ICART's mission is to design and advocate for accessibility features to be included as radio broadcasting accelerates the global transition to digital transmission. As we like to say: "Accessible design is good universal design"
more on the discussion of copyright; Jenny Luca explains how she works with students as they develop their own videos on a related educational topic...trailers for good books in this case; links to her complete blog posting are available
The mission of MPIR is to provide FREE access and introduction to the wonderful world of Old Time Radio. Turn that TV off, throw it out the door. Your mind is better, and gets better reception! Old Time Radio are radio plays from the 30's 40's and 50's, long before television. Rich, in history, American culture, and good clean family entertainment.
Mr men are brilliant to teach personality and physical description. Good to demonstrate adjectival agreement, pointing out differences between Mr men and Little miss.
Several game makers and ready-made activities. Some are PC only but handy all the same. Mostly downloads so good for those with poor or unreliable connections in your classroom.
This is a good way for students to check if their Chinese writing is legible. If the computer can't guess at what it may be, maybe they need to keep working at it. Built for success and great for interactive whiteboards.
This tool takes a sentence in Chinese (not pinyin unfortunately) and gives an English or French translation for every word individually. Very good for breaking up sentences into small parts, for analysing word-order and for students to check their writing.
This is one of the best Chinese-English dictionaries on the internet, when you consider that so many of the words have audio and an animation of the stroke order for writing.
This is a fantastic resource for any classroom learning Chinese or about China. The dictionary pinyin with tones as well as simplified and traditional writing, an animation of the order stroke for many words and audio of how the word should be spoken. There is also other resources such as practice sheets for writing, a translator, and other stuff for kids and the classroom.
Advice for language learners
General warning: what follows may or may not apply to you. It's based on what linguistics knows about people in general (but any general advice will be ludicrously inappropriate for some people) and on my own experience (but you're not the same as me). If you have another way of learning that works, more power to you.
Given the discussion so far, the prospects for language learning may seem pretty bleak. It seems that you'll only learn a language if you really need to; but the fact that you haven't done so already is a pretty good indication that you don't really need to. How to break out of this paradox?
At the least, try to make the facts of language learning work for you, not against you. Exposure to the language, for instance, works in your favor. So create exposure.
* Read books in the target language.
* Better yet, read comics and magazines. (They're easier, more colloquial, and easier to incorporate into your weekly routine.)
* Buy music that's sung in it; play it while you're doing other things.
* Read websites and participate in newsgroups that use it.
* Play language tapes in your car. If you have none, make some for yourself.
* Hang out in the neighborhood where they speak it.
* Try it out with anyone you know who speaks it. If necessary, go make new friends.
* Seek out opportunities to work using the language.
* Babysit a child, or hire a sitter, who speaks the language.
* Take notes in your classes or at meetings in the language.
* Marry a speaker of the language. (Warning: marry someone patient: some people want you to know their language-- they don't want to teach it. Also, this strategy is tricky for multiple languages.)
Taking a class can be effective, partly for the instruction, but also because you can meet others who are learning the language, and because, psychologically, classes may be needed to make us give the subject matter time and attention. Self-study is too eas