2010-04-06

Online Foreign Culture Learning Makes You Real Residents of Global Village

As financial crisis fades, cooperation between countries has flourished again. It requires the enhancement of transnational communication and understanding. If you need to work abroad, if you are a language learner, or if you want to travel around the world, it is necessary for you to know the culture of target country, which will help you work and study more smoothly and efficiently. How to learn the foreign culture effectively? Technology will help us. Let’s get familiar with some online resources for foreign culture learning.

cross culture learning online

Language is the great carrier of culture and if you want to learn a nation’s culture, you must know about its language first. I will introduce two wonderful language learning sites: livemocha.com and BBC Language.

  • Livemocha.com is the most active language learning community in the world. This online language paradise enables you to communicate with native speakers, and also offers many online lessons and quizzes to improve and check your language level. You can invite others to check your work and you also evaluate others’. Livemocha supports to record audio and then other language learners will offer you feedbacks. It is quit interactive and you will not learn the language alone.
  • BBC language is another effective resource for language learning. There are many foreign languages like French, Spanish, Chinese, German, etc. You can exchange learning tips, play language games, and share travel experience on it. News pieces and TV programs are available to visitors.

In the process of studying foreign cultures, it is better to discuss with the natives or at least share the opinions with others. Thus you can enjoy more feedbacks and some first-hand materials. An interactive atmosphere will act as a good assistant helping you learn more. I suggest you make a quiz and presentation to show what you learn, which will increase your satisfaction of mastering new knowledge. Then let's see some platforms you can make use of.

  • Facebook, Twitter, etc. are quite popular social media on which you will find a lot of people with same interest with you. They are the ideal places for you to get suggestions and share experiences.
  • Travel Blog shows us enticing scenery of all the continents. It is a collection of travel journals, diaries and photos from around the world. You will experience the whole world through the blogs. The travel forum, at the same time, will allow you to learn from those who have been to other countries.
  • Studentoftheworld.info is a typical site for students all over the world. This site has full introduction including the overview, statistics, etc. of nearly all the countries. One important thing is that students from the target country will show you their ideas which manifest the nation’s modern values, in some degree.

The internet resources bring us more convenience to study the foreign culture. As long as you search, there must be more marvelous learning sources. The governmental sites, travel sites, etc. are all good platforms for you to know the country. The more you learn the world, the better your life will be.


2 comments:

  1. ePals.com is another great site for K12 students to use, because it has TRUSTe certification of student privacy (which LiveMocha does not, sadly). You can find teachers of native-speakers of many different languages in the 200 countries with ePals members.
    It's free to join the ePals Global Community, and free for you and your students to get the powerful ePals SchoolMail too.
    Spanish teachers will find many native speakers in Latin America (more than 35,000 teachers with active profiles). Those classes can skype/videoconference in a reasonably similar time zone to US classrooms, unlike Spain.
    Latin American teachers also are interested in doing project-based learning with your students who want to use Spanish and share cultural info and scientific data.
    Join epals.com and find a classroom match for your classroom, even if it's just for the last six weeks of the school year!

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  2. LiveMocha has been extremely helpful to me in regards to meeting native speakers of foreign languages and practicing with them. I don't like their lessons though. I build my vocabulary for free with learnalanguage.com, then I go back to LiveMocha and practice what I learn.

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