RESOURCES TO BETTER MISSIONARIES LIVES
Posted by Stephen Carnazzo on February 28, 2010 under Language Resources | 
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I have come accross a search engine that is set up to find language courses on goggle.
It is off the website, EduFind.com.
It is well worth a look.
Posted by Stephen Carnazzo on September 20, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment
My wife and I have had to return to the United States and we are no longer in Timisoara, Romania. God has prepared the way for us to meet our obligations to our extended family. Along the way, we adopted our son, bought a house, and I started a new job. It has been a 8 month sabbatical from this site to help the family adjust to a new home, the new job, raise our son, and met other family obligations.
Posted by Stephen Carnazzo on April 4, 2009 under Missionary Budgeting | Be the First to Comment
Here is a great article on how to secure an exchange rate for large money transfers. The example is a large money transfer to purchase a house in another country. It advocates the use of a forward contract to secure an exchange rate for larger money transfers in the future.
The Wikipedia definition of a forward contract.
A good forward exchange rate article.
Explanation of foreign exchange spot and forward contracts.
Hope you like the articles.
Posted by Stephen Carnazzo on under Language Resources | Be the First to Comment
Here is a great Visual Dictionary Online. Too bad I bought one at a used book store the day before I found the website.
Check it out, it is great!
Posted by Stephen Carnazzo on March 25, 2009 under Language Resources | Be the First to Comment
The British National Corpus is an interesting resource for ESL.
In their own words, “It is a 100 Million Word collection of samples of written and spoken language…designed to represent a wide-cross section of British English from the later part of the 20th century.”
“The purpose of a language corpus is to provide language workers with the evidence of how language is really used…Traditional grammars and dictionaries tell us what a word ought to mean, but only experience can tell what is used to mean.”
It will give you an example of 50 examples using just their simple search.
Posted by Stephen Carnazzo on March 18, 2009 under Language Resources | Be the First to Comment
Here is a very interesting dictionary that goes into detail about a specific word and its associated use in phrases.
Here is an example using the word good in Romanian and English.
Here is the home page where you can search multiple languages.
The site also supports a language forum where you can find an ongoing conversation of the languages.
Posted by Stephen Carnazzo on March 5, 2009 under Language Resources | Be the First to Comment
Count'em
Here is an artistic version of word counts in the English language. You can determine the frequency of words by a simple search.
Posted by Stephen Carnazzo on under Missionary Life | Be the First to Comment
Stop and Think
I had a friend pass this article on about cultural mistakes. It is key to think about your host culture. How people act and converse always says more than one anticipates. Good intentions are not enough to get you by. Think ahead.
Yahoo Article on Culture Mistakes in the World.
Posted by Stephen Carnazzo on February 25, 2009 under Missionary Life | Be the First to Comment
Finding A Forum
Here is an intersting site, EXPATFORUM.COM. It is a site for Expats to post questions and get answers. The forums seem to have a broad range of questions, and there are many different country forums. This website does not focus on missionaries, but there are many practical answers to questions that all expats have. I have not reviewed the whole site, but they seem to have a sensible Acceptable Use Policy, and a missionary would not have to fear looking through the forum questions.
There is an expat blog, that looks interesting.
In addition, the main page has links to various expat guides that answer questions about visas, jobs, moving overseas,specific countries, properties, and health care.
Posted by Stephen Carnazzo on February 18, 2009 under Language Resources | Be the First to Comment
Listening is Better
Looking through the One Look Dictionary website for my most recent post, I found an absolutely amazing online talking dictionary. As the site states, “Dictionarist provides translation in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Dutch, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean dictionaries.”
It provides a number of voice and written translations between these languages and you can save your preferences.
Here is a good example of what it can do using the word Rouge. Very impressive.
What’s more you can add the search engine to your Google Toolbar or place the search engine onto your website. All for free.