Using Search Engines to Learn

One of the best tools to help you in your language learning is easily accessible – online search engines, like Google. You can use them in many ways to facilitate your study and find real, authentic language use to use as your own model. Here are several practical activities you can do with any search engine:

• When you are learning new vocabulary words, you can use online image searches to help understand what they mean. Put the word into a search engine, and see what images come up. You can see what kind of imagery is associated with the word. You can even use these pictures in your flashcards if you are using an electronic system (Also see Resources for Making Flashcards and Flashcards for Vocabulary)
• If you just do a regular text search, you can also see how a word is used in context. You can take the examples and study them to inform your own use of a particular word. This can be particularly useful for learning grammatical words, since they have no meaning of their own but form patterns to connect individual words into larger units. Some methods of learning these examples can be seen at Flashcards for Grammar and Learning Grammar.
• Google Translate can be helpful for translating individual words or phrases. Go to Google Translate and select the appropriate input and output languages. When you translate from English to the language you’re learning, or vice versa, you will often see a list of several words. You can print out this list and bring it to your conversation partner or mentor to discuss which one is appropriate. NOTE: Using Google Translate for whole sentences can work for languages more similar to English such as French or Spanish, but tends to produce very wrong results for languages that are more different.