Do you use Facebook? Probably! Around 900 million people use Facebook on a regular basis around the world in a plethora of different languages. It’s not just all those boring daily quips from people who are really not doing anything interesting at all that often clog up your own Facebook feed either. There are literally thousands of really interesting organizations and individual Facebook pages out there that you could use to help you learn a different language if that’s what you want to do.
Facebook, like all the other social media giants, including Google and other search engines, has been professionally translated into hundreds of different languages to make it more readily used by people around the world. If your interest is mountaineering or music, the arts or sport, then there is a safe bet that there are Facebooks of organisations all around the world that focus on these topics. And they won’t just be in English. They will be in whatever he language is in that country. So here are some tips you could use to help you use Facebook to learn a different language.
Tip#1 Use the top ten world Facebook pages in the language you want to learn and the topic you are most passionate about. “Social Bakers” has a list of links which records the greatest number of likes in your target country. Don’t forget that some languages are spoken in several different countries, so if you are after Spanish Facebook links, you can search for South and Central American based Facebook pages as well as European Spanish ones. You can sort the list by industry and choose say 5 or 6 pages that interest you.
Tip#2 Use “Alexa Rank” to search for the most popular news websites in the places where your chosen language is spoken. Connect with these websites’ Facebook pages. Make sure that you are not just connecting to e-commerce sites that will just try and sell you things that you don’t want to buy.
Tip#3 Use Google in the language you want to learn. Google is location based and you don’t have to be a translator to change the location settings. Go into the “Settings” on the main Google search page, then go into the “Advanced” settings and you can select the country and language to be a preferred language. You don’t have to use a professional translator to find search word or phrases. For your amateur needs, just use “Google Translate”.
Of course, there is no point in piling up your Facebook feed to make it more relevant to your language learning needs unless you read everything you see and respond in the language you are learning. The best thing about using Facebook is that you can do this anywhere, even in the Antarctic, as long as you have an Internet signal!