Summary

From beginner to advanced levels, ItalianPod101.com is an excellent, all-around online environment for learning Italian. The Pod101 platform, method and technology provide the necessary tools to get you immersed in the Italian language and achieve the goals you desire and/or require.

Since ItalianPod101.com is web-based, you can access your personal Italian Learning Center from anywhere, and it's really easy to download the podcasts and put them on your mp3 player (iPod, Zune, etc) or mobile phone to take them with you for practice and learning on the go.

One of the most important things when learning a language is good content - and ItalianPod101.com has this, and a steady flow of it. This constant flow of fresh content regards cultural aspects of Italian you will want to know, interesting tidbits about navigating in Italian society (whether on vacation or living abroad), practical information about getting by and much more.

Your Italian Learning Center brings together audio podcast lessons, lesson notes and checklists, transcripts, PDFs, video lessons, vocabulary training with flashcards and quizzes plus a Italian dictionary, grammar bank, a verb reference and plenty more.

And if you enjoy asking questions and learning from and helping other learners, a forum is available for all users.

It's simple to try it for free and upgrade if it works for you.

From Website

At ItalianPod101.com, our goal is to make learning the Italian language easy and fun, while also incorporating culture and current issues into our lessons. We believe that the more you speak, the quicker you learn, so we have designed our program to get you speaking right away. Situational Italian is heavily stressed, and our team role plays various situations to demonstrate the proper form of Italian to use when speaking with friends, customers, executives, and so-on. Knowing the proper form to use separates good speakers from great speakers.

ItalianPod101.com was developed with the hope of showing the world how fun and easy learning Italian can be. Here at ItalianPod101.com, we truly believe that learning can be fun, while at the same time convenient. We know how busy you are and that each day brings unexpected surprises. That is exactly why we bring the lessons to you and let you decide when they start.

Our innovative, fun, and easy to use language learning system is designed to get you speaking and interacting from the very first lesson. Learn Italian at your own convenience and pace with short, effective, fun daily lessons and a comprehensive, state-of-the-art Learning Center that provides you with the tools to take your Italian to the next level! Our interactive learning system consists of free daily audio podcast lessons, accompanying PDF materials, a Premium Learning Center, and a vibrant user community.

Our Method

ItalianPod101.com offers a unique learning experience that cannot be found in conventional classrooms. In addition to offering lessons that can be completed on your own time, we approve all of the content we release through a government certified Italian teacher. Here are just a few of the revolutionary advantages of our method:

Exposure to native speakers and many different kinds of voices and speaking styles…

ItalianPod101.com aims to have you speaking Italian after just one lesson! Our lessons focus on pronunciation and listening comprehension, so that you can start practicing what you learn from our professional teachers. Inside the PDF you will find the necessary tools for reading comprehension, and thorough explanations of phrases and key grammar points, in addition to segments on cultural insight. To address speaking practice, we have state-of-the-art software to allow you to record your own voice so you can compare your pronunciation to our teachers and continue to refine your speaking skills.

When all the aspects of ItalianPod101.com are put together, this program provides students of Italian with ultimate self-study learning course. In addition, we often provide conversations between three people to more closely simulate real-life situations.

Fresh, up-to-date content...

Many Italian teachers who live overseas have been out of the country for a long period of time and can be “out of the loop” on current words, culture, etc. This is another major gap that we fill. Lessons are carefully crafted to include current events, words, celebrities, and so-on. This is very dynamic content.

Borderless education on-demand...

We also fill a definite demand in remote locations. Our lessons provide you with a mobile classroom, as we bring you Italian on Demand. Italian lessons wherever you may be.

ItalianPod101.com offers our listeners a unique learning experience that delivers cutting-edge, dynamic content to be accessed at your convenience. With the inclusion of our lesson notes and Learning Center, we offer a full solution that provides the material, guidance, exercises, and testing to really make the knowledge your own. And it doesn’t even stop there - our vibrant and extremely helpful community provide each other not only quick answers to questions, but also give each other a sense of encouragement and motivation that is often lacking.

We focus on Italian, and Italian only...

Just Italian! All we do is Italian. ItalianPod101.com is not a generic package language learning course, such as some of the other big name language learning programs out there. Many other programs “scale” their solutions across several languages, simply recycling the same material over and over - the same pictures, the same conversations, just in a different language. But each language is unique, and at ItalianPod101.com we pride ourselves on developing a system that’s only about the Italian language and Italian culture!

One stop studying...

Have you ever found yourself lost on the information highway? Sometimes it’s like trying to drink from a fire hose! Hundreds of bookmarks, all with varying levels of quality and credibility. You finally find a great site, but it only updates once a year! ItalianPod101.com offers users one stop studying. The learning center has been carefully designed to provide you with the resources you will need to take your Italian to the next level.

Visit ItalianPod101.com.

Summary

The BBC is such an amazing resource for learning languages online for free that we've done a 6-minute video showing how you can effectively use this resource to learn at least the basics of 36+ languages.

BBC offers materials for the following languages: Albanian, Basque, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian (FYROM), Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian

Enjoy and please leave comments to help us focus our efforts!

Screencast Video

Helpful Links for this Screencast

http://freelanguage.org/learn/bbc
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/english
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/german
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/greek
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/italian
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/portuguese
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/quickfix

Summary

This is our first humble effort to disseminate much of the good info found on this website via screencast videos that make it easy to get a picture of learning languages online for free while kicking back, watching and soaking it up rather than reading through loads of material.

With this video we offer a 10-minute intro to useful sites for learning languages online for free. The web tour covers essential resources for vocabulary, grammar, dictionaries, translation, verb conjugation, language exchange and more.

We have started a channel on YouTube for these screencasts: http://www.youtube.com/user/freelanguageorg - you can help us a lot by rating and commenting on these videos on YouTube

Please let us know what you would like to see in future videos, too. We have a series planned and will be releasing them here frequently - your input will be valued and appreciated!

Screencast Video

Links in this Screencast

http://quizlet.com
http://www.transparent.com/wotd
http://lingro.com
http://www.gutenberg.org
http://wikibooks.org
http://www.busuu.com
http://www.babbel.com
http://www.myhappyplanet.com
http://palabea.net
http://www.reverso.com
http://www.wordreference.com
http://www.google.com/translate
http://www.verbix.com
http://freelanguage.org/the-big-list

Summary

Wikibooks.org is a community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. The Wikibook's Languages of Europe category can serve, for the language learner, educator and enthusiast, as an enormous doorway into the many European languages, both living and historical.

The European subcontinent has birthed and/or attracted an enormous variety of languages from many sub-branches of what linguists call the Indo-European languages.

Below you'll find direct links to a wide variety of European language open-content textbooks. These are free and open source, for everyone to use and benefit from. And collaborate on - especially language educators who have the knowledge to share with all through this open medium.

To boot, Wikibooks.org itself is available in a wide range of world languages!

From Wikibooks.org

Wikibooks Category: Languages of Europe

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

These language books concern Languages of Europe. See also Subject:Languages of Europe.

European Languages with Books or Pages

Albanian, Aragonese, Armenian, Austrian, Basque, Belarusian, Breton, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chechen, Croatian, Danish, Galician, Gothic, Greenlandic, High Icelandic, Hungarian, Høgnorsk, Icelandic, Insubric, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Leonese, Lowland Scots, Macedonian, Manx, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Old Church Slavonic, Polish, Provençal, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovene, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Welsh

This may be incomplete when you read this. Please check the Languages of Europe page for the latest content.

European Language Wikibooks Subcategories

Dutch language
English language
Finnish language
French language
German language
Greek language
Latin language
Lithuanian language
Portuguese language
Scottish Gaelic language
Spanish language
Yiddish language

Visit Wikibooks.org on Languages of Europe.
Wikipedia.org also has a category on Languages of Europe.

Summary

This (lengthy) article brings together a pile of Free Software (GNU GPL'd as Public Domain), freeware and shareware for language learning and reference for Mac OS X.

Software descriptions are taken from Apple Downloads. We will be adding more GPL applications soon.