Summary

Lang-8 is a free, unique and popular website for learners of many languages to come together and correct one another's writing. Native speakers review writing submitted by learners who wish to improve. You can help and be helped!

The free tools provided in the interface are straightforward and tuned in such a way that it's quite easy to correct another user's writing, as well as to see exactly how others have corrected yours.

Lang-8's interface also provides social tools for interacting amongst users, including a way to find language matches to suit your needs.

Lang-8 has a large user community, coming from over 180 countries around the world, and together they provide access to help in some of the more exotic languages for which it's often hard to find resources, much less free help. Yes, there really are plenty of people out there willing to help you improve your writing for free! In turn, you can choose to help others as well.

Also available is a mobile version of the website.

From Website

Real Interactions

Learn from real native speakers excited to help you with the language that you are learning.

International Community

Community members from all over the world make Lang-8 a fun, social experience.

Keep Track

Tag and keep track of the things you learn from native speakers. Refer back and remember!

See Results

By using Lang-8 you will get better, make friends, and see real results. There’s no better help than native speakers.

Lang-8 Intro Video

Visit Lang-8.com

Summary

From beginner to advanced levels, ChinesePod101.com is an excellent, all-around online environment for learning Chinese. The Pod101 platform, method and technology provide the necessary tools to get you immersed in the Chinese language and achieve the goals you desire and/or require.

Since ChinesePod101.com is web-based, you can access your personal Chinese 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 ChinesePod101.com has this, and a steady flow of it. This constant flow of fresh content regards cultural aspects of Chinese you will want to know, interesting tidbits about navigating in Chinese society (whether on vacation or living abroad), practical information about getting by and much more.

Your Chinese Learning Center brings together audio podcast lessons, lesson notes and checklists, transcripts, PDFs, video lessons, vocabulary training with flashcards and quizzes plus a Chinese 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 ChinesePod101.com, our goal is to make learning the Chinese 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 Chinese is heavily stressed, and our team role plays various situations to demonstrate the proper form of Chinese to use when speaking with friends, customers, executives, and so-on. Knowing the proper form to use separates good speakers from great speakers.

ChinesePod101.com was developed with the hope of showing the world how fun and easy learning Chinese can be. Here at ChinesePod101.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 Chinese 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 Chinese 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

ChinesePod101.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 Chinese 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…

ChinesePod101.com aims to have you speaking Chinese 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 ChinesePod101.com are put together, this program provides students of Chinese 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 Chinese 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 Chinese on Demand. Chinese lessons wherever you may be.

ChinesePod101.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 Chinese, and Chinese only...

Just Chinese! All we do is Chinese. ChinesePod101.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 ChinesePod101.com we pride ourselves on developing a system that’s only about the Chinese language and Chinese 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! ChinesePod101.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 Chinese to the next level.

Visit ChinesePod101.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

Hailing from Beijing, Popup Chinese offers refreshing, high-quality audio podcast lessons for Mandarin Chinese learners: free! Carefully planned and well-recorded, these lessons are professional, useful and fun. The Popup Chinese team is young, vibrant and eager to guide Chinese learners to true fluency in the language.

Popup Chinese is truly one of the most exciting language podcast resources to hit the scene for any language! In addition to offering free audio lessons for listening and download, they also provide a host of amazinly powerful free software tools including a user-editable English-Chinese-Pinyin dictionary, an excellent Chinese text annotator, a steady flow of annotated news in Mandarin Chinese and a Firefox English-Chinese-Pinyin dictionary plugin. And for those serious about speaking Chinese, a reasonable paid upgrade that includes lesson transcripts, supplemental exercises, a personalized vocabulary training software tool and access to a vibrant user community.

All in all, the Popup Chinese team and user community are incredibly dedicated and helpful! Get started (or keep learning!) now by immersing yourself with this talented, friendly and active Mandarin Chinese learning website: Popup Chinese

From Website

An Institution in Chinese Learning...

Popup Chinese dates back to 2001, when work on our Chinese learning technology began at the University of California, Berkeley. Our service developed rapidly during the SARS crisis in 2003 with the first web-based edition of our distinctive popup annotator going online later that year, hosted from a budget server based in Beijing.

Over the next few years, our learning systems attracted a following among bilingual translators. We began to release data for use by the open source community, and eventually run ancilliary reference services including NewsinChinese, and the Adso Textbook project. By late 2006 our textbook portal was garnering rave reviews as the premiere site for students with a serious interest in advanced mandarin acquisition.

Popup Chinese is our latest step forward, and an effort to bring the same excellence in language acquisition to students at earlier stages in the learning process. From our hutong in downtown Beijing, we produce materials that give foreign speakers the confidence to engage with China in mandarin: the language of the 21st century.

We encourage you to subscribe to the site and accelerate your learning. In addition to our basic subscriptions, we're delighted to offer custom learning packages to individuals and companies with unique training needs.

Visit Popup Chinese.

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.