After posting for journal sharing and reading the shared journals and perspectives on the use of technology for ELLs, I browsed a little bit to see what else is out there on the internet for language learning. I found the website Digital Dialects: Lange Learning Games, advertising that "the website features free to use online game for learning languages. Language resources include games for learning phrases, numbers, useful words, spelling, verb conjugations and alphabet. Games use Macromedia Flash Player” ( http://www.digitaldialects.com/ ). Sounds great. There are a bunch of languages from the most popular foreign languages like English and Spanish to some languages I had never heard the name of (honestly speaking) being offered on the website.
“Do we all not have quaint interests in life?” I thought, having chosen Tibetan language to give it a try. The alphabet at first sight was really intimidating with all those strokes with different thickness of ink for different letters! However, many letters sound similar or the same to my native language. Thus, if there is a transliteration, I can sound them out perfectly. I could be reading transliterated Tibetan with impeccable pronunciation without knowing the meaning for a word of what I would be reading. Then, my next question is “Do we just learn the spoken form to learn a language especially there is a written form for it? How long is it going to take me to learn just the basic Tibetan – its (unfathomable-looking) alphabet and to count numbers- together with the written form?” Language learning is very challenging, and I came to realize that the technology helps in many ways to reach the goal but the process to reach the goal also involves the learner’s motivation, time, effort and appropriate learning methods with a teacher’s guidance.
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