When we want to learn a new language online we must be very careful with the websites we visit, because some of them are purely grammar-translation oriented. The mayor difficulty with a grammar- translation approach to learning is the lack of context for the language. There is no possibility to make connections or group the new words and expressions into topics.
For example, I visited a website for learning Russian (http://www.ilike2learn.com/ilike2learn/russian/) and what I got where isolated words with the sound and the translation. At first I tried to memorize every word but after a few minutes I was too bored to keep trying and also I couldn’t retain more information.
I think it could be good for practicing or looking for the correct pronunciation of words, but definitively a language is much more than that. Every learner of a language needs to relate new knowledge to the previous one, to put things in context, to be immerse into the new language, to make associations but not only to the translation into the native language, but also to the images and descriptions. Thus, when choosing a good website we should try to look for those characteristics.
So from now on, I’ll be super careful with the websites I use to learn a language. I’ll look for something more complete, with topics, levels and that includes practice in the four skills (reading, listening, writing and speaking). That is how I like to learn in the classroom, how I believed language should be taugt at school and how I’ll teach my students in the future.
