Evernote is a lovely tool which you can have on your PC and/ or laptop as and also on your smartphone. It works like a word document but does do much more – and it’s free!
So, how can Evernote help you learn German?
When you learn German (or any other language), there are four skills you will practise: writing, speaking, listening and reading – and Evernote can help!
Writing: You can use Evernote like any document and write vocab lists or whole essays on it. The beauty, however, is that you can use it on your smartphone whenever you have a few minutes spare, like on the train, bus, in between seeing clients … Also, if you all over sudden remember a word or you see one that you wanted to check out, write it down quickly before you forget. You can then sync the smartphone with your PC and continue writing when back at home.
If it is homework you’ve done, you can email it directly from your phone to your tutor and he/she can mark it and return – just like any word document.
Speaking: with Evernote you can not only practise your German writing, you can also record your German speaking. This could be just for fun or because you want to check your pronunciation. It could be particularly useful if you are preparing for a speaking exam. Speak, record it, save it, check it, let somebody else check it, delete it if it was rubbish, keep it, if it was brilliant … the list is endless.
Listening: as you can record yourself, you can, of course, also record others, your teacher, a fellow student or a listening exercise you’ve found online. Once it’s on your phone, you can listen to it whenever you have a little time.
Reading: if you find a really useful German text online you can clip it to Evernote. You then have a screenshot of that page in your Evernote folder and also on your phone. But you can also add annotations, so a text you’ve found could have your thoughts on it, like in the picture:
Have you used Evernote before, and more importantly, have you used it for learning a language? Did you find out different uses for language learning? If yes, please add them in a comment.
And – before you ask – yes, I started this blog post on my smartphone this morning …. the idea came during breakfast 😉
Brilliant! I like this. I use Evernote for collecting papers I need for work. Now I can refine my use for learning German!
… and homework 🙂
I use evernote for keeping track of PDFs and science papers. Prefer writing in plain text apps though
I prefer writing on the big screen but if that’s not around, Evernote is perfect (I just need to proofread twice or three times ;-))