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.

Free 6-Day Chinese Course!

YES! I want to claim my free instant access to the Rocket Chinese 6 day Learn Chinese course ($27 value).

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Summary

The Rocket Chinese product from Rocket Languages has proved to be a highly successful, fun! and fast method for beginners to learn the Chinese language. The Rocket Languages team has designed a multi-faceted course including extensive audio lessons, software and learning games, grammar lessons with audio clips and a member's forum for help on demand.

As with any Rocket Languages product, try it out and if you don't like the results, you can get all your cash back for 60 days after you place an order. No risk there, and the potential to truly learn a new language!

From Website

Rocket Chinese is designed to be the easiest to follow system for learning how to speak Chinese available. It is an interactive course that makes you want to study. Also, it's practical. You'll discover exactly what to say in virtually all situations.

With Rocket Chinese, you are going to learn Chinese rapidly, effectively, and easily. You are going to be able to speak at a restaurant, at an airport, with new friends...

With the Rocket Languages Chinese Program you get:

A Rocket Languages Interactive Audio Course that prompts you to speak Chinese in a conversational and friendly way so that the words just stick in your mind! Learn a language the easy way!

Mega Software Learning Games that are specifically designed to increase your vocabulary and understanding of Chinese and allow you to have fun in the process!

Fully illustrated and easy-to-follow Grammar Lessons, for those of you who love to know how Chinese works. Most of these come with embedded audio clips in the lessons so that you can hear exactly how the words are pronounced!

If you have any questions, you can either email us or post a message on our Members Only Learners Forums, where our team of language experts and fellow enthusiasts will respond to your needs. With every Premium order you get unlimited and full access to our Forum - imagine having a teacher, virtually "on call" 24 hours a day!

And of course all Rocket Languages products are backed by a 60 Day 100% Money Back Guarantee. We're that confident, and it's that simple.

Rocket Languages will teach you how to speak Chinese naturally, so you can read, write, speak, and understand the language as though you have lived there all your life - these are truly cutting-edge multimedia courses!

Find out more about Rocket Chinese.

Summary

Verbix is "an independent non-profit organization that aims to promote and protect linguistic diversity." The tools on their site "contain verb conjugations for hundreds of languages, ranging from national and international languages to regional and even extinct languages."

There are four main things to bring your attention to in this article:

1) WebVerbix, a great free online verb conjugator for over eighty languages.

2) WikiVerb, a wiki site dedicated to languages, verbs, and verb conjugation.

3) FreeVerbix, a freeware version of the Verbix Windows software which bumps the number of available languages to above one hundred.

4) The Verbix website, where all three of the above and more (including the $40 paid version of Verbix 2008 for Windows) are available. Your purchase will support the non-profit group and expand the Verbix non-profit organization and web presence.

Also of import is the list of supported languages for the above-mentioned free and commercial products and online services.

The free Verbix stuff (WebVerbix, FreeVerbix and WikiVerb) provides plenty to work with for language learners and educators alike. The free online version works great for conjugating an enormous amount of verbs instantly.

From Website

UNESCO, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Verbix is an independent non-profit organization that aims to promote and protect linguistic diversity [UNESCO Observatory: Multilingualism]. This site contains verb conjugations for hundreds of languages, ranging from national and international languages to regional and even extinct languages.

FreeVerbix 7.3 is a universal Verb Conjugator that shows verb inflections in 100+ languages. It is based on Verbix language extension technology, so after installation of Verbix you can easily install any language extension to add more languages in Verbix.

WebVerbix is a free on-line verb conjugator. It contains a subset of Verbix for Windows features.

WikiVerb is a site dedicated to languages, verbs, and verb conjugation. It's not going to be a copy of information available in WikiPedia, but it will focus in verb conjugation. It won't replace www.verbix.com either, but it includes information and languages that are not available there.

Visit Verbix.com

Download Language Freeware

UPDATE: Byki now available for 74 languages! See list below.

Byki is freeware for learning [74] languages, including many less-taught languages for which learning materials are hard to find, such as Georgian, Mongolian and Icelandic. This is a gold mine for folks interested in learning the basics of over [seventy] languages - with no budget!

Along with the freeware, learners have free access to the Byki user community where other users share vocabulary lists for all the languages, instantly providing you with loads of new, free content.

They also offer a commercial upgrade for $49 USD, reasonable, and you get lots of extras with the upgrade.

The free version has been used both by folks at Free Language and friends of those folks. Beginners especially seem to get a lot out of this software.

Have a look!

Current Languages Available

Afrikaans, Albanian, Altai, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Belorussian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Buriat, Chechen, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malay, Mirandese, Mongolian, Norwegian, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (European), Romanian, Russian, Scottish, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog (Filipino), Tajiki, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen, Tuvan, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese and Zulu.

The folks at Byki are working hard to make more languages available in the near future.

Update from Byki!

As of September 5th, 2008, we’ve launched a whole new version of Byki (the artist formerly known as Before You Know It) with several new languages, and a beautiful new site. Be sure to check out the new ListCentral, with profile avatars). The new Byki has lots of great new stuff including new learning games and the new Byki blog.

Visit www.Byki.com

Summary

TheChineseReader is an very useful website for people learning to read Mandarin Chinese. You can paste in any text in Mandarin and the website will use a large variety of tools (see Resources & Credits below) to transform the text into clickable annotations.

This is wonderful for anyone having difficulty with a Chinese text and wanting that extra bit of help. It could also give some idea to people who know no Mandarin (or read no Mandarin) and are attempting to understand a website written in Chinese characters.

Excellent tool - many thanks Adam!

From Website

About the Reader

This project came about in response to the continually increasing number of english-speakers learning chinese. After many years studying chinese myself, and seeing friends do likewise, there were a number of tedious functions I came to feel a computer was better suited to do. Some hair-pulling web-development later, the TheChineseReader™ (TCR) was born.

The feautures of this site are constantly under development, though the speed of that development may not be all too impressive. If you have suggestions for fixes, new features, or other general feedback & inquiries, please contact feedback@thechinesereader.com

TCR is not a commercial site per se, though we are supported by sponsored advertisements, which help cover the costs of hosting, development, and maintenance. Thanks for understanding.

About the Creator

My name is Adam. I am a recent graduate of UPenn, now living in San Francisco. I work for a Management Consultancy, which leaves not that much time to work on this site. =) But I'll try to keep it up to date and add features when time permits.

Resources & Credits

The reader would not function very well without the unsung contributions of all those behind the technologies and data-resources used in this site—particularly those in the open-source community. I would like to take a moment to acknowledge them:

Unihan Database: this database provides the foundation for all of the single character entries and cantonese functionality. It is being used here under the GNU license, and is available at the Unicode website.

CeDict Database: this database proides the data behind all multi-character lookups. An incredible amount of work has gone into this project, and I applaud the people who make it possible. It is being used here under the GNU license, and is available at the Cedict website.

Ruby On Rails: the entire site is coded in the Ruby On Rails (RoR) framework. RoR is a web-application development paradigm that is 100% open-source, and in this developers opinion, the best in class. Again, profuse thanks to those who enable this and so many other sites to be realized through their efforts.

MySQL: alongside the RoR, this site is powered by a MySQL database. MySQL is arguably the most powerful open-source relational-DB package in the world. And it has contributed more than its fair share to web-apps everywhere.

Wenlin Software: Wenlin (文林) is a piece of commerical software whose aid to chinese-learners is almost unquantifiable. I include it in the credits here because thier mouse-over dictionary lookup is the rightful inspiration for the reader's core functionality.

Visit TheChineseReader.com