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This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Linas Vaštakas is an avid language learning enthusiast, and he currently runs a project InterlinearBooks.com which aims to make literature more accessible to language learners. He wrote this guest post about learning languages with Interlinear texts.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

If you’ve been keeping up with the language learning scene online, you have probably heard of Learning With Texts (LWT), which is software to assist you in studying foreign language text. If this is the first you’ve heard of it, then I recommend checking out Benny’s excellent introduction to Learning With Texts , because the rest of this post won’t mean much to you if you are unfamiliar with it.  This article also assumes you are aware of Anki , so if you’re not then you should read this introduction to Anki and Spaced Repetition and forget about forgetting ever again.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

About two weeks ago, in an effort to increase my Esperanto vocabulary, I signed up for lernu.net’s Vorto de la Tago (Word of the Day) service, which sends a daily email with, you guessed it, the word of the day. These emails are great for SRS because they include quite a few example sentences. The definitions are also monolingual (Esperanto-only, no English translations), which I think is a good thing because I notice that when I read Esperanto text I translate it to English mentally, thus slowing me down. So now I have these great daily reminders to add some new sentences to my SRS, and they’re forcing me to use the language to describe itself rather than using the crutch called English. And what did I do with these fantastic reminders?

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Consider this an admission of guilt. I am learning Esperanto . Esperanto has both its critics and proponents in the language learning community, which initially bothered me. Nobody has criticized me for wanting to learn Spanish, nor has anyone (including myself) felt the need to defend that desire. I expect that the same would be true if I suddenly decided to learn German, Hindi, Arabic, or Navajo. Yet, for some reason, Esperanto draws in critics and defenders. This has kept me from posting about it here, but now I’ve decided that my decisions don’t need to be defended, and criticisms are easily ignored.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Usually when I am reading in Spanish, and I find a word I don’t know and can’t figure out from context, I look it up in a dictionary. Often the sentence I originally found that word in is long and/or complex, which doesn’t make it a good candidate for entry in my SRS, so I will usually enter the example sentence in the dictionary into my SRS instead. But what if there is no example sentence for that word? This dilemma happens with at least half of the words I look up. Until recently, I didn’t have a good solution. Most of the time I would just let it go and later forget the word, causing myself to look it up again.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Welcome to the first post of a new series at Babelhut.com, Spanish Verb Highlight. This series will highlight a different Spanish verb in every post, and provide several example sentences showing how the verb is used in different tenses.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Today I received yet another envelope from Time Warner Cable addressed to “Peter Carroll or Current Resident,” which was seconds from being thrown in the trash can when I decided to open it. This is what was inside:

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

The latest version of Barra de Español is now available from addons.mozilla.org ! Those of you who already have an older version installed should see an update notification in Firefox soon, if you haven’t already.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

I received an email today from the Mozilla Add-ons group that Barra de Español has been approved to be in the public listing on addons.mozilla.org! This means that it no longer has the “experimental” label and can be installed without the user needing to check a box. For those of you who forgot what Barra de Español is, check out the original announcement . If you haven’t installed it yet, do so today!

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Our good friend Ramses has just launched a wonderful database of Spanish-English sentences at sentences.spanish-only.com. I insist that you go there now and bookmark it. I’ll wait.