Reviews

Hundreds of resources to help you teach yourself

Conferences for Serious Language Lovers

General, Websites, Conferences/Lectures

This site offers a global list of language-related conferences. Looking over the list now, I see conference titles such as “Ways to Protolanguage 3,” “International Language for Communication Conference,” “The Third Asian Conference on Language Learning,” and “CFP 2nd Annual Igbo…

Languages at Risk!

5 General, Websites

This online resource from UNESCO (which stands for United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization) allows you to search for information on endangered languages around the world.  For example, you can get a list of all the languages spoken…

This Is the Work of a Linguaphile

5 English, General, Dictionaries, Websites

The Online Etymology Dictionary is the work of a Pennsylvania-based historian and linguaphile, Douglas Harper, who writes on the home page, “This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they’re explanations of what…

Search for Gujarathi, Yiddish, and More!

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

The Modern Language Association has a spectacular online language map showing the languages of the U.S., as well as a data center with searchable language information. For free!  These tools will be updated soon…

Facebook Page for Kung Fu Fest 2013

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

If you are a social-media holdout, I am not going to try to convince you that you should dive in now. There are, after all, pros and cons to being on Facebook. If you are already on Facebook,…

This Is a Looooong List

General, Websites

In Wikipedia you can find a list of language academies, which are organizations that weigh in on what is and is not right and proper in a given language. They exist in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and many other countries—…

Picking a French Movie to Watch

5 Arabic, Dutch, English, French, General, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Yiddish, Radio/TV/Video/Film

I no longer have Time Warner Cable, but in the early days of this project, I found it very useful for language-learning purposes, and I would imagine other cable or satellite or fiber-optic service providers would offer similar or perhaps…

ConversationExchange.com: Barter Your Language Skills

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

Even if you live in a remote area, you can use sites such as ConversationExchange.com to find a Skype partner overseas and start speaking, say, Finnish or Xhosa. The web is a fabulous thing. Through this language-exchange community, you…

Listenlive.eu: You Can Go for French Radio, or Estonian, or Greek, or Portuguese, or Something Else Altogether!

5 Dutch, English, French, General, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, News, Radio/TV/Video/Film, Websites

A valuable resource for language learners, the listenlive.eu website has a formidable collection of links to more than 4,000 European radio stations streaming live on the web in many languages. I have used listenlive.eu to access German and French…