Language learning through Wikipedia articles

General discussion about learning languages
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Iversen
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Re: Language learning through Wikipedia articles

Postby Iversen » Wed May 22, 2019 11:53 am

When I want to learn some more of the vocabulary specific to one of my favorite subjects (science, history, music and a few others) then I often use Wikipedia articles for intensive studies - for some of my languages there are actually few relevant sources around, and then Wikipeda often turns out to be my saviour. However I may want informations about topics that are so arcane that only a few of the language versions have an article about it, but then I just find the information somewhere else and use the rest of that version to teach me the relevante words.

I also use Wikipedia if I want to be sure about a certain term in one of my weaker languages. I find an article in a language whose words I know that I know, and then I use the language jump feature to find an article in the weak target language.

So without Wikipedia life would be much harder.
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Saim
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Re: Language learning through Wikipedia articles

Postby Saim » Mon May 27, 2019 10:06 pm

Wikipedia is also really good for animal and plant names. A lot of the time languages group together species in pretty arbitrary and completely different ways (think frogs and toads for example) so it's good to keep straight with articles that also reference the scientific classification. I don't think it ever would have occurred to me that Catalan sargantana isn't quite the same category as "lizard" were it not for Wikipedia.
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cathrynm
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Re: Language learning through Wikipedia articles

Postby cathrynm » Tue May 28, 2019 1:41 am

If you're in proper 4-year degree college, don't use Wikipedia, but for me, when I do my Japanese class presentation, I usually go straight to Wikipedia, as they often have English/Japanese articles on the same topic and have names, how to say things for offbeat topics in both languages.
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sirgregory
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Re: Language learning through Wikipedia articles

Postby sirgregory » Thu May 30, 2019 9:31 pm

Another nice thing: For works of literature, Wiki articles often have very helpful links to online texts and sometimes even audio recordings. This is convenient for putting together your own free bilingual texts for well-known, public domain works.

As an example, the French Wikipedia article for Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days has multiple free audio books and the original text linked at the bottom. This saves the trouble of having to hunt around for these things on Google.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Tour_du_monde_en_quatre-vingts_jours

Bilingual text plus audio is the ideal for literature. The Bible is the most readily available text for this and it's available for free in many languages. (I've found the site below very useful). And the chapters and verses are very convenient for keeping your place. But it's nice to have some other choices.

https://www.wordproject.org/bibles/
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