Reviews

Hundreds of resources to help you teach yourself

DLIFLC: Language Resources for Free

Arabic, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Audio Lessons, Multimedia, Websites

A reader whose opinion I respect directed me to this website for the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC). Here you can find a lot of free multimedia language-learning material (audio, video, print) for numerous languages, including multiple Arabic…

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…

Walking While Reading El Diario: Look Before You Cross!

4 Spanish, News, Websites

The newspaper El Diario, available in print and online, is the largest, oldest Spanish-language daily in New York City. When I was working on my Spanish, reading El Diario was an extremely…

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 Pleasant and Valuable Study Aid

5 Spanish, Flashcards, Vocabulary

I love this SparkNotes product. It is a well-constructed box of 1,000 well-constructed Spanish vocabulary cards, and is the successor to another box of 1,000 cards, Spanish Vocabulary Study Cards, from the same company. Unfortunately, since using them, I have learned…

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…