Adopt the essential tools for learning English!

Victims of abundance, we all are, and the urge sometimes arises to wipe the slate clean of all the competing demands, so as to retain only what really counts in learning a language. Unfortunately, it's impossible to bring along a native speaker in the flesh, which is by far the surest way to make language progress. On the other hand, a virtual native speaker is easy to find, and the Internet is full of social learning communities that encourage encounters: Palabea,Babbel, Ling and many others.

If I only had a few essential connections to maintain, I'd set up a little dashboard with Netvibes, Yahoo pipes or simply iGoogle.

On this dashboard I'd have :

• Babbel, for example, which lets me work on vocabulary by theme thanks to a very fluid and relaxing interface, while allowing me to exchange directly with whomever I want.
• For more advanced language skills, a site like Collocation of the Week proposes to take a key word each week and study five collocations of this word per day. At the end of the week, a short test summarizes what I've memorized.
• Quizlet is a very simple tool, a playful variation on flashcards. All you have to do is enter a list of words in one column, their definition or French translation in the other, and that's it. In just three seconds, Quizlet produces a small battery of tests that leave no chance of being forgotten!
• The Elllo site is the ideal reservoir of videos for English: all activities include quizzes, transcriptions and downloadable MP3 files.
• What does that mean? lets you ask for the definition of a slang word or idiomatic expression from a community of native speakers or specialists when traditional dictionaries aren't enough.
• Visuwords is a visual metadictionary that presents the results of a word search in a "cluster" corresponding to a particular meaning of the word. A set of color codes provides additional information, such as word form (verb, subject, adjective), synonym and antonym.
• For pronunciation, Howjsayis a light and useful tool.
  

And everything else is free-flying on the web, with videos, press articles and podcasts on whatever subject interests you... with your natural curiosity as your only compass!