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

FSI is an acronym for the Foreign Service Institute, "the (US) Federal Government's primary training institution for officers and support personnel of the U.S. foreign affairs community".

Over the years, the FSI has researched, designed and taught language courses to Foreign Service staff and diplomats. These courses are now available and licensed to the Public Domain.

FSI-Language-Courses.com (and .net) is a sweet and simple website that provides users with the ability to view and download the Foreign Service Institute's courses for 31+ languages. The content is provided by individuals donating time and resources in an overall effort to provide quality languages-learning materials for free worldwide.

Sounds good to me. :)

In the Portuguese section of the site, there are currently two volumes with text and audio of the Portuguese Programmatic Course. This course gives total beginners a solid and useful introduction to practical situations that you actually encounter in your average day while traveling, studying or working in Portugal or Brazil. There is also a course of learning Portuguese for folks who already know Spanish.

From Website

Welcome to fsi-language-courses.com, the home for language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute. These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain.

This site is dedicated to making these language courses freely available in an electronic format. This site is not affiliated in any way with any government entity; it is an independent, non-profit effort to foster the learning of worldwide languages. Courses here are made available through the private efforts of individuals who are donating their time and resources to provide quality materials for language learning.

Visit FSI-Language-Courses.com Portuguese Courses.

Summary

It's difficult to "summarize" the booming expansion that has occurred with the Kaufmann crew since "The Linguist" appeared on Free Language 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 PortugueseLingQ, a roughly weekly podcast with mp3 audio content for Portuguese language learners. Transcripts of the podcasts are available through LingQ.

From Website

What is PortugueseLingQ?

First of all, the name itself (which is pronounced Portuguese Link) needs a little explaining. The first part, “Portuguese”, is fairly obvious since we teach Portuguese. 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 PortugueseLingQ...

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

Our podcasts may contain interviews, articles, or audiobook excerpts but are most often just general conversations in Portuguese. 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 PortugueseLingQ.com

Subscribe

Subscribe to PortugueseLingQ Podcast.
Subscribe to PortugueseLingQ Podcast via iTunes.

LingQ Podcast Network

EnglishLingQ
FrenchLingQ
GermanLingQ
JapaneseLingQ
PortugueseLingQ
RussianLingQ
SpanishLingQ
SwedishLingQ

Summary

Rosetta Stone has consistently spent millions trying to place itself at the top of the list of proprietary methods. They claim it's intuitive, that it "allows you to learn a foreign language like you learned your native language". They've marketed effectively fancy themselves an international standard for diplomats, companies and organizations wishing to prepare for working and living abroad.

Software Overview

This software is proprietary and thus is no longer recommended by Free Language.

Summary

This is an excellent, high-quality podcast from the University of Texas for learners of Brazilian Portuguese - especially those that speak or have studied Spanish.

The lessons are well-designed by professors and the material is quite helpful.

Bravo UT!

From Website

Our podcasts are designed to help those who are learning Portuguese, especially if you have a previous background in Spanish. First, you find some pronunciation podcasts that are built around dialogs illustrating specific sound differences. You can also download pdf transcripts and participate in a discussion blog for clarification of questions.

Next, you find grammar podcasts that focus on grammatical differences between Spanish and Portuguese. All of the lessons are also built around some cultural aspect that makes Brazil so awesome.

Try it out, and join our Brazilpod community. There are no registration fees or restrictions, just great chances to learn more Portuguese.

Visit Tá Falado Podcast.

Subscribe

Subscribe to Tá Falado Podcast.
Subscribe to Tá Falado Podcast via iTunes.