(Let me tell you how I’m doing it for free! Read on…)
I’ve mentioned before about my insatiable devouring of all things historic over the past 2 years. I lovelovelove history, and was quite disappointed in the discovery that my historical education during my school years was (to put it gently) extremely devoid of anything with substance.
Anyway, so I’ve been slowly working my way through studies of ancient history – especially that of ancient Greece and Rome. We’re going to be homeschooling Jack-Evan some day, and the classical education / liberal arts method appeals to me more and more as I gain a better grasp on what it all means.
Recently, I’ve begun listening to history courses from the Teaching Company (www.Teach12.com) that are available at my local library and from that, I developed an interest in reading through the classics (such as writings from Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, etc.).
Now, while I’m not ready to tackle Greek, I am highly motivated to learn Latin. I think it would be incredibly enriching to delve into the original works from the Roman Empire since so much of the subtle meaning of phrases can be lost in translated-to-English books. Plus, it would be a lot of fun too. I really enjoyed learning Spanish in high school, and can still read it, and took French in college – thus Latin should (I’m theorizing!) be fairly simple since it is the root of the Romance languages.
So with that in mind, this past week I gathered up some latin books (i.e. “Latin for Dummies”, “Teach Yourself Latin”), an Audio CD latin course, and a PC CD-Rom language courses (“Learn Latin Now!”) from my local library, along with a 2005 middle school beginning Latin textbook I found for 10 cent at the Goodwill, and began my quest. Shoot…Why would I pay for something I can do for (practically) free, right? 
I even found a Latin podcast and Latin Poetry to listen to online.
Along with beginning Latin, I also decided to brush up on Spanish so I can begin teaching Jack-Evan. I would love for Jack-Evan to be fluent in Spanish by the time he is a teenager. My husband’s birth mom speaks fluent Spanish, and lives in an all Spanish community, so he would have someone to practice conversing with as he grows too. To help me review my Spanish (with the thought that it’s been 9 years now since I studied it), I checked out a beginner’s Spanish course at the library called “Muzzy”.
You may remember the cartoon Muzzy language courses that were extremely popular (well, on commercials!) back in the mid-90′s. They showed happy kids laying around the TV laughing at the big green furry monster and learning French and Spanish. I remember wanting my parents to purchase one for me way back then, but it cost too much. So of course I was thrilled to find the DVD course for free! I’ve already viewed the 1st DVD 5 times, and it’s really helped with refreshing what I learned in high school. Your local library may have language courses too – mine has all of the Muzzy series in many languages as well as adult language programs.
Also, as with my typical can’t-help-but-immerse-myself learning style, I also began searching for free online learning materials – and boy, there are tons.
Here are my top 4 favorite free resources online.
1. One great free tool you can use is LiveMocha.com where you converse with a community of people in your target language, and get feedback on how you are doing.
2. Signing up for free podcasts and listening to free radio stations in your target language is terrific too. I found an excellent english / spanish podcast called “Voices in Espanol” at Spanish-podcast.com. I put it in my google feed reader and have already enjoyed a couple of episodes (even though I only understood 30% of it! haha).
3. Youtube is also a great resource for learning another language. Just do a searh for “yourchosenlanguage” Lessons (insterting the language name of your choice). There are no less than 11,000 results for “Spanish Lessons” alone. From there, you can learn verb conjugation, correct pronunciation, new nouns, common words, and more. For those of you interested in Greek, I know of many introductory Greek lessons on there as well. Last year I memorized the correct pronunciation for the greek alphabet through Youtube.
4. And then, finally, the best free resource I’ve found by far is the FSI Language Courses. They’re US government built public domain language courses for a wide variety of languages. The method used is mainly rote memorization in those courses, but it is quite thorough and gives you an excellent base to start memorizing a new language. Each language course has dozens of downloadable language units and corresponding workbooks. Languages include Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic, Greek, German, Hebrew, and Italian among many others.
For curiosity’s sake, I worked my way through the first unit in Chinese. How extremely fascinating it was to finally understand how that language works. You know they say you learn something new every day, right? Well I know absolutely nothing about Chinese. But after listening to the unit, I now understand how the intonation and voice inflection affects Chinese speech – and how one syllable can mean many, many different things based on the voice inflection (steady pitch, rising pitch, low pitch, etc). It’s really interesting.
The best thing about learning a new language from CD courses or from FSI is that you can download audio files and sync them to your MP3 player (which is what I do) – and listen to them while you are busy with something else or just before going to sleep at night. It’s amazing at how much you can learn (on any topic!) by listening for 20 minutes here and 30 minutes there.
So don’t be scared. Try it and see for yourself. Forget Rosetta Stone….Learning is fun and doesn’t have to cost a ton. :)
