A while ago I did an American Sign Language(ASL) course online. While I still cannot sign, it was fun to do and gave me enough basics to understand that sign language is quite complex and interesting. In fact, it seems to have more dimensions simultaneously than a vocal language. If I ever have to work with a deaf person, I will not hesitate to further my knowledge of their sign language.
A Frenchman studying Russian could not find a good free audio word-list, so he built one himself. Check it out if you studying French or Russian. And if you are fluent in Russian, consider helping him out (I will try to when I have time).
And if the idea of list building for the language learning purposes appeals to you, you could try out the software he built to make the recording task easier.
About a month ago, Steve Kaufmann (creator of theLinguist service) and I had a disagreement on whether grammar is important in studying language. In summary, he thinks that the grammar should be studied last if at all, while I think grammar allows one to create a mental infrastructure that would make learning easier.
Since Steve is currently studying Russian, we agreed to have a Skype discussion where he can demonstrate his Russian to me.
I am an idealist inside. But I keep that well hidden. 🙂 So, when I look at something that needs to be done, I search for the low hanging fruit. Grand ambitions are fine, but if they are not backed up by the near term useful solutions, everything will stagnate and die.
With Esperanto, the core idea is so great and compelling that many people seem to have difficulties to turn their eyes to identifying more immediate opportunities.
There is a great commercial service out there for those interested in learning English. It is called theLinguist and is run by the polyglot Steve Kaufmann (with 9 languages and more on the way, he more than deserves the label). Steve’s approach is very unconventional, but I think in a good way. It is run as a central website, it provides a lot of reading and listening material, it tracks the words/phrases you are learning and it provides tutor services that will look over what you write and suggest better (more standard) ways of saying the same thing.