Do you have a favourite method of language learning which works well for you? If so, which is it?
Can you recommend some good websites when one can learn (and perhaps also teach)?
If someone is into blogging I recommend
www.lang-8.com They have a "freemium" format, but I only had a free account. Still, I liked it a lot and it was perfectly OK for my needs. If you're into blogging, you should give the site it a try
The idea is to blog about whatever you want and receive corrections from native speakers. The response usually comes within hours of posting an entry. The possible exceptions to this rule include obscure languages with few registered native speakers and- surprisingly- English. I suppose the case with the latter is that there are loads of learners and not enough willing native speakers to go round. Of course the quality of corrections will vary- some people will only fix the most glaring mistakes, while others will not only suggest all sorts of corrections, but also go to great lengths to explain why this option and not that. Of course, being a native speaker does not necessarily imply writing one's mother tongue perfectly so erroneous corrections can happen too. I was extremely active there for over two years and wrote about 500 entries (mostly in Spanish and Italian), over 99% of which got corrected.
If you need to improve your spoken language comprehension, I recommend
www.rhinospike.com The good thing about it is that you don't even have to register to use some of the site's functions. A registered user can get 2 things there: post a text in a chosen language and get it read by a native speaker, or post a link to a recording/video (works only with YouTube, unless they've changed something) and get a transcription of what is being said/sung/etc. Of course one can record or transcribe other people's files too (it was there that I first heard of Audacity
). Doing so will move one's recording up the queue, so the more you record/transcribe for others, the less time you will have to wait for your submission to be recorded. If you don't want to register, you can still browse all the files and transcriptions. One very good thing is that all the recorded files are downloadable and accompanied by a written version. The biggest disadvantage is that when I last checked there weren't many people willing to record and unless you were requesting help with a popular language you could wait for a long time (after all these months I still haven't got any help with my several sentences in Icelandic).