Windows OS: How to turn your frustration into unconscious learning.

In modern society, we all have had the opportunity to browse around the ever popular "Windows operating system" which most of you are perhaps using this very moment. The endless debate whether Windows OS is better or worse than its main competitor the "MAC OS" is questionable because it all comes down to this simple fact; programming is never perfect and no matter how careful you are, computers have the tendency to malfunction. 

How is this relevant to learning languages? Well, imagine being a busy student who wishes to brush up his German, but can't find time nor the motivation to do so. One morning before going to school, he suddenly decides to reinstall his Windows operating system (or any other OS) into German rather than a language he is familiar with. Now you ask, what happens then? Many do not realize the amount of exposure we get from computer screens on a daily basis. It is almost impossible for me to imagine a person in this day and age who doesn't at least spend a couple of minutes in front of a computer daily, either at work or at home, even if, just to check the champion's league football scores.

The fun truly begins when your computer starts having problems which require your resourcefulness so as to fix them. A window pops up with an error message. You then proceed to search on Google translate the meaning of the message and in some cases make your way to blog sites, forums and tech support guides as to solve the issue.

Can't understand? Imagine solving the problem.

The best part is that nowadays most websites on the internet are capable of detecting which language your OS is using and in turn translate every webpage you browse, but it gets better than that. As you spend time arranging your PC to reflect your life, you realize that you need to start getting some vocabulary in order to read all the folders and filenames you need to learn as to get things done. It might bring waves of frustrations as you glue yourself to Google translate and go over the error messages word by word, but after a year's time, you will have perhaps learned several hundred words and all that anguish becomes self-gratifying.

Count on the internet to spice things up even more!

Maybe, some might consider it extreme, but I know for a fact that I have learned a tremendous amount of vocabulary at the cost of my sanity. However, the benefits no matter how difficult to perceive outlast the effort.

Peter.M




LanguageLearningShortcuts! by Peter Masalski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://languagelearningshortcuts.blogspot.com/.
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