Reviews

Hundreds of resources to help you teach yourself

Elementary Korean? I Think I Needed a Teacher to Accompany This

3 Korean, Books, Multimedia

I was pretty quickly overwhelmed by Elementary Korean. It is a textbook, accompanied by a CD to help with pronunciation. It is in fact a heavy, nearly $70 textbook, and the accompanying Elementary Korean Workbook is…

Elementary Korean Workbook: I Enjoyed What Little I Did in This

3 Korean, Books, Multimedia

In my very brief encounter with this Elementary Korean Workbook, I liked it reasonably well. It comes with a CD and is a companion to the big orange Elementary Korean textbook also reviewed in…

Basic Korean Grammar and Workbook: Not Basic Enough

3 Korean, Books

I did not get far at all in Basic Korean: A Grammar and Workbook by Andrew Sangpil Byon. I straggled through to page 21 and stopped. A big question for me was, who exactly is the target audience? …

Read Their Website in English...

Korean, Organizations

This association, whose acronym KAAGNY automatically makes me think “Lacey,” offers both Korean and English versions of its website. KAAGNY has been around since before I was born, serving the roughly half a million Korean-Americans living in the New York…

Live Lingua: Keeping the Free FSI Language Courses Alive

Arabic, Dutch, French, General, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Audio Lessons, Websites

These Foreign Service Institute language courses were recommended by a reader. I haven’t tried them, but the holdings are extensive and consist of older courses that are now in the public domain. They are also free, so the main…

Central Park West, Post-Marathon

5 Arabic, Dutch, English, French, General, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Sports/Fitness

Yeah, I know, the marathon is supposedly about running 26.2 miles. I am a runner, so I can appreciate that. Still, for me, New York City’s annual marathon spectacular is more about culture and language. Because of the global obsession…

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…

Central Park: An Autumn Day

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

Central Park draws international visitors year round, but if you really want to hear other languages, walk around here during the three non-freezing seasons: spring, summer, and fall. Summer especially is crazy with tourists. You can hear dozens of languages.…

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,…