How to use EuroComDidact ToGo
What’s the best way to learn?
The app promotes your plurilingualism focussing on Romance languages. It consolidates your vocabulary in the bridging languages, and it shows you the differences in the European languages’ lexicon.
Learning with the app is easy:
- Choose your native language or the language to guide you through the exercise.
- Select the type of exercise (departure language[s] and target language).
- As for the gap text, take the time to compare your ‘target word’ with its equivalents in the languages you already know. The more intensively you perform this step, the greater your learning success.
- Fill in the blanks. If you want, write down the automatically ‘corrected’ answers that occur when filling in the blanks. Lateron or in a further session, the app will demand the ‘right’ solutions from you again.
Attention: ‘Corrections’ do not necessarily indicate ‘errors’.
The automatic correction is due to the facts that (1) each language often has more than one word for one core meaning (synonyms) and that (2) two (or more) series of a same idiom or of different languages can share a same core meaning. Thus the English adjectives confused, crazy, scared… have a same core meaning in common: ‘deviation from a norm’. In Italian, you find matto, pazzo, strampalato, confusionale… and the same core meaning as well. However, (3) the program expects and accepts only one form per language and series. Therefore, corrections do not indicate ‘errors’.
Another point is that the EuroComDidact ToGo app is primarily designed to promote reading comprehension. Impacts on productive skills are not directly intended. As a result, misspellings are of lesser importance.
For effective learning, it is important to remember the app’s proposed ‘improvements’ and to compare the target words with their equivalents in the languages you already know. You will achieve best retention by building association networks between words, languages, meanings, applications and application situations as well.
