Freitag, 2. Januar 2015

A language learner's assistance


Dear readers!


Since October 2014, I call myself a professional language learner. If you want to know more precisely, I study Transcultural Communication.

In this post, I’ll let you know what helps me to improve my language these days.

First and foremost, I am happy to have learned what the internet offers when it comes to the English language. Now, I’ll present my most used websites to you.

In my opinion, the most important thing to know when you learn English is that there are sooo many great monolingual dictionaries available on the Internet. AND, they are more useful than you might think! That knowledge really helped me out in the past few months. 
To conclude, I`ve never used such dictionaries before and am glad that my current teacher showed them to us students right in the beginning of this semester.
Oh, I nearly forgot. If you want to know, my favourite one is the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. It contains everything a language learner’s heart can wish for and apart from that, its design is clear and neat, which I very much like.

Next: website for finding synonyms.
And the winner is: Thesaurus!
A problem of mine is that I have so much more words in my passive vocabulary than in my active vocabulary.  What I do to eliminate this issue is that whenever I want to use a word which I have already used in the same essay before or when it is just too simple and worn out, I look up a synonym for it. I believe that helps to expand my active vocabulary.
But, I have hardly any experience with websites with this purpose. Because of that, there is a good chance that there are many other websites which are better that Thesaurus and unknown to me.

What I also use quite frequently is the dict.cc app on my phone. It is a bilingual dictionary and works without a connection to the Internet. That’s why I prefer it as my phone often isn’t willing to cooperate when it comes to the usage of the internet. But, be aware that access to the internet is necessary when you want to listen to the pronunciation of a word!

Finally, when I have finished writing, I’ll use the grammarly.com website which analyses my text and tells me how many different mistakes it contains. That gives me an idea of how grammatically correct I have written and what I have to watch out for while rereading my work.


Now you have gained some insight into my life as a language student. 

I hope you enjoyed it!
Bye for now!

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