Summary

Worldia is a social networking tool for making friends and practicing languages. It focuses on using Skype to bridge the virtual gap and connect with real people worldwide as friends. The foreign-language-learning networking tools are accompanied by community building possiblities and paid private language lessons. The ensemble creates the potential for someone to quickly and interactively learn to speak foreign languages.

At Worldia, members can become tutors and earn money teaching online. This adds a nice twist to the social language learning gambit, and makes it a feature-rich web community for learning and teaching foreign languages - and getting paid! Nice.

One aspect of Worldia that I dig is the world map feature that allows you to view locations of all the friends you encounter on the site. Sweet.

Worldia is also available in Japanese. I imagine they'll add more languages in the future.

From Website

My Page

My Page is your home in Worldia, where.you give your self-introduction to others, write your diary and manage your activities in Worldia. You can also see what's going on with your friennds and communities and send/receive messages and let other members to start Skype conversations with you.

Find Friends

You may find someone who can related to while reading diaries and joining communities. You may also be able to search members to find your friends. You can find out more about the person by visiting his/her "My Page."

If you find someone interesting, send Friend Request politely. It would be wonderful if you fill up your World map with friends.

Communicating with Other Members

There is a dedicated messaging system in Worldia. Worldia also use Skype features so that you can actually talk with your friends. Some members are actually teaching native languages to each other using this feature.

You should actively provide and exchange information by wrting comments in community topics and friends' diary, and writing reviews of books and movies.

* Since Worldia is inter-cultural site, please make sure to respect others and act courteously while communicating with others.

Join Communities

Communities are where people with the same interests join to form a place for discussions and events. You can search existing communities to find the one you want to join or you can start a new community yourself.

Take or Teach Language Lessons

In Worldia, members who have registered as tutors are teaching language lessons to regular members. For student members, they can find the language and lessons they want since tutors are coming from all over the world. For tutor members, they can start lesson business with students from all over the world. Try the free trial lessons today!

Since starting as WannaTalk in March 2007, Worldia has grown to the site with close to 10,000 members from 170 countries and regions of the world. We will continue to work on improving our service so that more users will use our site.

Visit Worldia.net

Summary

One of the largest and fastest-growing online social language learning networks, italki.com offers a sophisticated user interface, a large and growing user base, a shared file database of lessons and helpful info as well as a great list of language-learning resources (you have to join to access them fully).

This is a great place to meet people for a language exchange over VoIP (Skype, Gizmo, etc.) and with instant messaging. You can meet and maintain language study exchanges with people from all over the world!

An excellent advantage of italki.com over some other social language learning networks is that their site has been localized in Arabic, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, making it easier to use the site if your native language is not English.

This site is an excellent way to meet, learn, teach and exchange cultural information with new folks from around the world.

If you are unfamiliar with Skype, click on the image below to find out more about making calls to anywhere in the world for free using any computer! It's the perfect way to connect and speak with language partners anywhere for free.

From Website

"What's italki?

italki is a language learning community. It's main goal is to help people learn languages.

At italki you can:

* Find language partners (language exchange, study buddies, teachers)
* Communicated with them (using Skype, MSN, Yahoo, Talkbox, etc.)
* Find language resources (podcasts, websites, videos, dictionaries, books, etc.)
* Participate in language forums

By creating a profile, you can find and be found by other people who are interested in helping you learn languages. Along the way, we're sure you'll make some friends and learn about foreign cultures. By voting on language resources, you can give recommendations and find out the best tools to help you learn a language. By participating in the learning community, you can also join discussions, ask questions, and help people trying to learn your language.

italki was developed by a company called Talk da Talk. Talk da Talk is based in Shanghai, China, and is dedicated to teaching English experientially.? They believe using a foreign language is the only way to really learn it.

We hope italki helps you learn a foreign language and make new friends!

What is language exchange?

Language exchange is when two people take turns speaking the other person's native language. By doing this, both sides get a chance to practice speaking the language they want to learn. We recommend dividing the time between the languages evenly.

For example:

* John speaks English and wants to learn Chinese
* John does a search to find Lily, a Chinese woman who wants to study English
* John and Lily decide to do a language exchange for 30 minutes
* For 15 minutes John and Lily only speak Chinese
* For 15 minutes John and Lily only speak English

There are many ways to arrange a language exchange, and there is no one right way to do it. Here are our final recommendations:

* be respectful
* don't be afraid of making mistakes
* have fun!

What is a language learning community?

A language learning community is a group of people that are dedicated to learning languages. When you study in a language school, you can rely on your classmates and your teacher to help you learn the language.

* You can ask questions of your teacher about "how do you say...".
* You can ask your classmates "which dictionary or textbook or CD is the best?"
* You also can ask them if they know anyone who can help with language practice

Unfortunately, not everybody has time, money, or chance to enroll in a language school.

Luckily, with the internet now the whole world can be your language learning community.Now it doesn't matter where you live. It doesn't matter if there is no language school and there are no foreigners living in your city. Now if you have an internet connection, you can find a native speaker of almost any language and talk with them for free. With internet phone programs like Skype, and chat programs like MSN, Yahoo messenger, you can communicate with people living on the other side of the world. Join our forum and discuss with other community members your experiences learning languages.

If you're interested in learning languages, try joining italki's language learning community. We hope you'll learn as well as contribute to it.
What are language resources?

Language resources are the tools you need to learn a language. That includes:

* Podcasts
* Videos
* Websites
* Books
* CD / MP3
* Dictionaries ... and more

Every language student needs these tools to learn a language. But did you ever wonder if there were better materials? Did you ever wonder if there was a better textbook? Or if there was a better electronic dictionary??
In addition, with the internet, there are many new and useful sites. There are amazing new podcasts, and websites with flashcards, or software programs, that have made learning much easier than even a few years ago. We hope this part of the website allows you to find the best tools, and gives you a chance to share your knowledge of resources that you found useful."

Link

Visit italki.com

Summary

This site can be an excellent companion to any web-based endeavor to learn a language, especially since the cards are stored online and you can be traveling and using random computers to access your study cards.

With this site you can quickly and easily create your own flashcard tests for anything you choose to study: vocabulary, grammar concepts, phrases... the cool thing is it's up to you.

Also at your disposition is a huge database of public flashcard packs to choose from, covering a large number of languages

From Website

Flashcards are study tools. Think of a small 3×5 index card with a question on one side and an answer on the other side. This web site is an internet application where you can create, study, print and download flashcards.

Special study features:

* View cards in random order or the order set by the flashcard author.
* Study either side of the flashcard first, quizzing yourself on the reverse side (i.e. show the answer and guess the question).
* Change the font face and font size when studying.
* Use access keys (keyboard shortcuts) to speed up the study session.
* After a study session continue by studying only those flashcards answered incorrectly.
* Use slide show mode to be automatically shown each flashcard at a set interval.
* Automatically monitor the time spent studying.
* Play a game of memory!
* Study off-line.
* Have your flashcards spoken to you by the computer
* Full members can study on your PDA.
* Full members can also use the advanced Leitner study techniques.

Visit Flash Card Exchange.