Wednesday, 9 January 2008

Social networking for language learning

I've just seen this site which is aimed at helping people to set up language exchanges. It's a kind of social networking tool. It's called Friendsabroad.com. You simply put in your language and then the language you want to learn and then you can also choose the country where you would like to find the person. Click on search and you get a list of people who fit your criteria.


You have to register, but it is free, then you can get in contact and start chatting, emailing through the platform (no email addresses are disclosed) and can even leave voice messages.

No 'teachers' as such are involved, there are however a coupe of useful tools on the interface to help you.

There is;

  • a text to speech converter, so that you can type in a phrase and see how it is pronounced
  • a multilingual dictionary so that you can get help with translating
  • a phrase translator. Type in any phrase you want and get a translation of it
On the whole I think this is a great idea. It looks like there are quite few people registered already, though many of the ones I came up with on my search hadn't been active for a while.

Still a great idea and if enough people get registered this could be a real winner.
I'd love to hear from you if you've tried it.

Best

Nik

0 comments:

Post a Comment