Learning a new language is tough and by just reading books such as “Dummies for German Language” doesn’t really help much. This is when you can try langoLAB, an online service that focuses on language immersion through online video and text. Much different from those thick books, it features authentic television, music videos, news articles and even blog posts. Sounds cool and interesting right? Well, I personally feel that this way of learning a new language is much faster than the traditional way.
Created by a wonderful team of three – Adam Duston, Shane Ermitano and Jennifer Ede, langoLAB aims to help people learn foreign languages by enabling them to comprehend the media as quickly as possible. According to them, “langoLAB is constructed around the hypothesis that people will learn a foreign language more quickly when they’re immersed in it through media and live interactions in which they can quickly perceive prelinguistic meaning and regularities. The site facilitates the social accumulation of knowledge about foreign language, grammar, and lessons in a novel way, using a rich client interface to map this knowledge to the foreign language media.”
For each video and text, it also comes with tools such as one-click dictionary lookup, flash cards, notes on idioms and phrases, etc. to enable comprehension for users. Currently, there are around 300+ users learning new languages through the media and it supports languages which includes English, Spanish, Russian, French, German and Italian. I believe that more will be included in the list soon and hence benefiting many people worldwide.
Overall, I’m pretty impressed and love this free service. Probably I can put aside my German language reference book and use this as a learning language tool. But sometimes I still need it to refer to some important points. langoLAB requires registration in order to gain access to the resources but it’s free.