If you’d like to study basic phrases for French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, or Swedish, I’ve created new pages with the list of phrases and mp3s for each phrase (instead of one mp3 for all the phrases together). Now you can listen to each phrase individually before trying out the audio flashcards to test yourself. [...]
Full Story »So Much for the Asian Century: Loss of Language Programs at Australian Universities
The University of Canberra and Curtin University both recently announced that they would be cutting their language programs. At Canberra, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish will disappear while at Curtin, Japanese, Mandarin and a major in Asian Studies may be abandoned. These cuts are very unfortunate since it leaves these universities with no language classes or [...]
Full Story »iTunes U Materials and MOOCs Available in Languages Other than English
I recently noticed that iTunes U now lets you browse the courses by language. Finally! Previously you had to go to the list of universities and look for a certain institution, which may or may not have had any real content. Now you can simply select Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Catalan, Portuguese, Korean [...]
Full Story »South Australia Travel Videos in French
Want to see how beautiful South Australia is and learn some French at the same time? The French-language travel site MonNuage.fr has a few videos of South Australia, including Adelaide, Flinders Ranges and Kangaroo Island. Here’s the one on Adelaide: South Australia is also called Australie Méridionale but that’s much harder to pronounce, so let’s [...]
Full Story »New French Listening Resources Videos with Transcripts
The latest French Listening Resources video has been uploaded! This short clip is for beginners talking about family members and their ages. If you need the transcript, check out the Watch & Read page. There are seven more videos from Carole & Fabien on topics such as the house, typical meals, stores & fast food restaurants [...]
Full Story »Readlang + Podclub = My Latest Language Learning Obsession
Readlang by Steve Ridout is a new site (still in beta) which helps you learn foreign languages by reading and translating words you don’t know. You simply import text from any website, click on words you don’t know in order to translate them into another language, and save these words so you can review them [...]
Full Story »Free Children’s Books Apps in Foreign Languages (Text + Audio)
There are a lot of free language apps available nowadays but many of them are not very good or extensive. They tend to include some basic words or tourist phrases in flashcard format, but very few offer connected text (such as stories) in addition to pronunciation. Lately I’ve been looking for apps that include both [...]
Full Story »Dora will help you learn half a dozen languages
I often buy DVDs from the European Amazon stores to ensure that I will have a choice of at least one or two other subtitled/dubbed languages besides the original language. I’m not sure how, but I came across Dora the Explorer DVDs at the German Amazon and noticed that they offered FIVE languages, or at [...]
Full Story »Death of a language website: fsi-language-courses.org [UPDATED: It's back online and there are at least 3 mirror sites]
UPDATE: The site is back online!!! All of the files are also available at fsi.antibozo.net, fsi-languages.yojik.eu, or www.livelingua.com/fsi-language-courses.php, or you can use this torrent if you’d like to download everything. If anyone knows what happened to fsi-language-courses.org, please let me know! It was the site that included all of the Foreign Service Institute courses in the [...]
Full Story »Adding Subtitles to Online Videos with Amara for Language Learning
Listening while reading a transcript of what is said is the best way to improve overall comprehension as well as pronunciation. Extensive listening and reading also contribute to vocabulary acquisition. I have previously talked about TV series and movies that may include subtitles, but what about online videos? Youtube does have an automatic closed captioning [...]
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