Category Archives: Website

Basic Phrases with Pronunciation: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Swedish Available

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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.

Basic Phrases with Pronunciation: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Swedish Available

 

 

Dutch and Danish will be coming next, and eventually I’d like to have audio on the Romance Languages Phrases and Germanic Languages Phrases pages as well.

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning Online and Teaching (MERLOT)

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The MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning Online and Teaching) website is a great collection of online materials for students and teachers across all disciplines, ranging from agriculture to world languages. If you’re looking for resources to use in your classroom or for self-study, I recommend starting with MERLOT before doing a general internet search because the materials are peer-reviewed, under a Creative Commons license, and the results are not influenced by certain companies who are promoting a product.

From their About page: “MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy. MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.”

I am proud to announce that my French Listening Resources mp3s are now included in the French materials and that they are available under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non-Commercial – Share Alike license, meaning that you can copy, distribute, and modify the mp3s as long as you attribute me as the creator, do not make money off of them, and share your adapted works under the same or a similar license.

After a short summer break, I have started updating the podcast once again with another eavesdropping mp3. I plan to continue adding a new mp3 each week, recorded by various native speakers in France and hopefully other Francophone countries as well.

French Listening Resources Podcast

You can subscribe to the French Listening Resources podcast through iTunes, regular RSS, or e-mail and the accompanying webpage is available as a regular blog or as an html page, the latter being where you can also find the transcripts and online listening exercises (and eventually the English translations).

Multilingual Vocabulary Lists and Verb Conjugations to Learn Several Languages Together

Multilingual Vocabulary Lists and Verb Conjugations

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Study several languages with multilingual vocabulary lists and verb conjugations

For those who also love multilingual vocabulary lists or verb conjugations, I’m continuously updating the Romance and Germanic pages. The Romance languages include French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Germanic includes German, Dutch, Swedish, some Danish, and a tiny bit of Afrikaans and Norwegian for the vocabulary sections, and German, Dutch and Swedish for the verb conjugations. Here are the index pages with links to each individual page:

Once I am able to add more vocabulary and verbs, I will probably split the Germanic lists and create separate Scandinavian lists (hopefully with Icelandic included). I have also been creating some Youtube videos so you can hear and see the differences among the Romance, Germanic, and Scandinavian languages as well as some fill-in-the-blank exercises for Romance languages.

For the Romance languages, you also have the option of hiding/showing languages as well as changing the order of the languages. This will be added to the Germanic lists soon.

Multilingual vocabulary lists - Days in the Romance languages available at ielanguages.com

 

Other multilingual sites to check out:

The MediaGlyphs Project Vocabulary List Generator allows you to select 2-3 languages and a theme to display the multilingual vocabulary lists.  It is updated by volunteers and some languages have much more content than others, but many languages are available.

Linguee.fr allows you to search for a term or phrase in bilingual texts (French – English, English – French, English – German, English – Spanish or English – Portuguese) that have been translated by professionals. Many of them are official European Union texts.  It is essentially an easier way to search the internet for a specific word, and it turns the texts into a comparative corpus. Linguistics nerd will love it!

Poliglottus offers basic vocabulary of 1,300 words in English, Spanish, French, German and Italian and basic verb forms in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Sardinian – though only two languages can be compared at once and the lists are not labeled (no themes for vocabulary and no tenses for verbs).

Romanica Intercom is a site for comparing and learning the grammar of the main Romance languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian and French), though it is a bit hard to navigate and the interface is only available in Catalan or Spanish.

Gilles’ Langues site in French, English, Italian, Spanish and German is very helpful too. He includes some memory games to play as well as PDF and EPUB versions of his vocabulary lists PLUS lots of mp3s of the words.

Book2 provides 100 audio lessons on basic phrases and vocabulary for A1 & A2 level in 40 languages. You choose which two languages to learn or compare, so it is not only English-based.

Internet Polyglot offers lots of language combinations to study lists of vocabulary, many with pronunciation and games. It is free, but like Book2 you can only choose two languages to view at a time.

BePolyglot was a pay language portal about the 5 main Romance languages that offered multilingual vocabulary lists.  [Unfortunately this website no longer exists, but you can view the free pages using the Internet Archive.]

 

Multilingual, but more work for you:

These sites offer plenty of languages, but they are not compared side-by-side like with the sites above. You have to do a little more work to see both languages in action (two browser windows open if you have a widescreen monitor or using one language that you are advanced enough in to learn a second, for example).

LanguageGuide is a pictorial audio vocabulary site. All of the languages use the same format and pictures.

Euronews has video clips of the news in several languages (with transcripts, though not word for word sometimes). Euranet and Presseurop are similar sites, though Euranet has fewer transcripts and Presseurop doesn’t seem to have any audio. Radio Praga is another site for articles with audio.

LingQ uses the same beginner stories in each language offered (the lessons Who is She?, Greetings, Eating Out, etc.) so you could download the mp3s and text for each language you wanted to compare and make your own side-by-side comparison.

Deutsche Welle’s podcasts are available in 30 languages, so you could use your strongest language to help you learn German.

Lastly, if you’re interested in the 23 EU languages, the official site has a recording of the same text in every language so you can see and hear the differences (or similarities) among them.

 

If you can help add other languages – from any language family – please let me know!

Updated July 2016

Studying or Learning Multiple Languages Simultaneously

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I’ve been working on my French & German Comparative Tutorial this week, and also searching the internet to find other sites that help people learn more than one language at a time, or even multiple languages simultaneously. I am so disappointed.

[Update: I haven’t found many websites but I have found some multilingual comparative books for learning multiple languages simultaneously. Of course, you should check out my Romance and Germanic vocabulary and verb lists too!]

Studying or Learning Multiple Languages Simultaneously

I’ve found a few vocabulary lists, but they’re mostly just showing the similarities among Romance languages. I can’t find any sites that include lessons for learning two languages, closely related or not. I’ve never been able to find books like this either, which is somewhat surprising considering that almost all graduate students must learn two foreign languages and I know I am not the only person in the world who studies French, German and Italian at the same time. Where’s the multilingual love?

Instead, all I’m finding is some misguided “advice” that learning two languages at once is a bad idea. Says who? Every single person learns in a different way. Maybe it’s a good idea and maybe it’s not, but you should at least try. Maybe you can learn as a beginner in two languages without confusing them, or maybe you need to be advanced in one but beginning in the other. It all depends on your learning style.

I took Intermediate French, Beginning German and Beginning Spanish when I was an undergrad and I never had a problem keeping the languages straight in my head. Apparently this is discouraged (!) at some American universities, like Georgetown: “Freshmen interested in pre-registering for multiple language courses must receive permission from the dean’s office. One of the deans will discuss your specific situation with you and help you determine whether or not studying a second foreign language is feasible.” You have to get permission to study languages?? How can studying a second foreign language ever be NOT feasible?? I. just. don’t. get. it. Quite a difference from French high schools, where students must learn two languages!

Of course, if you’re advanced enough in one language, you can always use it to learn another, i.e. learn German in French or learn Italian in Spanish. That’s precisely what I do when I buy language books here in France. I feel like I get two languages for the price of one. Even the cheap cahiers (usually no more than 5 € each) designed for collège-level students are useful for getting the grammar basics of German, Italian, Spanish and sometimes even Latin. LaRousse, Hachette, Magnard, and Hatier Chouette are all good ones.

Anyway, since I want to spread the multiple language love, here are some new resources that I’ve come across this week:

  • Pukka German is a podcast of informal German (slang, idioms, colloquialisms) from an adorable South African-German couple who live in Freiburg. It’s extremely useful since it’s the German that is not included in textbooks, i.e. the way people actually speak!
  • Deutschlern.net is a free Deutsch als Fremdsprache site with online interactive exercises. It’s all in German, which can be a bit intimidating if you’re a beginner.
  • Since there’s no amazon.it, I searched around for online Italian bookstores where I can buy Italian as a Second Language books. I managed to find two, Internet Bookstore Italia and Libreria Universitaria, but shipping outside of Italy is not cheap.

Pour les francophones qui veulent apprendre l’allemand :

Pour les francophones qui veulent apprendre l’italien :

There are other facile.com sites for learning Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Latin and even Provençal! (The English version of the site only includes lessons for French, Spanish and German.)

So if anyone else can find free online tutorials in learning two languages together (not necessarily just French & German or French & Italian), please let me know!