My Vision of Language Learning

Education is a major part of our civilization. I believe it is changing from frontal teaching to so called blended learning (a learning process involving many different components). We will learn through:

  • watching carefully built entertaining and teaching movies
  • conversing with our friends about that subject
  • reading books about it
  • participating in offline-online courses
  • playing educational games

So I just share a vision of mine, about a future evening of learning.

An Evening of Innovative Language Learning

 

I get home from

google-playful-office

my gamified working environment knowing, that I was productive and still have much energy. I want to learn 汉语: Chinese.

My virtual learning assistant shows me where I am — number of words, collocations, grammar units — and the path toward my next level: B1
She knows what games I like and offers me the following program to learn:

  1. ten new words are introduced in a tailor-made 3D edutainment video (3 minutes, visually spectacular, clear pronunciation)
    learn-chinese-tree-pic
  2. clear new words in a beautiful illustrated electronic dictionary including all current definitions, common collocations, phrases and etymology (10 minutes)
  3. play a language clay shooting game with the new words (10 minutes, very enjoyable)

study-over-etherpad-and-skype

Meanwhile a search has been started to find a human language partner for a half an hour one hour conversation. (Like Sharedtalk today.) She speaks Chinese and learns English. (Optionally I can pay for a professional tutor if I can afford it.) This person has been found, was asked to connect for a half an hour session and said yes. So now this session takes place. It goes so well, that we extend it to one hour and we mark each other for later sessions. (This means, that I know when she plans to study English and she knows when I plan to study Chinese and we got priority in each others searches. All these authorisations are handled in an easy way.)

I then conclude by:

  1. Watching the same generated 3D edutainment video
  2. writing example sentences and submit them to be corrected (10 minutes, busuu like)
  3. asking my girlfriend to check my new words: I draw the characters with my fingers to her back and she checks if they are correct. She can then reward me for the good results.