News — Learn to Read a Foreign Language

Try Out Our Bermuda Word - Polish Fairytales - Demo You finished or are in a basic Polish course but want to become fluent. When you're interested in our e-books, download the free try out version of Polish Fairytales and see how easy it is to read the Polish language and learn any new words via the testing. Notice how the software will ignore any high frequency (easy) words and focus on the low frequency (difficult) ones, and how you can set the practice reminder schedule for new words you learn.   Bermuda Word E-Books With Spaced Repetition Software Read Polish easily with the...

Learn Hungarian With Bermuda Word E-Books When you're still doubting the effectiveness of our e-books, download the free try out version of Hungarian Fairy Tales and see how easy it is to read the Hungarian language and learn any new words via the testing. Notice how the software will ignore any high frequency (easy) words and focus on the low frequency (difficult) ones, and how you can set the practice reminder schedule for new words you learn. Also check out our last Blog article on the steps to learn Hungarian if you need some guidance.   Bermuda Word E-Books With Spaced Repetition Software...

New Product Added To Bermuda Word E-Books We added another product to the Bermuda Word e-books library, French Beginners Stories. There's now more than 6000 unique French words in total to learn using our e-books. Read and learn French with fun and ease! Although we call this Beginner Stories it has a lot of new words, and to start out with French Fairytales is the easier story (see our 15 August article on version 3.0 of Bermuda Word software).   Why Is This E-Book A Very Good Way To Begin French Reading It has pop-up translation in context, manually created...

Try Out Bermuda Word Hungarian Fairytales If you want to master the Hungarian language you will have to read it. Only through reading you will build up enough vocabulary to be able to say you know 90% of Hungarian words and to be able to communicate fluently. And only through reading you can maintain your level of fluency easily throughout the years. Once you're at the level of reading a Hungarian bestseller you can maintain your language by reading an hour every week, or more often, as reading is a lot more fun than word cramming or going through theory...

A Top 10 Of Reasons To Learn Dutch With Bermuda Word Products Here we summed up a list of reasons why you will really learn Dutch by combining extensive reading and spaced repetition software: The only way to learn a language is by consuming lots of it, and the highest number of words are learned through reading You read Dutch from day one with fun texts from Dutch authors, no artificial texts about hotels or restaurants Extensive Reading is a proven method, the pop-up translation makes it possible to read advanced texts as a beginner and learn hundreds of new...

Bermuda Word German Fairy Tales Try Out Available Do you want to learn to read German? And you still think you will be able to do so using regular courses or graded readers? Think again. Save a lot of time by using Bermuda Word e-books. If you want to try out our product before buying, download the German Fairy Tales demo displayed in the catalog.   Learn to Read German Fast and Efficient! Download and check out the German Fairy Tales Demo and see how fast you can read through the pages and how easy it is to click any...

Learning A Language Through Extensive Reading Extensive Reading is the best way to learn a foreign language. You won't encounter more words or sentences than in stories and the words and word combinations are easier to remember in context of a story. Normally graded readers are available at different levels. You have to start with very simple texts because you simply don't know enough words. With Bermuda Word you can read complex texts as a beginner because of the immediate pop-up translation that has been added by us manually, to every word. This will bring down the number of texts...

Learn Russian With Bermuda Word E-Books When you're still doubting the effectiveness of our e-books, download the free try out version of Russian Fairy Tales and see how easy it is to read the Russian language and learn any new words via the testing. Notice how the software will ignore any high frequency (easy) words and focus on the low frequency (difficult) ones, and how you can set the practice reminder schedule for new words you learn.   Bermuda Word E-Books With Spaced Repetition Software Read Russian easily with the manual pop-up translation in context. Any new words you encounter...

Spaced Repetition In Reading For High Frequency Words Reading is a form of repeating words which will teach you the words and also the structure of a language. You meet new words and words that you already know in new sentences. However, for low frequency words it is more difficult. Enter Bermuda Word e-books with builtin spaced repetition software. It will let you do the reading, and it will remember for you which words you don't know (click). Spaced Repetition Software For Low Frequency Words You can set any spaced repetition interval in the software to practice new low frequency words that...

Extensive Reading and Spaced Repetition Word Practice Bermuda Word e-books combine two methods, one that is the most fun, just reading, and the other that is the most effective, spaced repetition practice, to offer you an experience in learning languages that is incomparable. Now added to the list of products are the Portuguese Fairytales which is the first in a series of Portuguese e-learning stories that is published:   Perfect your Portuguese reading and vocabulary For beginners and advanced students Learn up to 2181 new words   Go forth and have fun and learn at the same time!

    Learn A Language By Reading The best way to learn a language is to read it. If you're short on vocab, that might be difficult. Unless, it's manually pop-up translated. No slow select-the-word-wait-and-see-half-translation, I mean immediate and correct pop-up translation. That will allow you to go through texts fast. Reading is the best way to learn new words as you encounter them as part of a story, which is the natural way for your brain to retain information. In fact, the "retention factor" also has to do with the number of times that new information is "met", and...

The Best Way To Learn A Foreign Language Is by reading. Therefore go forth and read. Since reading a foreign language without translation doesn't do much unless it's graded readers, I'm only giving sites here with pop-up translation. And that have more than just a few languages available. Compare the sites teaching you to read your language below:  Site Number of Languages Number of Texts Quality of Translations Price bermudaword.com 12 up to 35,000 words Good, manual translation 7 to 13 dollars**** readlang.com 20* 0 to 100,000+* Poor, Google and Volunteering 24 dollars* bliubliu.com 20** 0 to 100,000+** Poor, Google 8...

Vocabulary Training Visual tools help with memorizing words. Rosetta Stone and similar online versions like Busuu use it to train your vocabulary or short sentences. A word or sentence is shown with a picture added. Visualisation helps learning. However, just as learning a list of words without context restricts your vocabulary to a kind of foreign language grocery list, a picture of a ball or a color will not do too much for your vocabulary training. A picture should tell a story. Art and Language Learning The art in the Fairytales and Short Stories products has been selected to fit into the...

Get Started At Reading As fast as possible. Maybe obvious, but not for all. There's a widespread notion that learning languages is all about cramming word lists or generic conversations, but the only way to learn a language fluently is through reading. There's graded readers for this, and online texts with pop-up translation, and the best texts to read are of course those that have correct manual translation as we offer at Bermuda Word. These texts keep you reading and don't force you to look up words in a dictionary, so keeps reading in a foreign language fast and easy....

Never A Goal In Itself Vocabulary practice should never be a goal in itself. Do you want to remember a list of words? What use is that, unless it's your grocery list? What you need is to remember words embedded in sentences or combined with specific other words. When you are looking for the French word for "Father", in the best case when you were taught at school, you will think of "Mon père fume une pipe" and then you will think hey, "Father" was "Père", now I remember. In the worst case you'll just remember "Père" if it was...

Articles and Nouns When starting to read German texts, apart from a basic vocabulary, it is nice to have a basic understanding of the grammar. It will not demand much study time, just read this blog or a wiki page and see what you can encounter. The most basic difference is that German nouns start with a capital, but there is more complex stuff about articles and nouns. For example, the English article and noun combinations "the village", "the city" and "the state" translate in German to "das Dorf", "die Stadt" and "der Staat". The first one as the neuter, the...

Step 1: Get A Basic Understanding Maybe you already have a base vocabulary of the language that you want to learn. You might have picked it up at school, but we all know that after language education at school where not everyone is very motivated most of us end up with just that. A basic understanding. If you don't know anything about the foreign language you want to learn, get yourself any second hand coursebook from which you can pick up the highest frequency words and some basic grammatical lessons. Or see if there is a Blog article on our website already...

New: Italian Short Stories Now you can continue your vocabulary expansion with Italian Short Stories. Any new words encountered in the text will be learned when rereading the text until you are fluent, and can also be stored for practice, where the software will determine from the frequency of the unknown word in the text how many times you would need to test or study the new word to retain it in your memory. As opposed to the Fairytales product there's no audio added and as such the price of the product is lower. Example screenshot: These short stories were...

Dutch Nouns Dutch grammar is similar to German grammar and to a lesser extent English grammar. For Dutch nouns, like with German, there are different definite articles ("de" and "het" both meaning "the") for which the correct article has to be learned by experience (it is "het dorp (the village)" but "de stad (the city)"). For this, extensive reading is perfect. Words and their articles are assimilated naturally. When you read a lot of Dutch texts you will only encounter the correct combinations of nouns and their articles, and as such it will become part of your memory. For the...

Spaced Repetition - Fast, but Boring and out of Context To learn vocabulary there are two major methods, flash cards and extensive reading. Regular vocabulary training (learning word lists) has evolved to spaced repetition flash card systems. This comes down to learning and remembering all of the words in a relatively efficient way. However users of the flash card method often complain of boredom and becoming averse to the system. Another problem of this method which may well be the cause of this aversity is that one is trying to fill the brain in an unnatural manner. Your brain is filled with single...

Verb or Adjective Inflections There's no need to cram all French grammar before you have done any reading. The best way to acquire new knowledge is to experience it. So start reading and when you run into a peculiar verb form in French just look it up on a chart. Before starting to read French, it is useful to distinguish between language components and be able to recognize for example verb or adjective inflections. The main component of French grammar is conjugation of the verbs. For verbs in the present tense this is the same as with the English difference between...

Learning Grammar In natural acquisition theory, grammar is not learned but acquired by long term observation of the language patterns. That means you hear your native language only used according to certain rules, which together make up the grammar. Accordingly you use it the same way. Grammar governs the composition of words from roots, and sentences from words in a language. When learning a second language, there is often much stress on the notion to acquire it artificially. Bits of grammar will be combined with new words and a short text where both the new words and the grammar are...

Advanced Word List Cramming Language learning systems using spaced repetition help you learn words by reminding you on set intervals which words to learn. It comes down to smart vocabulary list learning. If you cram a list of words you might remember them on the next day's exam, but not the week after. Handy for a high school student, not handy for someone who wants to actually learn the language. A spaced repetition system would remind you to look at the words again the next day, then after three days for example, and finally after eight days of seeing them the...

Do Roots Help To Read Faster? Most words of a language can be classified in word families and many word families are based on the same root. So for example 20.000 words can be from only 2000 word families which are based on just 400 word roots or stems. Dutch "begrijpelijk" (understandable) comes from the word family / verb stem "begrijp" (understand) which in turn is based on the root "grijp" (grasp). We can all grasp the meaning of this. Once you have encountered enough words within a word family you can sort of guess the root. Or vice versa, if you learn...

Learn to read Dutch with two Bermuda Word products Start off with 150 pages of Dutch folktales, and continue getting reading fluency with short stories from classic Dutch authors. Because of the immediate in-context pop up translation you'll read advanced texts without difficulty, eventually learning up to thousands of new Dutch words. The words that you have a problem remembering are stored and can be doublechecked or practiced until they are part of your permanent memory. Dutch is hard to learn for many people as for example the correct usage of articles "de" and "het" (both meaning "the") are hard...