Reviews

Hundreds of resources to help you teach yourself

Livemocha: Seeking to Provide Casual Café Culture

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

“As the world’s largest online language learning community,” reads the Livemocha site, “Livemocha fuses traditional learning methods with online practice and interaction with native language speakers from around the world. Livemocha delivers an unparalleled learning experience that promises…

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…

Mingle on Myngle

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

Founded in 2007 and based in Amsterdam, Myngle bills itself as “the No. 1 multi-language online school.” I haven’t tried Myngle out, but some of my readers have. One described it as “a great way of getting some cheap lessons to…

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…

Cute Website!

Arabic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Kids

I know little about Little Pim, other than that it offers language-learning products for kids, that it was founded by Julia Pimsleur Levine, and that the company’s instructional DVDs span multiple language families. Also that Ms. Levine happens…

Visit the Middlebury Language Schools Website for Answers to Application FAQs

5 Arabic, French, General, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Classes/Conversation

I don’t normally include language schools here, but Middlebury is famous for its summer programs. While I have not experienced one myself, I have heard great things about them over many years from people I trust.  The typical…