3 ways to learn languages through facebook

Facebook. Love it or hate it, let’s look at how it can be used for learning languages.

1. Chat with native speakers

If you have any Vietnamese friends, whether in you know them in person or people you’ve met online, you can use the chat feature to have conversations with your friends. Probably best not to add random people just for the sake of learning Vietnamese, though!

As well as being fun, this can be a great way to pick up new language in a natural and authentic way. It carries less pressure than writing emails or talking someone face-to-face as you tend to read and write one or two sentences at a time. You also have the time to look things up as you go along.

2. Translate your Vietnamese friends’ status updates

Another great way of picking up natural, everyday language is taking notes from your friends’ status updates. This is more useful for intermediate learners who just need to look up short phrases. If you put whole sentences into google translate, it’s probably not going to help you very much.

I often copy sentences into my question notepad to get clarification later. You can probably pick up some good colloquial expressions and slang this way.

If friends post statuses without diacritics, you could try websites that automatically add them so you can then look phrases up in a dictionary.

3. Change your language settings

Many other people suggest this, and it is a way of getting a bit more exposure to Vietnamese. If you’re also using facebook to chat in Vietnamese and the rest of the site is in Vietnamese, then you have a nice little digital immersion environment.

Bonus: Like More Vietnamese and interact with us there 😉

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» Check out Part 2 here: 3 more ways to learn languages through facebook.

Over to you: Have you used facebook or other social networking sites in your language studies?