About

The Language Learning Centre, established in July 2021, is a place for editors who may frequently translate articles from other Wikipedias and use a variety of different languages sources to develop their skills so that they can at least improve their understanding of text on another language Wikipedia and not solely rely on automated translation. Overcoming the language barrier is the key to building an extremely resourceful encyclopedia in the long term. This doesn't attempt to teach you a language as you'd expect from a course but is simply a tool for assisting this process, with word lists in different languages and a resources list with external links to videos, blogs and newspapers etc. to help editors acquire a language. Learning a language and reaching a fluent level takes a lot of time and requires a massive amount of listening, reading, writing and speaking in your own time to reach the goal.

Wikipedia:WikiProject Intertranswiki may be used for listing missing articles and for highlighting articles to transwiki. DeepL and Google translate will be the most useful tools to help.

Resources

"The best way to learn a language is to massively ingest it, by listening and reading. Listening and reading are so powerful. If you can read the books, you know the language. To get to know a language takes a lot of time and a lot of interacting with it – and a lot of that time has to be on your own. I think it's better to work on comprehension and vocabulary without pressure to reproduce the language (by speaking)."

—Steve Kaufmann on language learning.

"You have to know what words mean. The larger your passive vocabulary the more you understand. The more you understand, the more likely you are to be able to speak... It takes a long, long time. For a long time, everything is fuzzy and foggy... You have to give yourself credit for what you've already achieved.

—Kaufmann on the importance of knowing words above everything else.

Resources contains a list of videos with subtitles, newspapers, lists on Wiktionary, the other language Wikipedias etc. in different languages. A range of source material keeps it interesting.

Word lists

You need to know at least 10,000 words in each language to be able to understand 95% of the text. These lists will be developed gradually over time and at different speeds.

Spanish

French

Italian

Portuguese

German

Dutch

Danish

Swedish

Polish

Czech

Russian

Translations

Articles translated can be put up as part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Intertranswiki

Wikipedia:Language learning centre

Contents