If you’re looking for an unusual but practical Christmas gift this year, and you know someone with an interest in a second language, you could delight them with a language-related gift.

Here are our top five language gift ideas (in no particular order)

1. An Earworms CD (beginners, many languages, £12-£14)

Earmworms is one of our favourite products, ideal for beginners, and available in a huge range of languages. Get those essential first words and phrases stuck in your brain with catchy tunes! Read more about Earmworms and how to get a 25% discount.

2. A Cideb  ”Read and learn” book (all levels, French/Spanish/Italian/German, £6-£16)

There’s nothing like reading a good story along with an audio CD to improve your language skills. Cideb do a huge range across all levels from beginner to advanced. Read more about Cideb Audio books.

3. A Michel Thomas Course (Beginner/intermediate, French/Spanish/Italian/German, £10-80)

Undoubtedly one of the best language teachers ever (sadly no longer with us), Michel Thomas’s audio courses require no note-taking and teach with an incredibly intuitive method that really works.

4. A verb wheel! (beginner to intermediate, many languages, £5-£10)

There’s no escaping having to learn verb conjugation in most languages. These cleverly designed verb wheels are more fun that a verb book and would make a really unusual gift.

5. A smart phone app (beginner to intermediate, £5-£20)

We’ve covered a few of these now, from the BBC Active Languages, SuperMemo, and Linguascope. It’s not easy yet to buy an app for someone else’s phone as a gift, but what you could do is make a little voucher with a print out of the website for the app of choice, put it in a shiny envelope and then pay for them to download the app on Christmas day!

And if they don’t speak a second language but love the English language (shameless plug coming…) you could always buy them a copy of my SF thriller, The Looking Glass Club (which, if weren’t with us when it launched last year, was #1  on Amazon UK’s Best Seller lists under Science Fiction, Mysteries and Crime over New Year last year!)

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a linguistic New Year!

Gareth

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2011 at 8:17 am and is filed under Apps, Books & CDs, Courses, English Language, Enhance Learning, Resourcefulness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.