With our increasingly busy schedules, online courses are a great solution for learning new languages. In order to make the most of your learning experience, it's best to complement the course materials with some practical exercises you can do in our spare time. These are just as important as attending your online lessons. You can successfully learn a language by incorporating it into your everyday activities, including writing or talking.

Fortunately, the web is full of tools that can help you to incorporate your language of choice into your life. Some of them allow you to check and detect gaps in your knowledge, others make it easy to find conversation partners through language exchange platforms. It's important not to stick to one or two tools – language needs to be practiced in various contexts, all of which stimulate different linguistic capacities.

Language Overviews

There are many online resources to help you deepen your knowledge about the languages you’re studying. Introductions at Omniglot.com feature practical information on every language, as well as links to other tools designed specifically for this language. BBC's languages section is a great source of information on over 40 languages, and on About.com you can find many articles and word lists for several languages, including English as a second language.

Dictionaries

The online dictionary world is dominated by Google Translate, and rightly so – even though it sometimes makes rudimentary mistakes, this automatic translation tool will help a conversation go smoothly with words translated as they're being typed.

Vocabulary

Anki is a flashcard program that makes memorizing a bunch of words in a short time a piece of cake – also, it's free and works across different platforms. Memrise is quite similar, but extended to include memory tricks and other tools that help to remember new words. Internet Polyglot is not bad either. It boasts a game-like system of flashcards for 17 languages.

Writing

Lang-8 is a great tool to learning how to write. You keep a journal, which is from time to time checked and corrected by a native speaker of the language. It covers a smashing figure of 91 languages! It's free, but it's an exchange service too – you'll be assigned as an editor to the journals of others.

Pronunciation

A great place for exercising pronunciation is Forvo, probably the largest service of its sort – it features audio recordings for more than 200 languages! After signing up, you can create or own pronunciations, download files and create a list of your favorites.

Communication

Livemocha and busuu probably have the largest communities for language learning that can be contacted directly and reached through Skype. Italki is not a bad choice either – you can easily find a native speaker of your language of choice and meet up for a conversation. Bonus point – time zones are handled automatically.

Remember – practice makes perfect!