Since the middle of last year, I’ve needed to learn a number of new Excel skills to manipulate and analyze data at work; for the most part, this has meant paying regular attention to youtube videos by Bill Mr. Excel Jelen, and Mike Excelisfun Girvin. They have both quick and easy “here’s something you might not know about Excel” videos, as well as longer “clear and concise instruction of an Excel function” videos. In addition to their own ‘shows’, they also get together and share unique approaches to the same excel problem and share their differing answers together, as part of an ongoing series of “Dueling Excel” episodes. I’ve learned so much from these videos, as well as their books (many available at my local ibrary).
Excel in French?
A while back, I wondered if it would be hard to track down similar Excel videos in other languages. As it is with most things these days, all I needed to do was turn to Google and ask “comment utiliser index match excel youtube“. Once a youtube video that was remotely close to what I was looking for opened up, I was set— Youtube’s “suggested videos” eventually guided me (as expected) to videos with a decent number of views. Without trying very hard, I found a short video introducing the =VLOOKUP function, which is evidently called the RECHERCHEV function French– voila!
Other hobbies?
If learning Excel in another language isn’t your thing, what about guitar? In English, you can have James Taylor teach you how to play Fire and Rain, himself. If happen to enjoy the guitar and also want to learn Brazilian Portuguese, why not try learning how to sing and play a song? Or just sing along…. or just play along.. etc. etc.
I don’t know how to say “how to play guitar” in Portuguese, so I used Google Translate, and then used copy/paste to put the results, “como tocar guitarra,” into a google/youtube search. Once you start adding in the names of artists and songs that you like, you may find something. In my case, I ended up finding a high-quality guitar lesson for Caetano Veloso’s ‘Sozinho’. The video wasn’t done by Caetano Veloso himself, but this teacher quite cleverly incorporates great on-screen tabs as well as original audio from the song.
What if the language level is over your head?
At this point, I don’t understand more than a few words of this video (i.e. I don’t speak Portuguese); however, looking at the guitar instruction, it’s pretty clear that it’s a good video (over 80,000 views at this point). If I stuck with this video long enough to pick up the song on guitar, I’m confident that at least a few of the phrases from the teacher would stay with me.
Don’t torture yourself
If you don’t feel like learning the whole song, remember you might just want to try learning the chorus before moving on to another song. I don’t think I would ever encourage people to treat these kinds of videos as something to memorize; however, if you’re not using your target language as a tool for learning something new every once in awhile, then you may find that this kind of exercise is an interesting change of pace.
Again– if Excel and Guitar aren’t your thing, what about French instruction on how to cook? Are you a student in the Sciences? Why not listen to how a French math teacher explains integral equations? There’s nothing really revolutionary about anything that I’ve written here, but I think many language learners would benefit from giving it a try.
