Language Learning at Its Best
By Andy Heath
Some of you might know that I have a degree from ETSU in Johnson City, Tennessee, in Spanish. I have to admit I really liked that degree program, and from a career perspective it has served me well when I needed a job over the years. Though it is also difficult to move up with such a degree because people often want to keep you in the lower ranks of customer service to speak to the people that need your help because they can't find enough Spanish speakers to replace you – even if you're qualified for a promotion.
Still, for those that are interested in learning a foreign language, I have some advice for you that you might find helpful. My Spanish is a little rusty at this point, but it used to be very good, so I have some idea of what I'm talking about.
First of all, for most language you don't need to spend a penny to learn them. Not a penny. You see all these shiny, nice looking language learning packages at the bookstore – don't spend your money on them. Instead, go to fsi-language-courses.com and see if the language you want to learn is represented there. The more common languages like Spanish, French, and Chinese have programs there. Then you can go through these courses.
The FSI courses were designed by the U.S. government decades ago to train linguists for foreign service. They are in the public domain, so there are no copyrights being infringed. They're not pretty by any means. They don't have cute pictures, and they're not shiny and glossy, but they are quite good for language learning. I went through some of the Mandarin Chinese exercises and I feel fairly comfortable with the numbers in Chinese now.
The other action you need to take is to review the website How To Learn Any Language. This is an excellent website written by a guy that loves to learn foreign languages, and he has some excellent material on there that makes it much easier.
At this point, I'm not sure I have it in me to learn another language, but if I did, these are the two websites I would use. If language learning is something you're interested in, then try them out.
