Summary

Quizlet.com is a great website for effectively learning vocabulary, for languages and anything else! For a quick video on how the whole thing works, check out the demo video. Cool fact: It was started by a 15-year-old high school student!

Basically, you can add and share vocabulary lists, make them public, private or share only with certain groups. Once you have them in the system (or you find an existing set you want to study), you can choose between several options for learning/familiarizing and self-assessment.

The site is slick, fast and has lots of active users. It's really a cool place to learn anything from the Greek Alphabet to TOEFL and SAT vocabulary and plenty more.

There are already gobs of lists available on the site - so many that individual attention is being brought to amazing collections available on the site, such as the HSK Test Vocabulary Preparation Pack and more.

So take a look at Quizlet when you get the chance. It's likely that content already exists for what you need to study! I have added this to all the language sections even though there are not vocabulary stacks yet for all of these. Reason being you can use the site to create any vocabulary lists you want - it's wide open!

From Website

The Quizlet Story

For lack of a professional writer working for Quizlet, here are some ramblings from me, Andrew Sutherland, creator of Quizlet, president of Brainflare, web developer, and high school student.

Quizlet is how I occupy my free time and even some of my non-free time. My mission for Quizlet is to make learning vocabulary not a chore. I know a lot of teachers assign vocabulary to students, but few students actually "absorb" words into their vocabularies after they take their test. Which kind of defeats the purpose, right? So Quizlet is my response - it aims to make learning fun, thus make learning effective. At the very least, it can help students do better on quizzes and tests even if they don't fully "absorb" their words.

I started Quizlet in October 2005, back when I was a mere 15-year-old (human years). I had just received a list of 111 French Animals to memorize from my magnanimous French teacher. I was puttering along with my dad with some call-and-response type quizzing. "Man, I love doing this" was NOT what I was thinking. So I put my thinking cap on, and the first line of code for Quizlet was written that night. Of course, that code was all deleted when I thought about what Quizlet would be. You really should plan first.

Quizlet is a shoestring operation. For its first 420 days, it was the work of only myself. I did all the designing, programming, debugging, and perfecting. The project had no product managers, no marketers, and no venture capitalists. It was just me and my testers. Recently I've realized some things are out of my field of expertise (I'm not a lawyer, for example). So there are a few other people involved these days.

Quizlet is free and will remain free to all users. The current plan is to offer targeted advertising on the non-studying pages. I'm hoping to make some deals with some educational and test-prep companies and perhaps some universities. If you're interested in advertising to my userbase of highly-motivated high-school and college students, shoot me a note (see above right).

Let's see, what haven't I covered? Ahh, the name Quizlet comes from Quizlette, the name of the "little" quizzes my French teacher gives. She could have charged royalties, but that just wouldn't be right…

And because you really want to know, I made Quizlet using only the finest ingredients:

PHP
MySQL
Apache
Mootools Thanks Valerio!
XHTML, CSS, Javascript, JSON, etc etc…

Visit Quizlet.com

Summary

It's difficult to "summarize" the booming expansion that has occurred with the Kaufmann crew since "The Linguist" appeared on Free Language over a year ago. That is why Free Language has numerous articles on the various websites and resources available through multilinguist Steve Kaufmann's web entelechy, including the many LinqQ [liŋk] podcasts, the LingQ method, revisiting The Linguist on Language and why not throw in a little thelinguist.com love, too. :)

This particular podcast is JapaneseLingQ, a roughly weekly podcast with mp3 audio content for Japanese language learners. Transcripts of the podcasts are available through LingQ.

From Website

What is JapaneseLingQ?

First of all, the name itself (which is pronounced Japanese Link) needs a little explaining. The first part, “Japanese”, is fairly obvious since we teach Japanese. LingQ is the name of our online learning system which you can find at LingQ.com. At LingQ you’ll study many different languages in a fun, community atmosphere. The “Ling” in LingQ comes from TheLinguist.com the people behind LingQ. Lastly, the “Q” is important because it forms the speech bubble in our logo and throughout our site and because it makes “lingq” sound like “link” (we think!) which is what our system does for you.

At JapaneseLingQ...

. we LingQ you to a world of real Japanese content
. we LingQ you to our revolutionary learning tools
. we LingQ you to a community of fellow Japanese learners

Our podcasts may contain interviews, articles, or audiobook excerpts but are most often just general conversations in Japanese. We will usually talk about topics of general interest. Please do send us feedback and topic requests. We’re always happy to hear from you.

After you listen to the podcast, sign up for a free account at LingQ (l-i-n-g-q.com) and study the full transcript using LingQ's revolutionary learning tools.

At LingQ, you may also want to submit writing for correction or join live 1 on 1 and group discussions with our tutors. Plus you will find thousands more podcasts with transcript. Come and find out what LingQ is all about!

Of course, even if you don’t decide to become a member, you can continue listening to the podcasts as long as you like.

Visit JapaneseLingQ.com

Subscribe

Subscribe to JapaneseLingQ Podcast.
Subscribe to JapaneseLingQ Podcast via iTunes.

LingQ Podcast Network

EnglishLingQ
FrenchLingQ
GermanLingQ
JapaneseLingQ
PortugueseLingQ
RussianLingQ
SpanishLingQ
SwedishLingQ

Summary

MIT has joined a growing list of universities worldwide in the OCW (OpenCourseWare) Consortium. An OpenCourseWare is "a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses".

Of interest to language learners is MIT's Foreign Languages and Literatures Department on the MIT OpenCourseWare website. While courses in this department range from "Communicating Across Cultures" and "Japanese Literature and Cinema" to "Topics in South Asian Literature and Culture" and "Expository Writing for Bilingual Students", they do also include specific language education courses. Currently at ocw.mit.edu, OpenCourseWares are available for learning the French, German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish languages.

What makes these truly "free and open" to the general public is the Creative Commons license under which these OpenCourseWares are licensed: The Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike 3.0 License. In a nutshell, this license gives the public freedom to share, copy, distribute, display and make derivative works of the courses as long as they give proper attribution, do not use it for commercial purposes and "share alike" (under the same license) any new changes or improvements.

This is an exciting project to see! In time, free and "OpenCourseWares" should be available for learning all the world's major languages and, I hope, at least some of the minority languages as well. Bravo MIT and the OCW Consortium!

From Website

MIT OpenCourseWare is an idea—and an ideal—developed, supported, and embraced by the MIT faculty, who share the Institute's mission to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship to best serve the nation and the world. In 1999 the Faculty considered how to take best advantage of the Internet to advance education, and in 2000 proposed OCW. The rest is our history...

Link

Visit the MIT OpenCourseWare Foreign Languages and Literatures Department.

Summary

This is a cute and funny podcast where a father and son have a dialog in which they translate funny phrases into English and Japanese.

I have added this in the Learn English as well as the Learn Japanese sections since it can be entertaining to students of both languages.

From Website

I’m an American who has been living in Japan since 1990. My other podcast, Herro Flom Japan, is listened to by hundreds of very nice people around the world. I work in Tokyo but live in Koga, Ibaraki Prefecture.

Tony is my 10 year old son. He likes video games, playing with his friends and his little brother Andy, dodge ball, card-based games and saying anything with the word “poop” in it.

Tony and I like to play a game where one of us says something totally insane and ridiculous in our own native language, and the other has to translate it. This is us, having fun with silly phrases. Caution: Podcasts may contain any of the following words in Japanese and/or English: booger, fart, dingleberry, poop, buttface or wee-wee. (Well, probably not wee-wee.)

Visit the Japlish Podcast.

Subscribe

Subscribe to the Japlish Podcast.
Subscribe to the Japlish Podcast via iTunes.

From Website

Want to learn how to use Sura-Sura Kanji Quizzer? It's easy!

Step 1: Select Kanji

Sura-Sura Kanji Quizzer has hundreds of kanji to display, but usually you'll only want to see a few at a time. Use the Select Kanji section to activate the kanji you'd like to quiz from. If you haven't yet created an account and logged in, you will be given an opportunity to do so.

Several different selection methods are available to help you find the ones you want. You can select by chapter, by difficulty, or by active status. (An active kanji is one that the quizzer might display.) Selecting by active status is useful if you want to activate or deactivate all kanji.

Javascript should be enabled on your web browser for the selection page to work properly. The first time you visit the page, it may take awhile to download all the images, but it will be faster on subsequent visits.

Step 2: Use the Quizzer

The Quizzer section displays kanji from your active list in a random order. Only the information you want to see is displayed. You can move your mouse over the hidden information to reveal it.

If you think you've mastered the displayed kanji, click the "Success" button to deactivate it. (You can always reactivate it later.) If you weren't able to easily remember the hidden information, keep the kanji active by clicking the "Keep Trying" button.

Step 3: Repeat!

Once you've deactivated all your active kanji using the quizzer, pat yourself on the back for a job well done. You'll probably want to try again later to make sure that you really know them all.

Comments

An excellent site for all of your online Kanji practicing needs, this resource is clean, well-designed and incredibly useful.

Visit KanjiQuizzer.com