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Websites
- Italki. I love this website. It’s a forum where you can find language teachers, both professional and non-professional ones, the non-professional ones being called “community tutors”. The difference between the two is that you can normally expect lesson plans and more structured lessons from professional teachers, while community tutors give more informal lessons. However, this is not always true. You can sign up with my affiliate link and get an extra $5 when you purchase $20 worth of credit. Values are in USD.
Web Extensions
- Your first go to should be Language Reactor. They only have an extension for Chrome-based browsers at the time of writing (March 2022), but they’re a good one-stop shop for most of your language learning needs.
They recommend youtube videos and netflix shows to watch in your language that have subtitles in both your target language and English. Language Reactor then lets you watch these shows with your target language on top of the English transcript, allowing you to hover over words and show their translation.
They also have a text translator that allows you to import webpages (or just copy and paste text) and translate them.
- Toucan for Chrome is a tool that takes the webpage you’re browsing and randomly translates words so that you can understand the word’s meaning in context. There is also a Firefox version available. For Southeast Asia, you can use Toucan to learn Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. While this admittedly divorces the word from its native grammatical context, it might help you remember the semantics better.
- Gloss for Chrome, another extension that works similarly to Toucan. This one allows you to learn Mandarin Chinese in either Simplified or Traditional script. It also helps you learn Vietnamese, Thai, Hindi, Filipino, and Arabic.
Books
Videos
Podcasts
Websites
- Project Syndicate, a news website with articles in English. Some of their articles have language translation to Chinese, Arabic, and other languages.
Polyglots