What you missed: The best language news/links over the summer
How’s your summer been? I have been (and still am) travelling almost every single day to encourage language learners one-on-one, but I know a lot of you have had your own language projects to keep you busy!
Since you may not have been browsing the Internet as often with so much sunshine to soak up, I thought I’d catch you up on some of the language news from the blogosphere and elsewhere that you may have missed over the last months.
Luckily Fluent in 3 Months team member, Joseph, scours the web for the best blog posts, apps, tools, news and language encouragement every week to add to links I send to over 60,000 people in the weekly newsletter. Make sure you’re signed up to not miss a thing.
Among our discoveries this summer we have…
General language resources
Completely free online comic books - This page has online comics to read in Arabic, Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Tagalog, Portuguese and Spanish. Well worth checking out!
Using Quora as a language learning tool – The website Quora, and especially its language learning topic can be a great source of inspiration and answers to your language learning questions. This post introduces why. [Also, don't forget to follow me on Quora as I get more active after my booktour!]
Talks at the Polyglot Gathering – This Youtube channel shares the uploads of the fascinating talks given this year in Berlin by many experienced language learners.
TuneIn – the biggest database of live streamed radio from many countries. Use it for actual native spoken content in whatever language or dialect your heart desires.
Youtube trends – select the country of the language you are learning and see what is trending on Youtube there. A great way to watch fun videos and get some practice.
Language specific resources
Chinese skill the app – while Duolingo slowly grows its language-base, other people are filling the gaps and this app does it beautifully for Chinese. Well worth checking out this free app if you want to learn on your smartphone
Russian Grammar and the Cyrillic Alphabet: Not that hard after all! – More encouragement for Russian learners in this well written post
BrazilPod launches Língua da Gente, new series for beginners – Another gap in the market finally getting filled, is this well thought out new podcast for beginner Portuguese learners
Stressifier – For the English learners and teachers out there, this tool highlights the syllable of the words in bold to help emphasize the stress
400 French Songs (Playlist with Spotify) – More than 24 hours of French Music – Carefully selected playlist of some amazing songs in French. This will keep you busy for a while
30 French movies to watch in a month – Why not devote one day per movie in this list and watch some high quality French cinema?
Improving your language learning skills
Why You Have Trouble Remembering New Words, and How You Can Fix It – This article by Sam dives into mnemonics, memory palaces and other cool tricks to help you learn words in your target language
6 Memory Strategies To Supercharge Your Learning- After starting with mnemonics, this article offers several other cool ways to improve your language learning memory
How to read in a foreign language – Luca takes on the topic of improving reading skills in your foreign language
How to Keep Learning a Language when You No Longer HAVE to – Another great compilation post with thoughts from various different language learners (including myself)
21 principles for learning a new language – Ollyshares his top tips for those of you who need guidance in language learning.
Food for thought in language learning
Lessons learned from a failed language project – I always tell people that you need to fail your way to success and make lots of mistakes. It’s the best way to learn and improve your strategy. This post shares one learner’s perspective from things learned in one attempt.
Does speaking another language change how you think? – Scott Young is on his final months of a year without English, and it’s helping him answer some interesting questions with his new perspective
For rare languages, social media provides new hope – A great reminder that some neglected languages have a bright future in the 21st century
How many hours to learn a foreign language – This post from Judith looks at the question logically
Fun!
“Weird Al” Yankovic – Word Crimes - A funny video about language learning, grammar and speaking/writing correctly, from musical satirist Weird Al Yankovic!
The Germanizer 3,000 – For those of you learning German who want a laugh!
20 Questions in multiple languages – This fun game asks you questions about an object or concept and it has to guess what it is. Amazingly accurate and worth a try! On this site you can find it in French, Chinese, Hungarian, Polish, Spanish, Dutch, Czech, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian, Japanese, Greek, Norwegian, German, Danish, Swedish and Finnish.
Breaking Bad is getting remade in Spanish -For those of you who liked the original, watch out for the Univision remake, called Metastasis. The main character is even going to be called “Walter Blanco” – I kid you not!
There are a surprisingly huge number of amazing language learning links coming up all the time, both from the web in general and from the highest rated language bloggers.
In the past, I’ve tried following other sites or social media channels and never quite found a good selection of interesting and fun links, and that’s why I got my team to make it a priority to research the best links from all sources, every week. We work hard to make sure you get the best of the best sent to your inbox.
To not miss out on any new fun links that show up, make sure you are on the list!
If you found some fun/interesting links over the summer that Fi3m readers may be interested in, feel free to share them in the comments below 
Otherwise, we look forward to wrapping up the final weeks of the book tour (through Kentucky, Tennessee, North/South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana) and can’t wait to get back into active blogging – fun things are coming up on Fi3m really soon. I can’t wait!!
