Also, what accent has he? In my opinion, the courses are definitely worth checking out and as they are free to access, it couldn’t be easier to do so. It could be really helpful to pair these lessons with a language exchange partner or tutor from italki as a means to get more conversation practice. Vocabulary–besides the language transfer words and the ones used in the course. Its importance, however, has not been fully appreciated in SLA research, pedagogy, or classroom contexts. I’ll lookup that website, thanks! Perfect for learners who are just starting out or haven’t yet, Also perfect for students at any level having a breakdown over their current teacher or method of study, Complete Spanish–every grammar rule and language bend there is, including the exceptions and less familiar ones, Ability to form the most difficult sentences, Ability to speak using the correct pronunciation, dialect, etc. Yeah, you can’t ditch the dictionary. I decided to try out Swahili (which I speak) and Greek (which I don’t) to see what the audio lessons are like. www.patreon.com/languagetransferwww.languagetransfer.org/support Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. Consequently, you really can’t listen to the audio files unless you’re completely focused on them. So if you’ve a nice word to say about Language Transfer, please say it there! Over the six-minute long lesson, the student (and you!) Thanks for reading! We earn money when you click on some of the Links on our site. "Every time I think about it, I freak out about how well thought out these audios are." Though no one on the other end can keep a tab on what you are doing, Language Transfer is a course that requires your active participation. As they are introductory courses, you will certainly need to use other resources if you want to become fluent but both the Swahili and Greek courses which I checked out will teach you loads of grammar, quite a bit of vocabulary and will really teach you how to get to grips with each language. The explanations are very clear and simple. You won’t hear any native speakers on most of the courses and you don’t ever actually hear a conversation. The lessons kind of progress in a strange manner as you don’t follow a traditional language learning route, such as starting off with greetings, etc. transfer translation in English - French Reverso dictionary, see also 'transfer list',balance transfer',bank transfer',coach transfer', examples, definition, conjugation Composed of linguists, pedagogues and activists, Language Transfer aims to unite people … While I came away impressed at both courses overall such as the method that Mihalis uses and the level of depth he goes into while teaching you a lot of content in a short time, I do however have a couple of issues with it. . Another issue that some people might find a bit off-putting is that all of the lessons are untitled and so you don’t know what you’ll be covering in each. It doesn’t unnecessarily spoon-feed you though. But it extremely quickly surpassed that foundation. so you don’t sound like a “gringo”, Thorough understanding of the language mechanics. The only confusing thing was that Mihalis explains what some of the letters of the alphabet look like despite having said to ignore reading and writing. While lots of courses start off teaching you introductions and greetings, for example, I didn’t see them come up in either the early Greek or Swahili lessons and basic words such as ‘yes’ and ‘no’ only come up very late on in the Swahili course. It’s never too late to change your ways! It was also quite interactive (despite the fact you’re simply listening to a lesson) and engaging as you focus on what he says, the explanations he gives, and the sentences you build together with him and his student. Let’s take a more in-depth look at what the lessons are actually like. Translate texts with the world's best machine translation technology, developed by the creators of Linguee. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Negative and positive transfer due to lexical reasons: Cognates and false cognates are a good example of how L1 interferes with the second language, in this case English. I need to try this one out! I found them to be an effective way of learning and was impressed at just how much you come away learning in a relatively short time. He does, however, admit in the third lesson that you should base your pronunciation on native speakers but unfortunately doesn’t actually expand on where you could really listen to them. You can, however, fund him and support the project by making a donation on the website and with each donation you get to vote for which language course he produces next. Umm…sorry but I don’t really have a thing for French. I checked on the Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) post where he answered any questions about the methodology and languages of Language Transfer. Both grammar points and vocabulary are given to you in equal measure and so you’re constantly learning how to use them together. After that, you simply need to click on the first audio file and it will start playing immediately. What I like about this is you follow along with her at a natural pace, so you feel like it is a real experience, not a rehearsed one. My take is listen to the first lesson, and don’t tell me if it didn’t work. Translator. Mihalis (the founder) presents everything in a very calm and relaxed manner, thoroughly explaining everything as he goes while encouraging the student who answers his questions. Thank you for sharing! After having said your word or sentence out loud, you can continue playing the audio file and listen to a student’s response and Mihalis who will either correct them or confirm that what they have said is correct. The amount of material available varies depending on the language you choose. With Swahili, Mihalis starts by looking at what verbs look like so instead of having two words like ‘to sleep’ in English, Swahili just has one ‘kulala’ and this essentially means the same thing. As such you need to return to the ‘Free Courses’ page and click on the next lesson if you want to continue. She also knew how to adapt verbs and use them according to the information he had already taught her and to me, this showed what the ‘Thinking Method’ is all about. This first lesson looks at various simple verbs such as to sleep, to eat, to laugh and to want. These audio courses serve as a great introduction to the nine languages currently available. I just wanna ask how long did it took you to finish the course? Welcome to that little voice and thank you for following my blog. They go into lots of depth on how each language works, teaching you all of the main grammar points and giving you the tools needed to learn independently and intuitively. While there are no exercises, quizzes, writing or reading for you to do, the whole focus is on getting you to engage actively with the language. They make so much sense." We earn money when you click on some of the links on our site. It’s completely free and better than most paid resources. French is a popular language, if will find something perfect for you…. I’ve just nominated you for the Sunshine Blogger Award ❤ https://lifeputsimple77.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/sunshine-blogger-award-2/, Great post & must say the name of your blog is really creative, Lovely post! While not everyone will enjoy the structure of the lessons and courses and the fact that all of them are quite similar in terms of how they are presented, as they are free they are definitely worth checking out just to see if the learning method does suit you. Throughout the course, you should interact and engage with the material, pausing the lessons when necessary to reflect, think and say your response out loud. Chapter 4 presents the results of three experimental tasks, In the lessons, Mihalis teaches to a real student who is learning the material for the first time. Some of the languages on the Language Transfer are a work in process and so more German lessons should be added to the 50 that are already on the site in the near future. This is in contrast to lots of language courses which simply regurgitate lessons and then translate them into another language, regardless of whether or not that makes sense to do so. Hello My Long Post Titles, Thank you for sharing this because I had not heard of the free Language Transfer courses before, though I wish that they had an Esperanto course for English speakers since that is the language that I am currently studying (maybe one day they will make a course for it), but it is good to know that they have Spanish and French et cetera courses in case I ever … Don’t let the basic look of the Language Transfer fool you – all of the material is very well thought out and presented and the audio lessons are well recorded. You can also download each lesson individually from Soundcloud or even download whole courses using torrents. This was described to me as "a completely free and more intelligent version of Michel Thomas" which had me very intrigued. Thanks for the info. So you can’t listen to it while doing push-ups or taking a walk or driving the car; you have to sit or even lie down (at your own discretion; his voice can get sleep-inducing sometimes), focused on learning Spanish. As such, don’t expect to listen to conversations in the courses. In any case, I would definitely recommend giving the Language Transfer courses a try and what do you have to lose?! There is no time wasted in the lessons and everything is geared to you getting as much out of each of them as possible. As such you really do progress quite quickly in comparison with some other online language learning courses. All of the lessons available on Language Transfer take the form of audio lessons. As aforementioned, the Language Transfer courses are completely free and so you really can just go to the website and try out the language lessons for yourself. I’ve been interested in learning a new language for awhile now, and have to say this sounds pretty interesting. Using the Language Transfer Supports Introduction to Language Transfer Issues English learners arrive at the doors of our schools from many different countries and every walk of life. Language transfer may occur across both languages in the acquisition of a simultaneous bilingual, from a mature speaker's first language (L1) to a second language (L2) they are acquiring, or from an L2 back to the L1. I know it will work for you! 118 Khaled Karim, Hossein Nassaji/First language transfer in second … Introduction Language transfer is a major process in L2 acquisition. Just one guy, Mihalis, creates all of the content and I was very impressed at the quality and the in-depth look he offers up of the various languages on the site. I have been slowly working my For beginners looking to learn a language, these free courses are an effective and efficient way to start your journey. Each lesson also builds on the others, while his calm and soothing tones and encouraging manner to his student makes listening to the audios very easy. By the way can you recommend a good online course for advance French? Thanks. For example, Spanish speakers learning English may say «Is raining» rather than «It is raining», leaving out the subject of the sentence. And it’s called Complete Spanish, the Thinking Method by Mihalis Eleftheriou. Indeed, I’m quite certain that if you complete the Swahili course you’ll have a very good starting base from which to continue learning the language. This will be invaluable in helping you after the course to learn more Greek and not be afraid of coming across unfamiliar words. Mihalis will also continue to develop new courses in the future depending on funding. But after starting Language Transfer, I’ve realized that it’s definitely not the most efficient. Wang et al. For instance, Greek and Swahili have 120 and 110 lessons respectively. Oh. If you like the courses I would definitely recommend making a contribution as it’s just Mihalis producing all of this amazing content. Thanks for dropping by! Mihalis also encourages you not to write down words, structures or sentences as it will inhibit the mental processes that you need to learn how to speak Greek, Swahili or any of the other languages that Language Transfer offers. Now Language transfer has a slight unfair advantage in that the other methods laid some foundation. If you add ‘ni’ (I) and ‘na’ (the present tense marker) you then get ‘ninalala’ which means ‘I sleep’ or ‘I am sleeping’. In any case, ‘kucheka’ certainly does mean to laugh! I still don’t get why this stuff is available for free! I think Michel Thomas has a French course too–his method is similar to the one I’ve mentioned here. "This is absolutely amazing!" The Effects of Second-language (L2) Learning on Students with Special Needs • There is a great deal of research that looks at the difference between students who are culturally and linguistically diverse versus those with disabilities. He does go on to say however that all courses have been checked by native speakers so that sort of allayed any fears I had about the material and after working through a number of the lessons, I could tell that he really knew his stuff. For iOS (Apple) download the app here! Proverbs and sayings are very important in Swahili and so while he doesn’t look at many of them in the lessons, at least he tells you about them. The Swahili course, for instance, was very well done and at the end, you come away having learned lots of complex grammar in an easy and non-intimidating way. French Language Tutorial includes more than 200 pages of grammar and vocabulary topics, sample sentences, informal ways of speaking, cultural information about France, and an overview of French pronunciation.This e-book also comes with 200+ mp3s (more than FIVE HOURS) recorded by three native speakers and FREE lifetime updates. The idea here is that you listen through the lessons and stop them as frequently as you want to give answers to Mihalis’ questions. Indeed, the whole process encourages you to be very intuitive. I learned a great deal about available courses in my chosen language (Spanish). The amount of content that you cover in what are just short lessons is very impressive and there is absolutely no time wasted at all. Might look a bit basic but the content is very well designed. This time however he doesn’t admit that he is speculating and it comes across more as fact. Language Transfer needs your help to train new teachers and keep all this awesomeness coming! The use of repetition and using words we already to know to form new ones and introduce new grammar points really helped me to remember words and construct basic sentences in no time at all. This means you again have to return to the start page if you want to continue your lessons. Thank you for this review. In my case, the Thinking method did it. (if you’re sincerely participating though, hitting the pause is not even necessary as she goes at a fairly natural pace.). By pausing the audio files, you have time to think over your response and not regurgitate memorized words or sentences, instead thinking for yourself and coming up with your own answers. With them, they bring a wealth of linguistic and cultural diversity that transforms the simplest classroom into a unique cultural experience. All Language Transfer audio courses are now playable from the brand new app! For instance, while you learn a bit about the culture as you go, you certainly don’t learn much about it and Mihalis actually encourages you to use the introductory material that he provides you with to start your own journey of discovery whether that is reading books in the language you’re learning, watching films or reading the news. Look up words and phrases in comprehensive, reliable bilingual dictionaries and search through billions of online translations. My brother is currently trying to learn Spanish so I’ll be letting him know about it as well. This list contains a total of 6 apps similar to Language Transfer. I listened to the first 3 lessons and I’m a fan. These later lessons are a lot more complicated than the earlier ones but are still delivered in a calm and relaxing manner where you build on words and grammar points you’ve seen before. Consequently, I can definitely recommend giving the courses a go. Ranking based on 2205 authentic reviews of French language schools in France Courses from 342 € Free cancellation Exclusive discounts & Lowest price guaranteed Free and impartial advice from our friendly consultants Language Transfer Spanish Reviews. Alright, we do, but a simple Google search or dictionary does that for you. The Language Transfer courses don’t pretend to have the answer to all of your learning needs. These courses are our best bet to helping you progress on your French-speaking journey. So what is it like if you use the Language Transfer for a while? All of the courses are aimed at beginners and the idea is to give you the basics of the language, stimulate your interest in it and get you to engage with the material so that you have all the necessary skills needed to continue learning whichever language you’ve chosen. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. While I really enjoyed the lesson and how he built things up, this time the next lesson on Soundcloud was something to do with Rabbis and Moses, completely unrelated to the course. It’s certainly the best Swahili course I’ve come across and so I can certainly recommend using it to learn this wonderful East African language. He is fluent in several languages and enjoys traveling frequently. We can wait for it, or start with some other for a while! The Michel Thomas Method is a popular approach in language learning, with a range of language courses available for beginners. Thank you for sharing this because I had not heard of the free Language Transfer courses before, though I wish that they had an Esperanto course for English speakers since that is the language that I am currently studying (maybe one day they will make a course for it), but it is good to know that they have Spanish and French et cetera courses in case I ever return to trying to learn one of those languages again. I’m not saying other methods of learning are stupid; if something works for you better than the rest you stick with it! Buy French Language Tutorial as an e-book! Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Unsubscribe at any time. Oh that’s entrancing. Aka, the cream of the crop! I have been getting back into studying Spanish for a while (I used to study it for four years in high school and stopped) by a language study course that someone gave me last week. I’ve talked a lot about Language Transfer in this article without explaining much about how the course is structured. Language transfer is the application of linguistic features from one language to another by a bilingual or multilingual speaker. They will soon also offer Arabic, Persian (Farsi), and Turkish. Leaving a positive review is a great way to help the app appear in more searches for language courses! Whereas others such as French, Arabic and Turkish serve more as introductions to the language with only have 40, 38 and 44 lessons available for each of those. The study of native language influence in Second Language Acquisition has undergone significant changes over the past few decades. Learn French in just 5 minutes a day with our game-like lessons. The term language transfer is used to describe what occurs when people who are in the process of learning a new language transfer the applications from their native language, or their first language, to the new language.That is to say that the people learning the new language use some of the aspects that are applicable to the previous language while learning the new one as part of the … Alternatives to Language Transfer for iPhone, Windows, Mac, Web, iPad and more. A well-thought out collection of 90 audio lessons (each about 10-15 minutes long) for Spanish learners, which start from the absolute beginning and cover almost every minute detail there is to the language. This approach attracts me. He then explains that to use the verbs you have to drop the ‘ku’ part and add on a pronoun and a tense marker (well at least in this early stage). Super awkward! This is interesting. The whole course actually seems like one gigantic audio file which was broken down into the 120 lessons as each one seamlessly flows into the next one. We won’t send you spam. Filter by license to discover only free or Open Source alternatives. Language Transfer is an audio course comprised of 90 lessons, each about 7-15 minutes long. French speakers learning English, however, do not usually make the same mistake. learn how to say ‘he/she is waiting for me’, how to ask ‘is he/she waiting for me’ as well as how to say something in the negative. There are a lot other things in life where you have no other option than memorization–I just think a creative process like language learning is better without it. Transfer (English to French translation). You’ll know nearly all of the grammar you need to hold conversations and will be able to break down most sentences into more manageable chunks. Alex is a freelance writer from Brussels. I think though that this does show that the Language Transfer isn’t like other courses and that the whole look to it is very basic with all of the focus on providing you with quality content for free. Cognates in linguistics are Mihalis will also continue to develop new courses in the future depending on funding. This last lesson is actually the only one that doesn’t really work for me as he speeds through them and it isn’t as clear as all of the other lessons I went through. For Android phones download the app here! At the end of the course, you will again have a great starting base from which to continue on your Greek learning adventure. offered $1,000,000 to become fluent in any second language in a year I went straight to the website but alas, no Korean, the language I need to understand. This is the most important aspect of the course as you want to engage your brain and not simply memorize everything which he considers to be destructive, stressful and inefficient – just focus on the explanations. The Language Transfer’s courses approach language learning with what has been coined as “The Thinking Method’. It was a bit shocking to see that for Swahili and Italian he says ‘I was recording before I had ever attempted a conversation in them’. I have seen a couple of other people complain online that he sometimes indulges in linguistic myths and folk etymology. Besides, imagine getting lost in Latina Land after years of conventional/rote study, unable to recall anything besides “This is the pen of my aunt” and “Carlos has fallen from the tree.”. I was quite surprised however to see that Mihalis only teaches you ‘yes’ and ‘no’ right at the end of the 110 lessons in the Swahili course in lesson 109. Indeed, in the first few Swahili lessons, you come away having learned quite a few sentences, words and grammar points in what only amounts to ten to fifteen minutes of lesson time. For instance, while his knowledge of Swahili seems to be very good, it couldn’t really pass as a ‘native accent’ and it sometimes comes off as a bit Spanish. British newspaper The Times has called the Michel Thomas Method “The nearest thing to painless learning.” So, we decided to do our own Michel Thomas review. This is because sentence subjects can be left out in Spanish, but not in French. 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