Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia that you can use to learn about pretty much anything in the universe. One lesser known feature of Wikipedia is that every article has been written in many languages.

The good thing about Wikipedia is that when the articles are translated into different languages, they’re translated by native speakers, and they’re constantly edited. This means that mistakes are rare, and if there are any, they’re quickly picked up by moderators, and corrected.

As I said, you can use Wikipedia to read articles about almost any topic you can imagine. Let’s look at how this works with a real example. I'll type in a random topic close to my heart: the wonderfully talented singer-songwriter extraordinaire, ✨Mariah Carey✨.

So, type in www.wikipedia.org and then, type in Mariah Carey (or whatever you want to learn about). You’ll then get a whole page dedicated to facts about Mariah Carey:

Now, here’s where Wikipedia becomes really powerful for language learning—you can instantly switch the article to another language!

So, now we have the article we want to read, let's translate it into another language. With Wikipedia, it's very simple.

Look at the top-right-hand side of the Wikipedia page, and you’ll see an option labeled 'Languages'. Click this button to open a list of available translations.

If you click the "languages" button, a list of languages you can translate the article into will open up. Let's translate our Mariah article into French by clicking the word "Français".

Just note, that the names of the languages are written in their own language, so if you want to read it in French, you click "Français".

French — Français
Spanish — Español
German — Deutsch
Italian — Italiano
Portuguese — Português

You get the exact same article, just written in French. Amazing!

You can then use the English to help you to read the French. What you should try and do is read the article and write down any words you don’t know, and use www.wordreference.com to find out what they mean. If you think they will be useful to you in the future, learn them and write down a few of the example sentences on WordReference to go with them.

Not every article is available in every language just yet, but new translations are added all the time. Why not explore different topics and see what’s available? You might even discover a fascinating new subject while improving your language skills!

Now it's time to put this into practice.

✅ Step 1: Pick a Wikipedia article about something you love—maybe your favorite singer, a hobby, your favourite animal or a historical event.
✅ Step 2: Switch it to your target language using the “Languages” button.
✅ Step 3: Write down three words from the article that you didn’t know before.
✅ Step 4: Look them up on WordReference, and note their meanings, example sentences, and pronunciation.
✅ Step 5: Keep a record! Over time, you’ll build a personalised vocabulary list based on things that genuinely interest you.

📝 Bonus: Try reading the article aloud to practise pronunciation!

OK, so I'm going to have a go at this task. Firstly, I'll visit Wikipedia and type in my topic of choice. I've decided to choose to learn about "elephants". So, I type "elephant" in the search bar.

Then, it comes up with a lovely article all about elephants. If you look at the top right-hand corner, you'll see that this article is availale in 196 languages.

I want to read this article in French, so I'll click "Français".

And then, we get the same article written in French, and we can read all about "éléphants".

For the task, I need to pick three words. I'm going to pick the words "autrefois", "tandis" and "bout". I'll then type them into a website called www.wordreference.com, which is an online dictionary, and I can learn what these words mean.

When I search for the words on WordReference, it gives me example sentences that I can use to help me learn the words.

The first word is "autrefois", which means "in the past" or "at one time"

The next word I chose is "tandis", and when I type it into WordReference, it tells me that the word "tandis" is actually part of a phrase, "tandis que", which means, "while"

And then, the final word I chose was "bout", which means "tip" or "end", and it's a masculine noun.

So, that's just a little exercise we can do with Wikipedia to help us learn some new words and phrases. Two or three words every now and then is a great boost to our vocabulary.

Let’s see what interesting words we can all discover!