About ielanguages.com

This website began as a collection of notes from my high school French class in the late 1990's. I will be forever grateful to Madame Refice, my first French teacher, for giving me an understanding and appreciation of the French language that led me to create this website. I've been continually adding more languages and linguistic-related material over the years. The academic and teaching ESL pages were written by me during my undergraduate and graduate coursework. Seven of the language tutorials were written by me, and I wrote them while learning the language. (I don't consider myself completely fluent in any language except French.) The tutorials focus on the basic grammar and vocabulary points of each language, but I am trying to incorporate more authentic language, slang, and informal ways of speaking. The rest of the tutorials were written by generous volunteers who also want to help others learn languages as much as I do.

I want to thank Malin for helping with the Swedish page; Natasha, Emir, and Sven for helping with the Croatian page; Jan and Peter for correcting the Dutch page; Daniel Roche for writing the Icelandic tutorial; Johan Petur for writing the Faroese tutorial; Vremita Desectia for writing the Indonesian tutorial; Olavo Germano de Sousa Neto for writing the Portuguese tutorial; Ivan Karmin for writing the Ukrainian tutorial; Stephen VanZuylen for writing the Russian tutorial; Josh Pirie for writing the Finnish tutorial; Ömer and Mehmet Sener for writing the Turkish tutorial; Mert for writing the Afrikaans tutorial; Brandon for writing the Latin tutorial; Jonathan for writing the Catalan tutorial; Rafael for adding Portuguese vocabulary to the Romance Languages page and Myles for helping with the IPA transcriptions. In addition, I would like to thank David and his family for doing all of the French recordings, as well as Marina, Renzo, Corrado, Sabrina, Olavo Germano, Krystallia, Mariska, Celine, and Sarien for doing the Russian, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Afrikaans recordings.

- Dr. Wagner

Le voyage pour moi ce n'est pas arriver, c'est partir. C'est la saveur de la journée qui s'ouvre, c'est l'imprévu de la prochaine escale, c'est le désir jamais comblé de connaître sans cesse autre  chose, c'est la curiosité de confronter ses rêves avec le monde, c'est demain, éternellement demain. (Traveling for me is not arriving: it is departing. It is the flavor of a new day, the unexpected at the next stop, the eternally unfulfilled desire to know something else, the curiosity to compare one’s dreams with the real world. It is tomorrow, forever tomorrow.) – Roland Dorgelès, French novelist, 1885-1973

Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas, et cette question de déménagement en est une que je discute sans cesse avec mon âme. (It always seems to me that I will be better off there where I am not, and this question of moving about is one that I discuss endlessly with my soul.) – Charles Baudelaire, French poet, 1821-1867