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The Web has really changed the distribution of understanding materials. Within the last few few years, podcasts as learning products have grown to be increasingly popular, either as a stand-alone mini-course or being an improvement to courses and applications shipped through more conventional sources. Understand Out Loud purports to be a one-stop destination for sound and movie learning. It offers around 136 podcasts among its 10,000 titles. And, as you would assume in these times, customers charge the games utilising the familiar five-star method.Learn Out Loud presents podcasts in nine types: careers, study helps, journalism, examination preparation, medical, law, teaching and writing. Yet another podcast that caught my vision is The Nude Researchers Radio Display Science Podcast. And number, do not confuse it with the Naked News.


These scientists only "reel down research and set the important points bare." Other exciting brands are the Press Artist's Strategies Podcast. Designed for the innovative skilled, the blurb claims that podcast is semi-daily, fast-paced, info-packed and funAs near as I will collect, podcasts are free, though the website does promote other understanding products. Train Out Loud could be the site's service for folks who desire to publish a podcast or other understanding aid. Teach Out Loud is really a free and simple instrument, your website claims, and publishers may earn royalties if applicable. The Digital Podcast directory site provides podcasts in various categories--ranging alphabetically from art to movie products and services and everything in between. The listing contains 15,525 podcasts in 95 groups and has 17,305 registered users.


To greatly help us choose from its many products, Digital Podcast provides lists of the highest-rated podcasts, podcasts with voting factors, and podcasts with subscribers.Not most of Electronic Podcast's podcasts are learning-related, although many are. Its featured podcast inside my visit was Insta Spanish, providing instant Spanish lessons. Podcasts also arrive as supply vehicles for material providing continuous knowledge and talent progress to experts of most sorts. Here are a few of the attractions I found.The Company English Pod helps business professionals every-where boost their order of company English. Let us face it: Actually some of us whose first language is British battle with organization English.


Along the way to the factory store the driver explains to me that in Cuba cars are often handed down through the family. All the old 1950s cars driving around are passed down that way too and obviously can't be sold to outsiders. Because parts are not available for these antiques the local people must find ways to adapt other parts for them. Weren't the designs so interesting and unique in the 50s though? Finally we arrive at the Cigar Factory. 61.50, plus a couple of bottles of rum. 7.50 bottle of this sweet type called Legendario that i will give as a gift later. Might as well i figured at that price, but i realized later that the liquid meant i would have to check that piece of baggage instead of taking it carry on and avoiding the baggage carousel. I'm sure our driver got a little cut of this too but that is good as well! Next we took a drive through the downtown area which was fascinating. This city is so solidly build! In the old city it's the gold of south america that built it! Fascinating things to think about.


There has been some discussion here on TWD about alternative news sources. Fortunately Facebook, Twitter and Quora are not the only free news sources in this new world of the internet, although they remain good ways to post resistance messages to Republicans. Be aware that social media sites will "customize your feed for a more personalized experience." That means that using social media for news will increasingly leave us in echo chambers, where the news is curated to our own biases. This leaves us in danger of the same polarization that is dividing our country now. I would encourage everyone to subscribe online to your nearest big city newspapers. Print journalism and the journalists that work for them remain a bulwark of Democracy, and they deserve our support.


But for free news, resist the temptation for the shortened "Flash News Briefings" on smart speakers like Alexa or Google Home. They are great for headlines, but these smart speakers, at least on the Amazon Echo 2nd generation, Alexa will also play your local radio station that carries full NPR news, full BBC news, and your local and state news. On YouTube, you can subscribe to CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, FOX news, and others that don't come to mind right this moment. Podcasts. You can get these on your laptop, tablets, mini tabs, etc. Most smart phones come with built in podcast apps that contain a variety of podcasts. Comparing my Samsung, which comes with a default app, Castbox, I find that Castbox is much deeper for podcasts than the iPhone default.


You can get everything from full podcasts of Maddow or Ari Melber from MSNBC (what, who me, biased?), to many many others that break down the news in depth. MSNBC talking heads are admittedly very biased, and if you are more moderate, or just want to expand your understanding of conservative issues, there is plenty on Castbox for you. For your MacBooks, Iphones, iPad, and iPod touch, Christine Chan of Imore recommends these podcast apps (podcast aggregators) for Apple's iOS platform: Overcast; Castro; Pocket Casts; Instacast Core; iCatcher! On Android, outside of the default Castbox, free podcast apps recommended by Joe Fedewa at Phandroid include: BeyondPod; DoggCatcher; Player FM; Google Play Music,(which includes podcasts and music, as do most podcast aggregators); and Pocket Casts. Remember not to overdose on news, however. Browse comedy, music, cooking, cars, history, celebrities, and podcasts by diverse podcasters. Some of my favorite shows by black podcasters include the hilarious Late Night, Whenever, from WNYC studios in Chicago and NPR Code Switch. Drunk Film School is fun for all. Subscribe to a second language podcast and learn Spanish.


Our latest Quoran of the Week can speak five languages—English, Spanish (very useful, as we’ll learn shortly), French, Portuguese and Italian. His Mandarin and German are good enough that he could get by if he was travelling. And he now has Quechua, Russian, Hindi and Czech among other languages on his radar. Say hello to JD Davidson, our youngest Quoran of the Week, who might surprise you both with his maturity and the interestingness quotient in his answers. JD, who lives just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, even has an interesting answer to why he goes by those initials. While the first part of his hyphenated name is Jonathan, his middle initials are S and W. "I would be much better titled JS," he agrees.


Then he happened to visit an aunt in another state. "We didn’t know each other well and I think she might have forgotten my actual name! She called him JD, and though he didn’t like it at first, decided he would go by that when he moved to a new school. Ever since, the initials have stuck. JD’s interest in languages was kindled early…in fact, as early as kindergarten. "When I was younger, I lived in a kinda segregated community and before I went to public school, I had never really interacted with people of colour. When I got to kindergarten, I found that I could not understand the dialect of my African-American classmates. I went back home and told my parents that there were Chinese people in my class and they tried to speak ‘Chinese’ to me.


My parents asked if I tried to speak Chinese back, and it made me wonder," recalls JD. The next time he had a conversation with a black classmate, he "spoke Chinese". Predictably, that didn’t go over very well, and young JD learned something that day. "I’ve definitely come a long way in my understanding of ethnolinguistics," he says. The first of those new experiences came when he was learning Spanish in his freshman year of high school. He picked up the language quickly—even taking his textbook home to learn by himself (and reading it in two weeks) since the class was going too slowly for him. Then he found out about an upcoming mission trip to Honduras, and while he is an atheist, signed up, saying that he could help translate.


"About nine months later I was in rural Honduras, surrounded by some of the most memorable kids ever at a children’s home, many of them being orphans. I became close friends with a sweet little girl named Ana and I cried the most I ever had in my life when we had to leave each other," said JD. He promised Ana he would see her again soon. The group, however, announced that they weren’t coming back. But almost exactly one year later, JD did in fact return, in a story he details in a Quora answer to What is the dumbest thing you have ever done? Learning Spanish turned out to have other advantages as well. As he reveals in another Quora answer, it helped him "charm a cute Colombian girl" who is now his girlfriend.


JD joined Quora last year, when he was 15. He was always the curious sort, turning to the internet for answers to the constant stream of questions that would come to mind. At some point, his Google search led him to Quora. "I found a place to feel at home," says JD. He soon began contributing, putting to use the observations he’d collected in his language learning journeys in his answers and through his Quora blog, Lingualism. At first, says JD, his answers "were okay" and received a few upvotes. "I then started to pay attention to what made good answers and I paid attention to Top Writers, and decided that I was going to be a Top Writer myself.


One of the first answers he was proud of was to the question What is the life of teenagers like these days in the United States? "At the time it was my longest and probably most upvoted answer," says JD. He began to refine his writing style, while picking questions that were a good match for the knowledge he was able to share. For example, he wrote about whether Americans that have European ancestry still know the language of their ancestors. All the listening to foreigners paid off when he answered What are some things the outside world would be shocked to learn about the United States of America? He got to talk about how life in his community was different from media and movie portrayals when he responded to What is the life of teenagers like these days in the United States?


Is America really as cool as it looks in movies? His favourite answer though was to the question: I feel like I'm wasting my time when I'm reading. "It’s my favourite because it details a key component of my personal story. The person who asked the question was suffering from some of the same things and thanked me for my advice. Teenagers, says JD, have a valuable role to play on Quora, and those who believe younger teens devalue the site are wrong. "It’s easy to homogenize us, but the minds of teens offer perspectives that are unique in that we think in ways that are creative and full of struggle largely because we’re new.


JD says he has many favourite writers on the site, but there are a few who who have greatly influenced him—among them Robert Frost, John Burgess, Scott Welch, Dan Holliday, Judith Meyer, Philip Newton, Kaiser Kuo and Sam Morningstar. Being on Quora also helped JD firm up what he would like to pursue as a career. He had always had a number of interests, including music, film and languages, but now aims to pursue journalism and hopes to be an international correspondent someday. "I’d always been interested in a lot of things and for my age, I’d always been good in a variety of things.


Quora taught me that there were people who were a lot better at things than me, and that they loved them a lot better than me. Seeing what true desire and devotion looked like made me look at myself and see what I was actually devoting myself to and enjoyed. "Then I realized what I had been doing the entire time: writing. I realized my entire life I had always loved it. I thought about my other passions, I started noticing all the different questions that interested me on Quora and my answers. Apart from the honour of being named Quoran of the Week, JD also receives some swag in the form of an official Quora T-shirt, shipped direct from Mountain View, California. For Quoran of the Week winners who have yet to receive their official Quora T-shirts, our apologies. Jonathan Brill has informed me that contractor issues had resulted in a delay, so if you haven't received your T-shirt yet, hang tight. Shipments should be back on track soon.


I noticed when I started my journey learning Spanish, I realised there were so many courses available but there wasn’t one course which bought together everything. What I learnt quickly is if you want to be fluent it isn’t enough to study one course. You have to immerse yourself in the language and if you aren’t able live in a Spanish speaking country, you have to incorporate Spanish into your everyday life! I have compiled a list of my top 5 tips that I personally used to learn Spanish. 1. Start following Spanish speaking vloggers to improve your comprehension and you are able to slow down their videos too if they are too fast initially. Some of my favourites are Lina Woo, Carla Arcia and Eduardo Menoni.


2. Watch Spanish shows and listen to Spanish music while reading the lyrics — this will help to train your ear and it will help to improve your comprehension skills. I am currently watching Nicky Jam, el ganador on Netflix which is a great show! Some other good shows are La Casa de Flores and La Dona. 3. Focus on a particular accent, with Spanish there are so many different accents and dialects — trying to learn them all will not work. Find one accent and focus on that e.g. watch shows and research specific words in that dialect. You can find radio stations from that particular country here which serves as a hub for all radio stations across the Caribbean and Latin America. 4. Challenge yourself when you are watching Spanish shows, start with English subtitles, then Spanish subtitles and the ultimate goal is to have no subtitles. 5. Use HelloTalk to speak to native speakers this will help to make sure you can communicate in real time. This app is amazing, I have connected with some great people that have helped me learn Spanish and more about their cultures.


Are you a night owl or a morning person? Sleep has been known to have a positive impact on learning. A 2016 study investigated the effect that repeated practice and sleep have on the long-term retention of information, particularly foreign-language vocabulary. Over the course of two sessions done 12 hours apart, 40 participants practiced foreign-language vocabulary. Half of them learned in the morning and reviewed in the evening of the same day, while the other half learned in the evening, slept on it, and then reviewed that lesson the next morning. One week later (and again six months later), the researchers assessed the participants’ retention. They discovered that sleeping in between lessons led to much better long-term retention. This finding echoes the results of a recent analysis our team at Duolingo conducted on the learning habits of tens of thousands of language learners.


However, we found that practicing before bed time isn’t the only trick: What’s key is making language learning a daily habit and sticking to it—consistently. Here’s the data that supports it. First, we analyzed Duolingo users’ behavior to identify 14 groups based on their activity level at different times of day. The following heat map illustrates the 14 usage groups. Each group has its own distinct preferences for when to spend time learning throughout the week. The "bed time" group, for example, is most active between 10pm and midnight on both weekdays (left) and weekends (right), as indicated by the dark red cells during those hours. Compare that with the "9-to-5" group, who uses Duolingo mostly during the working hours of 10am to 6pm on weekdays (left), but not much on weekends (right).


These behavioral groups were all discovered automatically by a clustering algorithm, and then we gave names to each group based on the results. Next, we analyzed Duolingo users’ performance using an additive factor model, which can estimate each user’s language ability while controlling for the inherent difficulty of each exercise (due to vocabulary, grammar, or other factors). We can use this model to assess and rank each Duolingo learner according to their proficiency level. When comparing Duolingo users’ proficiency across different groups, we found that those who practiced consistently just before bed time ranked higher than 52.9% of all users on average.


This was the highest-performing group in our analysis. On the other hand, users who practiced arbitrarily (without any regular routine) were the lowest-performing group, only ranking higher than 47.8% of all users on average. After the "arbitrary" group, those who practiced only on weekdays or weeknights (but didn’t keep it up over the weekend) showed the worst performance. These results suggest a couple of things. Yes, those who study just before sleeping tend to perform better than other groups. But the time of day isn’t the only thing: Equally important is the fact that these language learners consistently studied daily before bed. Users in the "bed time" group made language practice a daily habit on weekdays and weekends alike. This wasn’t the case for several of the other lower-performing groups, such as the "weeknights," "weekends," or the "9-to-5" group that didn’t keep studying over the weekend.