improve afrikaans vocabulary skills

Summary

Quizlet.com is a great website for effectively learning vocabulary, for languages and anything else! For a quick video on how the whole thing works, check out the demo video. Cool fact: It was started by a 15-year-old high school student!

Basically, you can add and share vocabulary lists, make them public, private or share only with certain groups. Once you have them in the system (or you find an existing set you want to study), you can choose between several options for learning/familiarizing and self-assessment.

The site is slick, fast and has lots of active users. It's really a cool place to learn anything from the Greek Alphabet to TOEFL and SAT vocabulary and plenty more.

There are already gobs of lists available on the site - so many that individual attention is being brought to amazing collections available on the site, such as the HSK Test Vocabulary Preparation Pack and more.

So take a look at Quizlet when you get the chance. It's likely that content already exists for what you need to study! I have added this to all the language sections even though there are not vocabulary stacks yet for all of these. Reason being you can use the site to create any vocabulary lists you want - it's wide open!

From Website

The Quizlet Story

For lack of a professional writer working for Quizlet, here are some ramblings from me, Andrew Sutherland, creator of Quizlet, president of Brainflare, web developer, and high school student.

Quizlet is how I occupy my free time and even some of my non-free time. My mission for Quizlet is to make learning vocabulary not a chore. I know a lot of teachers assign vocabulary to students, but few students actually "absorb" words into their vocabularies after they take their test. Which kind of defeats the purpose, right? So Quizlet is my response - it aims to make learning fun, thus make learning effective. At the very least, it can help students do better on quizzes and tests even if they don't fully "absorb" their words.

I started Quizlet in October 2005, back when I was a mere 15-year-old (human years). I had just received a list of 111 French Animals to memorize from my magnanimous French teacher. I was puttering along with my dad with some call-and-response type quizzing. "Man, I love doing this" was NOT what I was thinking. So I put my thinking cap on, and the first line of code for Quizlet was written that night. Of course, that code was all deleted when I thought about what Quizlet would be. You really should plan first.

Quizlet is a shoestring operation. For its first 420 days, it was the work of only myself. I did all the designing, programming, debugging, and perfecting. The project had no product managers, no marketers, and no venture capitalists. It was just me and my testers. Recently I've realized some things are out of my field of expertise (I'm not a lawyer, for example). So there are a few other people involved these days.

Quizlet is free and will remain free to all users. The current plan is to offer targeted advertising on the non-studying pages. I'm hoping to make some deals with some educational and test-prep companies and perhaps some universities. If you're interested in advertising to my userbase of highly-motivated high-school and college students, shoot me a note (see above right).

Let's see, what haven't I covered? Ahh, the name Quizlet comes from Quizlette, the name of the "little" quizzes my French teacher gives. She could have charged royalties, but that just wouldn't be right…

And because you really want to know, I made Quizlet using only the finest ingredients:

PHP
MySQL
Apache
Mootools Thanks Valerio!
XHTML, CSS, Javascript, JSON, etc etc…

Visit Quizlet.com

Summary

This site has a good selection of online games and activities for learning the Afrikaans language.

There are also many other languages available on the site.

From Website

Digital Dialects was launched in January 2007, originally a by-product of a dissertation reviewing web resources for language learning. The site was conceived as an educational tool for learning languages, and as a guide to online resources.

All animation and webpage design is by Craig Gibson. The animated activities are intended to incorporate the interactivity of computer aided language learning software with the web-design principle of simplicity in use and access. In essence the games are intended to provide a relaxed way of acquiring basic language skills, a break from the books!

The site will continue to be a work in progress, and it is intended that Digital Dialects will represent the World’s major languages, with a cross-section of languages from diverse regions. Audio files are to be gradually incorporated into animations for certain languages. The development of particular language sections will be dependant on assistance from translators and native speakers.

Link

Visit DigitalDialects.com Afrikaans Learning Resources

License

View the DigitalDialects.com Terms and Conditions.

Summary

Wikibooks is a great idea. Like Wikipedia, Wikibooks consists of content that is public domain. That means that anything there is reusable in any fashion, such as for teaching.

Visit the Afrikaans Wikibook in English.

From Website

The name "Afrikaans" means literally "African". Afrikaans has its roots in 17th-century Dutch, but has since developed its own distinctive character and flavour in the three centuries that it developed on the African continent. Being a Germanic language, the youngest of all, it is closely related to English and German.

Website Content License

The content on this website is empowered by the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL) and is, thus, free and open for everyone.

Summary

Good site with basic resources for beginner learners of the Afrikaans language. Some of the topics you find at the site include introductions, first words, basic grammar, verbs, numbers, days and months, general phrases and TV and radio info.

From Website

It is easier to start learning Afrikaans, or any other language, than it is to become good at it. It can also be more fun, because when beginning you can make rapid progress without learning grammar or trying to learn words which only occur infrequently.

Learning a language can vary from knowing ten words to fluency. It all depends on your goal. Do you want to learn enough to be polite, to get by or to be able to express yourself fluently and with confidence.

Easy Afriakaans is aimed at anyone who wants to start learning the Afrikaans language or just wants to learn a few useful words and phrases before their next visit. There are also links to other resources which might be helpful.

One way to use Easy Afrikaans is to pick key or useful words and phrases that you want to learn. For example, as a visitor to another country, the key words in a foreign language are the words which will be of most use to you and which you will use most often.

These key words and phrases will vary from visitor to visitor depending on the purpose of their trip. A businessman, for example, is likely to have different language requirements to the tourist, and when only learning a small part of language may choose to concentrate on a few formal situations.

Or, if you have friends who speak another language, you might learn a few expressions that you can use in specific situations with them. In either case, you are starting to learn the language and if you continue to learn it , then the vocabulary you have learnt will be a great help.

Visit EasyAfrikaans.com