Perhaps the single topic that I read about the most is travel. I have always been fascinated with far away places and beautiful, exotic scenery… multicultured festivals and traditional styles of dress.

So naturally, when I am learning a new language, I go on the hunt for travel blogs in that language. When you’re learning a new langauge, you need a lot of practice using it, and you also need a way to pick up new vocabulary. A great way to accomplish that is to read in your target language, and the best way to stay motivated and stay interested in reading is to read about a topic you love!

Finding blogs you enjoy

You don’t need much to find them. Just a little Google-fu. If I was searching for travel blogs in English, I would start by typing exactly that: “travel blogs”.

Of course there are a lot to choose from, and some don’t update regularly, others are boring, or poorly written, or just spam… but surely someone has already listed the ones he likes best somewhere before, right? So I would change my search to “the best travel blogs”.

At this point, I can expect that most of the results on the first page will be top-10 style lists of great travel blogs. So now I just need to know how to ask it in Italian. So I would search for “i migliori blog di viaggio”.

You should already be greeted with several really good options now. In many cases, you might be satisfied to stop there. But if you don’t like the results you’ve gotten, or if you just thin there’s still something better that you’re missing, you can tweet Google to give you the results you want, either by changing the language in the advanced options, or by specifically navigating to the Google site related to the country whose language you’re studying — for example, Google.it for Italian. Typically, I’m usually satisfied to set my Google search preferences to include all the languages I speak or am studying.

Italian travel blogs I read

I’ve found several interesting travel blogs in Italian. Here are a few that I like:

As you know, I use Google Reader, so it’s easy to skip past any post that I find uninteresting with the press of a single key, so I actually subscribe to almost a dozen travel blogs just in Italian. (Which says nothing of how many I’ve subscribed to in Russian, Spanish, and English!)

For me, the important thing is that not every post will be interesting, so by adding a lot of blogs, I give myself the freedom to skip past things I don’t care about while still knowing I’ll get plenty of opportunities to practice my language skills, and learn new words, while reading things that are interesting.

It can work with anything

It doesn’t have to be about travel. If you’re interested in cars, search for blogs about cars. If you’re intersted in skydiving, or knitting, or astronomy, find blogs about those topics! After all, if those are the things you love, and that you want to talk about, you need to learn the words people use to discuss those topics in conversation.

And more importantly, you need things that interest you if you’re going to stay motivated to keep reading, and learning, and practicing your language.

So what topics do you find interesting, and what do you read about in the language you’re learning? Let everyone know in the comments!

 

See more about: ,

Related posts:

  1. Finding the sounds of Italian
  2. Use Google Reader to learn languages
  3. Learn Italian vocabulary from Andrea Bocelli!
  4. The internet is your reality simulator
  5. A few Italian word patterns

Links in this post