Reviews

Hundreds of resources to help you teach yourself

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…

A Moment in Television Time, 2009

4 Italian, News, Radio/TV/Video/Film

When I was studying Italian in 2009 and 2010, the Italian channel RAI was 554 in Manhattan with Time Warner Cable. I don’t know how much it costs currently, nor do I know what other cable companies you might be able to…

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…

VocabuLearn Italian: Good Accompaniment for Mindless Housework and Errands

3-5 Italian, Audio Lessons, Vocabulary

VocabuLearn’s publisher, Penton Overseas, was a victim of the global economic crash. The company no longer exists under that name, but the CDs it used to make are gradually finding new life on the web in the form of…

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,…