RSS Readers & Language Learning

Any person learning a foreign language via an input-based approach will invariably be using the Internet to access much of their authentic content. RSS readers (aggregators) are a very powerful software tool for organizing and accessing all of your resources in one central place. Using a reader greatly reduces the amount of time you need to spend manually checking web sites for new content.

Many web sites offer all or part of their content in a regularly published feed format. A feed is nothing more than a stream of data coming from a web site that describes content on the site. It is entirely controlled by the site's owner. When a change is made to the site the feed is updated and if your reader is subscribed to that feed you will be automatically notified. The feed may provide just a link to the new content or it may give you all of the content, which you can read in your reader software.

The reader I use is Google Reader (reader.google.com). It has nice organization capabilities, text can be comfortably read, and it is accessible anywhere I can use a browser. The interface is also available in many languages (of course, mine is set to Japanese).

Many sites will have links to their feed(s) prominently displayed. You just need to copy that address and add it to your reader, everything else will happen automatically. Here is just a sample of some of the feeds I follow:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%E3%82%AA%E3%83%90%E3%83%9E

https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/25624708.rss

http://www.c-radio.net/rss/c-radio.xml

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/lingosteve/uploads?orderby=updated

Google Alerts (google.com/alerts) is another good way to keep interesting content coming your way. You can subscribe via email updates or get everything in an RSS feed and monitor it in your reader.

You can monitor videos by turning a Google Video search into an RSS feed:

http://video.google.co.jp/videosearch?q=オバマ&hl=ja&output=rss

If a site has no RSS feed you can manually create one with Page2RSS.com