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Tag: online learning

How to learn 1,000 foreign words in 22 hours

How much time do we need to learn a foreign language?

According to Joshua Foer, an American journalist who learnt Lingala – a Bantu language spoken in the North West of the Democratic Republic of the Congo-, you just need 22 hours spread over a period of 10 weeks.

He used Memrise, a web app that teaches foreign languages through a game based on the repetition of words and their audio pronunciation. The trick is to assign to each word a “memo”, that can be an image, a sound, a rhyme, a video or just a note on the etymology of the word.

The idea behind Memrise is making the study of a foreign language a fun practice by using the internet as a social gaming and by exploiting the potential of our memory.

Read full article http://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/09/learn-language-in-three-months

Do ‘digital natives’ learn online differently than ‘digital migrants’?

Hannah Slavik of Diplofoundation comments on a recent study of Open University of Catalonia (UOC) titled:Learning in Digital: An Approach to Digital Learners in the UOC Scenario.

Hannah says that the study “suggests that there is no significant difference between the way ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital migrants’ study online. This is an important finding at a time when online learning is increasingly used, both for mature learners (in the trend towards life-long learning) and for net generation learners, within traditional university programmes.”