Learning English Online

If you mean an actual online course, I've heard some good things about some of them. Shop around; I also hear that some are free, though I haven't done any research.

Thank you for your prompt answer. What are the good things you've heard about learning English online? (actual online course) Will you specify those?

I didn't pay much attention, as I don't like working online with my dial up connection. I do recall that Robert Gentel seemed impressed with Rosetta Stone's online offer, and he owns this site and at least at one time had several sites devoted to language.

You might look up Rosetta Stone's English language courses on Amazon. Often, there are ads below Amazon's page that link to online courses. Also, if you review the product reviews, someone might suggest something offered without charge. This is time consuming of course.

The same advantages/disadvantages of doing anything online. For example, you can learn from any teacher around the world, this can help reduce costs and increase availability of teachers to you but also eliminates a lot of subtle communication that in-person communication contains and that can help the learning process.

Online courses also typically involve greater amounts of self-study, and in this sense they can serve to provide you greater amounts of practice that would be prohibitive to do in school or to a lesser degree with books as homework.

So the bottom line is that computers aren't nearly as good as humans at this, but they are a lot cheaper and better than books (a computer can do voice recognition to check your pronunciation, a book can't).



Depends on the school/institution and the online course, but with all else being equal no it is not usually better.

Roger asked me to stop by if I could so I'll answer this question you directed at him. In terms of computer-assisted learning of languages Rossetta Stone is really the de facto gold standard. But they are also prohibitively expensive for a lot of people (desktop software in the hundreds, monthly fees in the hundreds a year).

Their strength is the methodology they use to avoid teaching you by translation at all, it is much more similar to how people naturally learn languages (i.e. when you learn your native language you just learn by rote and imitation, not by grammar and translation but most people are taught a second or third language by grammar and translation) but this methodology is of limited utility to you once you already have a basic command of the language (as you seem to), and at some point there is a diminishing return for you in any computer or online course. You will need real-world kinds of practice for much improvement once you are almost fluent, and I don't know of any good online or computer course that can really get you there. I'd really only recommend online and computer language tools for beginners and intermediate learners.

So with that in mind, I've already mentioned the "best money can buy" kind of language course online, and here is a free/freemium (this is a payment model that starts at free with optional upgrades) site that is probably the most popular online language course there is: http://www.livemocha.com/

But to be honest, your writing sounds like your command of English is pretty good and what you most need sounds like conversational classes. So even if you look online for your language education, I recommend that you seek out places you can actually practice and interact with real-live people. At some point a computer course that does not involve live conversation is not going to be able to teach you any more.

Nothing on earth will compare to a one-on-one (one teacher, one student), live and in-person language class with a competent (you may want to go for native, if you want to learn to understand native speech better) teacher, and if that is something available and affordable to you that is certainly the way to go.

Can't disagree with that at all.

Thanks for stopping by.

I think the question is learning English online is better than going to traditional school? According to some, a traditional class room is better than having to learn online English. Actually, in a classroom, you even get to check your English speaking skills because you have class fellows that you can exercise your lessons with. There are also many who choose to learn online English because of the comfort and convenience it brings. Most people who pick the online way are employees, businessmen and other people who are too busy cannot attend regular class.

Hi Msgema,
It's good to learn English online, but school or any institution is also necessary to learn. Online learning is good to improve our skills because we can learn online at any time when we desire to learn.