I stumbled upon this site about a year ago. I thought about it again when I started to plan my next vacation to Africa, which will be in about a year. I want to be able to speak to the locals, so I visited my old pals at byki.com. This site is as simple as you can get to learn a foreign language. And of course leave it up to your Resource Queen to find you a great free resource online!
To get started is so simple.
1. First start off by visiting BYKI.
2. You than pick a language you would like to start to learn. The options are: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belorussian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Chechen, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Haitian, Creole, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malay, Mongolian, Norwegian, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen, Tuvan, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese and Zulu. Whooo! I know, a mouthful!
3. After you’ve picked your language, fill out the short form that only includes your email address, if you’d like to receive future emails and if you have HTML email or not.
4. Check your email for the link to download the software to start learning your foreign language.
5. You will be directed to the software download. Everything is very simple to do.
6. Once you have the software downloaded on your computer, you can get started right away. The software is very user-friendly.
About the Software.
The languages are taught by the flashcard method. There are 5 different learning modes. Review, Recognize, Know, Produce and Own.
You can ‘review it’ by just reading the flash cards. You can ‘recognize it’ by viewing the information in the foreign language and think or say the word(s) in your spoken language. You can ‘know it’ by typing in the answer to the flash cards in your spoken language. You can ‘produce it’ by reading the spoken language side of the flash cards and say the words in the foreign language. You can ‘own it’ by typing in the answer, which is in your spoken language, of the flash cards in the foreign language.
The good thing about this software is that it also contains voice learning. You can hear how the foreign language is spoken. To me, this is the best part of the program. I’d like to know that not only can I read a language, but I can ‘talk the talk’ as well!
Another plus to this program is that you can house more than 1 of the free lessons in your downloaded software program. All you have to do is follow steps 1-6 above to add additional languages. You can easily switch to the other languages in your program by switching to another list, which is how the program refers to each type of language.
You will learn basic conversational pieces using this software. Days of the week, animals, colors and greetings are some examples. Of course, like anything free, it is limited. If you would like to learn more than the scope that is given, you can click on the ‘More’ tab in your program to be directed to BYKI’s website to purchase more detailed learning applications. As they say in Swahili, “Kwa heri!” (Goodbye!)
