English is the only language I speak and write fluently. It’s the result of growing up in an area and country where everyone around me spoke only English.
Sometimes, I feel being mono-lingual limits what I can learn.
On Twitter, in my personal account (not associated with eLearn Magazine), I follow a lot of chefs, restaurant critics, cook book authors, and food bloggers. As I expanded this network, I found more and more Twitter users who tweet predominantly in French.
At first, I struggled with it. Do I continue following them, even though I don’t know what they’re saying 85 percent of the time?
Sure enough, I started paying attention to the handful of French words that I already knew simply from being exposed to kitchen talk for many years, like bain-marie, buerre blanc, poulet, mise en place, vin rouge…
Little by little, I found links worth clicking through and discovered more and more recipes that I was motivated to translate. Now, I’m picking up a couple of new French words a month. True natural language learning is always need-based, and let me assure you, I needed to know how to make real pâte à choux!
This morning, while searching for Creative Commons-licensed artwork to use here at eLearn Magazine, I had a little stroke of inspiration. What if I tried keying in the same search words, but in a different language?
Sure enough, some amazing new images started cropping up!
In one search for computador, I fell onto these images, by Lizette Greco, related to the One Laptop Per Child program. I loved them so much, I just had to share them.
The point is, I might not have been prompted to expand my language skills–ever!–without all these interconnected and globally-spanning social media tools at my fingertips.