website to learn English.

[Teacher Mark 53]

Dictionary: vdict.com

Thesaurus: visuwords.com

Text to Speech: text-to-speech.imtranslator.net

10 Common Speaking Mistakes: intelliphonics.com/toefl/index.html

Conversation Questions: iteslj.org/questions/

Edited September 2, 2009 by Mr. Saigon

[thongd4me 69]

Is anyone knows a good website to learn English for grammar, spelling, sentences, and Vietnamese/English dictionary. Please share with me. Thank you.

I found this site to learn basic Vietnamese it has many other languages including English in a basic form. You can get the beginer package for free.

http://www.byki.com/

chuc may man

I like Byki. Too bad they don't have a version of their flash card app in Vietnamese. I only found two versions of the program - one in English, for English speaking people learning another language, and one in Spanish, for Spanish speaking people learning English. The flash card files for the language you're learning are separate from the program, so the same program can be used for learning dozens of languages.

A problem I have with the Byki Vietnamese flash cards is that it's sometimes difficult to understand the Vietnamese recordings. They used a girl speaker and a low sample rate, so some of the non-voiced sounds come out mushy and difficult to hear, almost like the speaker has a lisp. Also, like most courses, it's Hanoi dialect.

Still, I would highly recommend getting the $50 upgrade. A lot of material is included for a very reasonable price. Another cool feature is that you can make your own card stacks and share them with other people.

I strongly recommend AVOIDING the Pimsleur courses. They are audio only, which they somehow believe is a benefit. The upside is that the native speaker on the CD will say the phrase numerous times, rather than just using the same recording over and over. This means you'll learn to say the phrase exactly like that native speaker. The downside is that they provide no written script, and emphasize that you shouldn't use a written script. This means you'll have no idea what words you learned, nor have any ability to compose your own sentences. You'll only know the sounds needed to speak the entire phrase, or to understand the entire phrase if you hear it spoken exactly the same way. This means you might know how to make the right sounds to ask a question, but you won't understand the response.

Phuong is taking English lessons, but she frequently asks for my help in learning to pronounce words. It helps her enormously if I can spell the word like it would be spelled in Vietnamese. For example, is she asks how to pronounce "crowded" then I would write "krao đeđ". This helps to compensate for the relatively poor audio of Yahoo Messenger, Skype, and MagicJack. I thought that 'j' would be a problem for her, since they don't have this letter or sound in their language, but neither Phuong nor any of her family has had any difficulty pronouncing my name.

I looked at Byki for Thai but I don't have enough time right now to get deeper into it.

That may change in the next few weeks/months after my busy time at work.

I didn't get very deep into it but I'm eager to start and then I'll give a more in-depth review.

If you live in a major city, you may be able to get some of these packages for free from the public library.

In any case, there are tons of materials online.

Just do a search "Vietnamese (English... whatever) language learning" and see what pops up.

[chizkeyk 0]

try Rosetta Stone

[Teacher Mark 53]

try Rosetta Stone

Down on Bui Vien in D1 you can get that software for a real nice price at one of the computer shops.