Reviews

Hundreds of resources to help you teach yourself

Google Translate: I Use This, a Lot

5 Arabic, Dutch, English, French, General, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Yiddish, Dictionaries, Websites

Need to translate Welsh to Bengali? Well, this is your site. Google Translate provides instant translations among 70-something different languages. l use it all the time. As with any electronic translator, the translations are in many cases far from…

WordReference.com: A Reader Told Me About This

French, General, Italian, Spanish, Dictionaries, Websites

The WordReference.com site offers online language dictionaries. Try English to German (and vice versa), Portuguese to Spanish (and vice versa), English to Polish, and so on. Or you can get a list of Italian conjugations, where you type…

A High Information Density Here

5 Arabic, Dutch, English, French, General, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Yiddish, Websites

This encyclopedia of writing systems and languages is a longtime labor of love of Simon Ager, an Englishman who now lives in Wales. He started the site way back in the Internet dark ages of 1998. Omniglot contains information on…

Test Yourself for Free!

4 Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, Tests

This company has free online quizzes for German, Italian, Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and English.  Try one! They’re fun. Although I haven’t tested all of them, the ones I have taken struck me as very…

This Is So You Can Spell, and Be Spelled to, in French

3 French, Audio Lessons, Radio/TV/Video/Film, Websites

If you want to sound literate in a foreign language, it is important to be able to spell. But because the spoken alphabet is not normally taught in standard teach-yourself materials, you kind of need to work on it on…

Forvo: For Pronunciations of the World's Words

5 Arabic, Dutch, English, French, General, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Yiddish, Dictionaries, Websites

Forvo’s tagline says it all: “All the words in the world. Pronounced.” Okay, maybe not all, but it is good to have a goal. There are 300 languages on Forvo’s language list, from German and Spanish to…

Once You Speak French, You Will Be Able to Use a Lot More of Assimil's Products for Other Languages

French, Books, Multimedia

Some people whose opinion I respect really like Assimil, a French company offering multimedia programs with different language bases. For example, there are English-based programs designed for English speakers learning other languages, and French-based programs designed for French speakers learning…

These Are, or Rather Were, a Great and Reasonably Portable Study Tool

5 French, Flashcards, Vocabulary

These are great. Blue on one side, white on the other, clear print, sturdy, and a good choice of words. Plus inexpensive. Or at least they used to be. Unfortunately, between the time I began this review and the time…

MLA Headquarters, 26 Broadway

5 Arabic, Dutch, English, French, General, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Yiddish, Websites, Organizations

This eminent 130-year-old organization “provides opportunities for its members to share their scholarly findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in the academy.” The Modern Language Association publishes prolifically, academics congregate annually at their annual convention,…

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