo let's you take a "welcome lesson" as a guest - to give you a feel of how the lessons work (so you can decide if you'd like to join). After you finish the welcome lesson, you can either discard your progress, or make an account and continue learning. Fortunately,
they don't ask for any personal information - no gender, name, location, etc -
Just an email address!Duolingo also keeps you motivated by letting you set a
"daily XP goal" - You earn
XP (that's experience points, for y'all non-gamers
) by by finishing a lesson. Getting answers wrong also depletes your
"health" or hearts - lose them all and you don't get any XP. (See? Told you it's like a game! You even "level up" by reaching a certain amount of XP!).
Another fun thing about the site is the words you know have a "strength" meter that fills up or goes down depending on how recently you practiced. So if you don't do a practice session with that word for several days - the meter goes down. (I think this helps, because it can warn you of which words you might be forgetting due to not using/reviewing it enough)
You also earn
"lingots" (they look like the rupees from Zelda
) occasionally after completing a practice session/lesson, which you can spend in the
"Lingot Store". And to be honest.. there's not a lot you can buy with them (at least, not yet). I've only bought the
"Heart Refill" power-up (gives you back 1 of the hearts you lost during a lesson/session - which helps if you're almost at the end of a lesson, but only have one heart left), and the
"Timed Practice" item (like the name says - it let's you do timed practice sessions. [which I haven't used yet *cough*]).
Anyway! There's more to the site, but you get the idea.
And for anyone who decides to join (or is already a member), my username on there is
robin8592 
I'm currently learning German - Still a total n00b, though.. I've only learned simple phrases like "She is drinking water", "The man is reading", etc. And according to my list, I've learned 59 words so far
(I'm having to review/practice a lot, too. Still getting words mixed up and forgetting what others mean!)
Feel free to use this thread to brag ("I just reached level 7!", "I just completed another lesson!"), help out anyone else who is learning the same language, ask questions, or suggest other language learning sites/apps/books/etc.
