Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Too old for Zon

Zon - a virtual world for anyone to learn Chinese.  

I signed up and found myself walking around and working toward actual learning - something I haven't done in SL lately.  The bandwidth was no issue and there was no program to download (something I have not been able to find with most virtual worlds).  I don't know if I will ever be brave enough to actually begin discussions, but it certainly has potential.
I heard about ZON at the Christa McAuliffe Conference keynote this year.  Dr. Yong Zhao discusses "How Technology Redefines Talents- What Should Schools Teach?"  It was a fascinating discussion which I liveblogged.  Now I have finally found time to experiment with his site. 

This seems to be as close as possible to learning a language from the "ground-up" which I have found to be the best method for me.  This is the way I learned to communicate in Farsi (something I have forgotten since leaving Iran back in 1974) and in German during my years of teaching there.  I will probably never get to China, but would love to learn more about its language.  How about you?
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