english language exchange community websites

Proven Course Teaches English Quickly with Audio, Video and Mobile Apps

Beginner and advanced levels alike will enjoy EnglishClass101, an excellent online and mobile way to learn English quickly.

EnglishClass101's fun method and modern platform immerse you in the English language, giving you just what you need to achieve your goals for travel, business, family and other needs.

EnglishClass101 is web and mobile based, giving you a custom English Learning Center anywhere. Download podcasts on your iPhone, Android, iPod Touch, iPod or any mp3 player and take them with you for practice and learning on the go.

High-Quality Content for Learning English

A key aspect to learning a language is quality content. EnglishClass101 creates a steady flow of fresh content covering everything from cultural aspects of English to tidbits about navigating in the United States, England, Ireland, Scotland, New Zealand, Australia and other English-speaking countries, plus practical information to help you get by.

Beyond Audio and Video

Engage in a combination of audio and video lessons, lesson notes and checklists, transcripts, PDFs, vocabulary training with flashcards and quizzes plus a English dictionary, grammar bank, a verb reference, social network and plenty more.

It's simple to get a free lifetime account.

Have Fun Learning English Fast

Busuu English offers English learners a dynamic combination of online lessons, language exchange and mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android.

Busuu offers many of their features for free :) This includes picture-based vocabulary training, writing exercises, reading comprehension exercises, video chat, interactive exams and a bustling community for social exchange in English.

The Busuu system allows you to keep a track record of your English studies and mark your progress as you complete each lesson. You can work through your lessons at any time, enabling you to fit your study schedule into your daily life however you choose.

Find Friends and Practice or Exchange

Finding friends is easy in the Busuu community! Quickly search and contact other English learners to practice with as well as exchange partners to share and trade with. Plus, there's a free video chat function for easy access to language exchanges right in the same interface you're using to learn.

Stay Motivated in Style

In order to keep you motivated, Busuu has created a beautiful interface which allows you to grow and visualize your own language garden as you make progress learning English. If you are interested in learning more than one language, you will have a tree for each language that sprouts and shoots to the sky as you progress through the lessons and levels. It's quite a thrill to see this grow and know it's a visual representation of your language skills!

Free English Mobile App for iOS and Android

Busuu offers free mobile apps for learning English on the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android. The free app takes you through the basics for getting around, and is especially useful while traveling.

Summary

Busuu is a language exchange community and free multimedia (image + audio) foreign language lesson archive. The site currently supports English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, Turkish, Russian and Polish and the founders of Busuu plan to add more languages as quickly as they are able.

The site is based on the Drupal framework, the same platform as Free Language, though they have taken it to quite another level altogether! Clean, crisp, fast-loading and full of fun colorful graphics that change as your language skills improve (called the Busuu Language Garden), Busuu promises to be a contender in the growing social language learning milieu.

The lessons are divided into three levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced. Each lesson has a photo/audio component along with writing practice, native speaker exchange and a review test. You can keep a track record of your studies as you complete them. All lessons are free and can be completed at anytime, letting you choose your study schedule and mark your own progress.

Finding friends is easy through the search function, so discovering practice/exchange partners is fast and simple. Busuu provides a video chat function through the site for easy access to language exchanges without needing to go outside the site or use other utilities.

Altogether a bright, cheery and user-friendly site, Busuu weilds a healthy lessons archive and growing user community. Have a look at the site tour today to find out how to begin improving your English, French, German and Spanish skills. Who knows, by the time you read this article, other languages may have been added...

Update: Babbel is now available for Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, Turkish, Indonesian and Polish along with English, French, German, Italian and Spanish!

Summary

Babbel is the bomb. Not babble or Babel but Babbel! It's a website with slick tools and a smooth interface (modeled after a video game console) geared primarily towards learning and retaining loads of vocabulary terms and key phrases through audio visual.

Summary

Palabea is a social network site for practicing, learning, teaching and otherwise communicating in foreign languages. It has a beautiful site design and its features are quite strong.

After testing thoroughly the entire user interface, I am convinced that this is one of the most solid social language learning network platforms in cyberspace. It has a clean and friendly interface, the site loads quickly and the wide variety of features were well thought-out and executed.

The features include:

• uploading and sharing audio, video, photos and documents
• managing friends and meeting new people
• creating and partcipating in virtual classrooms
• watching videolectures, reading documents and listening to podcasts from other users
• calling friends and translating on the fly
• tool for recording audio and video right through their site!

There are plenty of others, too. And the team seems to be active in developing more features and improving upon those already available.

Palabea is currently ad-free! I'm not sure what their business model is, but they've partnered with Deutsche Welle, Babylon and Café Babel. They partnered with Babylon on the widget to translate on the fly while talking with someone (or just surfing), but I am not sure exactly how they are affiliated with the other two - both of which are very cool, by the way!

The site is localized in 6 languages: Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish.

So congrats to the folks at Palabea! I know I'll be stopping in over there.

From Website

Learning a new language just became fun, easy and free.

palabea.net is an e-learning website and social community that offers opportunities to learn and practice foreign languages. It offers a wide range of tools and technologies which support its users with their learning endeavours, and allows people to communicate and learn about different cultures.

Changes in society triggered by the effects of globalization developed the need to learn and respect cultural diversity. To maintain a dialogue between people in different countries, and to forge multicultural relationships, learning foreign languages is essential. Some obstacles in learning a foreign language, including: lack of motivation and time, and high costs, but using palabea.net everyone has the opportunity to learn a foreign language and communicate with people around the world without leaving their home.

palabea.net users are able to:

- Access a portal of contents (video lessons, podcast and multimedia educational material), information on language schools, au pair opportunities and traveling abroad. More information will be added as the portal develops.

- Have online conversations in a foreign language: palabea users can easily find friends who share similar interests, and who will help them learn and practice languages. Users will be able to speak about any topics, or if they prefer, use lessons or situation games designed for to improve language skills -Practice comprehension with audio and video applications. The users can listen to podcasts in other languages or watch video lessons, which help explain grammatical aspects of the language. -Play teacher and assist others in learning their native language which allows for innovative ways in collaborative learning.

- Generate their own content, as individuals or a group. People can present themselves with information, pictures/videos. - Unlike other social networks, palabea.net offers an integrated video-chat system that appears on the page and doesn't require users to download an extra application. -palabea has created virtual classes to help users practice their written language skills. In these classes the users collaborate with documents and assist each in learning languages. These virtual classes can be created by a group of users, or if the user prefers, they can request the services of a professional language teacher.

Palabea.net complements traditional language schools rather than competing against them. It is another distinctive aspect of palabea.net, who from the outset, worked with many schools to help produce e-learning applications that are both be easy to use and effective.

Palabea.net was founded by Sebastian Schkudlara, Guido Veth and Patricia Sierra Fernandez in Berlin. The Palabea.net team is a small and international group of multilingual speakers, with three official languages: English, German and Spanish.

Visit Palabea.net