L'inglese...mai stato così "easy"

L’estate è agli sgoccioli e tutti torniamo a lavoro o a scuola…e ancora resta in sospeso quella difficile missione che continuiamo a rimandare: migliorare o rinfrescare il nostro INGLESE. Non troviamo mai il momento giusto per farlo…

Non sarebbe stupendo se aveste la possibilità di migliorare l'inglese mentre ve ne state rilassati sul divano senza ripassare la grammatica o complicarsi la vita consultando un dizionario a ogni piè sospinto? Non sarebbe fantastico riuscire a capire gli inglese facendo abituare il nostro orecchio all’accento madrelingua senza troppi traumi? E che ne dite di arricchire il lessico di "phrasal verbs" e espressioni idiomatiche ma senza annoiarsi con liste e liste di parole?

Da oggi è possibile! Grazie a Easilang. 

Bab.la or "Be bop a lula": love languages!

There's one place online whose aim is to have (almost) everything you need when you have to do with languages. The website is Bab.la. It is very articulate, full of contents and activities and seem to have a wide audience in mind, from beginners language learners to language professionals: you could literally spend hours just exploring it and discovering what it has to offer...

Lets' start with language professionals and/or language bloggers. If you belong to any of these categories you might know Bab.la thanks to a popular competition it has been running for a few years now: web readers nominate the top language lovers blog, learning blogs, professional blogs, Facebook pages and Twitterers...of course all about languages!
Bab.la itself manages an interesting blog...about languages, travels and internship opportunities abroad. The blog title? Just, lovely...Lexiophiles!
If you have your own blog/website you can also embed a dictionary, a quiz plugin or install a browser toolbar with the dictionary.
Bab.la olso offers professional human translations - all you need to do is to upload the document you want to be translated, in order to have a price quote.

Visual dictionary

Love overwhelmed me today as I was working on a very technical translation...love not only for my job, but also for this extremely precious tool: the Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary. It is just perfect for you, technical translator who is going crazy, spending hours to understand what that specific term refers to and also for you interpreter, who is preparing for an assignment. Unless you are an engineer or a scientist, some words may have no sense to your eyes. Seeing things rather than learning plain words is way more effective.
And searching for pictures on Google might not proof enough sometimes...and there it is: the visual dictionary. Of course there is a hard copy version - but the online one is very handy!

Memrise - Water the garden of your memory

Yeah, we know: learning is a life-learning process...but...does it have to be done in the same old way as we did when we were in school? Fortunately, new technologies (I would say amazing web designers and IT engineers) help us learn, discover something new and improve ourselves by creating amazing websites and apps.
Today, I want to talk about Memrise. The motto on its home page says it all: Learning, powered by imagination.

Learning can become fun and become a nice filler in our spare time during the day. We spend hours in front on our laptop or fiddling with our smart phone - why not learn something? Memrise offers you the chance to learn something in a gradual way - bit after bit. You read a word, you learn it, you learn a new one and then you are tested with different exercises and you collect your score! Next level: new words or concepts, other tests and the old words will be refreshed to your memory again at some point. And so on and so forth...you could spend hours learning, listening, repeating and playing, gradually growing the garden of your memory!

Dizione italiana

Ce l'ho fatta! Finalmente ritrovo l'entusiasmo e l'energia per scriver un nuovo post su mio amato Glottovolante!

Fino ad ora ho solo parlato di lingue straniere e viaggi all'estero, ma mai come in questi ultimi mesi sono stata così concentrata sulla mia lingua madre: l'ITALIANO. Ora che sto completando la mia formazione come interprete c'è un aspetto che urge essere maggiormente curato (non è mai troppo tardi, per fortuna): la dizione. È vero spesso ho storto il naso in passato...all'idea di omogeneizzare la lingua, di "spersonalizzarla" e "delocalizzarla".