learn swedish

Best Language Learning Software?

We are asked this question quite a lot, and truthfully the answer is not simple. The fact is, a lot depends on what language you are learning and how you learn best.

That said, if you are learning English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish or Swedish, one of the very best triple-faceted combinations of an online learning platform (a "web software"), an offline desktop application and an iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad app we've come across is Babbel.

Babbel's interface is the definition of eye candy, works on any modern Web browser, loads quickly and runs solidly. The dynamic learning system reviews you on terms and phrases you've learned while seamlessly incorporating new ones on topics you select. This guarantees you'll be interested in what you're studying - and that it will be the most applicable to your specific needs and goals.

Part of the Babbel learning system involves media-rich (and user shared) virtual flash cards. The flash card stacks are organized into "packages" (groups of cards) that treat common themes (eg, youth hostels, winter sports, restaurants and eating out, fruits and vegetables, clothing, standard greetings, giving and receiving compliments, etc). With input and contributions from the users, these packages get consistently better as more contributions flow in.

Furthermore, an intelligent system organizes all the vocabulary words you've learned. You get a comprehensive overview of everything you've studied - and it signals which are your problem words so you'll know you need to practice them again. This syncs seamlessly with the Babbel Refresh desktop application as well, using your personalized Vocabulary list to calculate reminders for what's best to review next and how often. Wow - talk about helpful!

Add to all of this Babbel's social networking tools, including the ability to hook up with other users interested in sharing and exchanging language skills, and you have a dynamic Italian-education platform that covers all the bases.

Go ahead and try a Babbel lesson free and see if it works for you. You can select one of various options for your free lesson, too. Chances are you'll be up and learning in no time, making friends to share with, quizzing yourself on the go and progressing more quickly than you thought possible - online, offline and on the go.

If you're interested in our more in-depth reviews of Babbel for the particular language you are learning, have a look at the articles we've published lately:

Babbel English
Babbel French
Babbel German
Babbel Italian
Babbel Portuguese
Babbel Spanish
Babbel Swedish

And we also reviewed Babbel over two years ago - when it was in its nascent stages - for our social language learning section. View this review article with even more info here.

By the way, did you think we were going to say Rosetta Stone? Well, Babbel costs between $6.62 and $11.95 USD per month depending on your subscription option. Compare that that with a whopping $539 for a full Rosetta Stone course, and you could be using Babbel for 67+ months at that price! If you can't get ahead in 67 months using Babbel, we suggest you'd better move to a country where the language you're learning is spoken! After all, nothing can top true immersion, but using Babbel's socially interactive community is about as close as you can get without catching a plane.

Finally, what if you're learning something other than the languages Babbel has to offer? Well, we're going to address that very soon, so please subscribe to our newsletter and/or RSS feed to be the first to know.

Submitted by polyglot on Sat, 2010-05-08 23:52.

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Lang-8.com Get Free Help with your Foreign Language Writing, including Spanish, French, Chinese and Many More

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

Submitted by polyglot on Thu, 2010-07-29 23:38.

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Babbel Integrated Swedish Language Learning Website, iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad Application, Social Network, Photo Flashcards, More

Summary

Babbel combines multi-media visual and auditory learning, social networking interactivity, sound educational methodology, mobile apps (for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad - Babbel Mobile) and desktop goodies (Babbel Refresh) in a one-stop integrated platform for learning Swedish.

They've very recently expanded their platform by adding loads of new features to the Web interface as well as mobile and desktop apps to enhance your Swedish learning efforts online - and take them mobile:

Babbel Refresh: Bite-sized units catered to your individual Swedish learning program, spaced out appropriately and delivered to your via a free desktop app! (Free, works with Windows and Mac.)

Babbel Mobile: Synchronizes your Babbel account with iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, allowing you to study Swedish on your mobile device - even if you're offline! Babbel Mobile is free to download for everybody, and access to the Vocabulary is available for free for those who already are subscribers to Babbel. If you're not on Babbel, you can purchase the vocabulary as a stand alone app, which has 3000 words and phrases, for a onetime $7.99 USD.

Babbel's interface is the definition of eye candy, works on any modern Web browser, loads quickly and runs solidly. The dynamic learning system reviews you on terms and phrases you've learned while seamlessly incorporating new ones on topics you select. This guarantees you'll be interested in what you're studying - and that it will be the most applicable to your specific needs and goals.

Part of the Babbel learning system involves media-rich (and user shared) virtual flash cards. The flash card stacks are organized into "packages" (groups of cards) that treat common themes (eg, youth hostels, winter sports, restaurants and eating out, fruits and vegetables, clothing, standard greetings, giving and receiving compliments, etc). With input and contributions from the users, these packages get consistently better as more contributions flow in.

Furthermore, an intelligent system organizes all the vocabulary words you've learned. You get a comprehensive overview of everything you've studied - and it signals which are your problem words so you'll know you need to practice them again. This syncs seamlessly with the Babbel Refresh desktop application as well, using your personalized Vocabulary list to calculate reminders for what's best to review next and how often. Wow - talk about helpful!

Add to all of this Babbel's social networking tools, including the ability to hook up with other users interested in sharing and exchanging language skills, and you have a dynamic Swedish-education platform that covers all the bases.

In addition to Swedish, Babbel is available for learning Brazilian Portuguese, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

So try a Babbel lesson free and see if it works for you. You can select one of various options for your free lesson, too. Chances are you'll be up and learning in no time, making friends to share with, quizzing yourself on the go and progressing more quickly than you thought possible.

Treat yourself and have some fun learning Swedish - go Babbel!

Free or Subscription?

Let's face it: finding resource online for learning Swedish is not quite like Spanish or French - it's tough! Thus it's well worth subscribing to a paid service to truly open the doors to your virtual classroom.

Having researched and tested free and paid options extensively, we definitely say that Babbel sits right at the top of your options - it's incredibly fun and intuitive, offers online and offline solutions and is amazingly fairly priced: between $6.62 and $11.95 USD per month depending on your subscription option. (Compare that with $539 for the full Rosetta Stone Swedish course, for example. You could use Babbel for 67+ months at that price!)

For most people's needs, we recommend the 3-month option which runs $7.95 per month. It's a great way to leap ahead.

Submitted by polyglot on Wed, 2010-04-28 19:08.

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Video: How to Use the BBC Website to Learn English, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, More - Free!

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

Submitted by polyglot on Thu, 2009-10-15 10:37.

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How to Learn Languages Online for Free, Video Screencast Part 1: General Introduction

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

Submitted by polyglot on Mon, 2009-10-12 09:14.

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Swedish-Flashcards.com Free Swedish Course with Loop Flash Card System, Sentence Manager, Dictionary, RSS Feeds

Summary

Swedish-Flashcards.com is a fast-loading, useful site for Swedish learners to manage and practice vocabulary lists (words and sentences). There are many existing word and sentence lists created by other users that you can snag and use right away. You can also create your own lists and sentences on-the-fly and test yourself until you know them all. As a result, this resource works for Swedish students of all levels, beginner to advanced. The self-testing is done via built-in flashcard software that you control.

The website has an integrated dictionary that gives explanations of terms and includes examples of how these are used in real sentences. In addition, when you view a sentence, you can scroll over the words and view annotations. NB: You can copy and paste any Swedish text you want into the site's Text Analyzer and it provides you with what you see below (see grey scroll-over pop-up in image for glosses).

Something I have found incredibly useful is the Sentence of the Day email that you can subscribe to on the site. This sends a different sentence every day and is complete with a translation of the sentence, plus a link to hear a native speaker say the sentence.

If you upgrade to a premuim membership (~$5/month) you can also hear audio for the sentence. In fact, the only thing you cannot do without a membership is hear the audio on the site. Other than that, it is full-featured and incredibly quick and helpful for learning Swedish through memorizing words/sentences and their constituents.

Bravo Oliver for this excellent site and keep up the great work!

From Website

Study Swedish from Home

Introduction

Since our first flashcard website started in 2005 a lot of time has been invested to design an efficient system which enables you to learn a new language in the shortest time possible. Make sure to read this introduction carefully so you understand how the system works. Once you know how this website works and you use it regularly it will become an important tool to learn Swedish. Ideally make time each day for 2 or 3 sessions a day, each lasting about 10 - 15 minutes.

Once you have created your own account you can set up your own word list. You can either add words manually or automatically to your own word list.

Automatic Mode

If you choose this mode then the system will choose random words for you to practice. Within the "Automatic Mode" there are two different choices. The first is "completely random words" and the second is "frequent words first". Obviously if you are a beginner you should focus on those frequent words first, if you chose the level "Complete Newbie", "Basic" or "Intermediate" the system will just do that. If you chose the level "Upper Intermediate" or "Advanced" completely random words will be added to your word list.

Manual Mode

If you would like more control over which words you learn switch to the "Manual Mode". In this mode you choose which words you want to learn and not the system. There are a few ways to add words manually. The first is to use the search function in the navigation bar on the left-hand side. You can search for Swedish or English words. On the result page every found word has an "Add Word" link next to it. Click it to add this word to your personal list. After you click it the link text will change to "Remove Word", so you can immediately remove the word from your list if you have added it by mistake.

The second way to add words manually is to click the link "Add new Words" in the navigation. This will show random words for you to add.

Finally you can add words by clicking on "Public Word Lists". These public lists normally have a common theme, like "Animals", "Computer", "Fruits", etc. You can either pick some words of these public lists or copy the whole list.

By default you are in the "Automatic Mode". If you do not want to add words automatically you can change this in the settings. In the "Automatic Mode" you can also add words manually.

The Loop

The main problem of learning new words is that over time word lists grow very big. This means that the learner feels overwhelmed and the time between word repetitions becomes too long. To solve this problem a so-called "Loop" is used.

The Loop consists of a subset of only 30 words out of your word list. This means you can concentrate on a few words only, until you have memorized them properly. To keep a flashcard in the loop click on the "Loop" button.

If you have become familiar with a new word which is in the Loop click on "1 day", "7 days", "30 days" etc. Which means that the word will be shown only after the indicated time has passed. If you know a word very well click on "30 Days" or "3 Months" so the word will be shown only after a long time. After the indicated time has passed the word will be put into the Queue.

Once you remove a word from the Loop another one will be put in the Loop. The system will first check if there are any words in the "Queue". If the Queue is empty and you are in "Automatic Mode" the system will choose a new word for you and add it to your word list and into the Loop. If you are in the "Manual Mode" the system will tell you that you need to add more words in order to continue. It is important not to let the queue grow too big, otherwise the system will become increasingly inefficient. Your every day task is to clear the queue and add 5 to 10 new words to your list.

If you click "Remove" then the word will be removed from your word list. "Block" will do the same except that it will also prevent the word from coming back in the "Automatic Mode" where the system chooses words for you. By default there are 30 words in the loop. You can change the number of words in the loop in the settings.

Word Lists

If the Loop system sounds too complicated to you, then you can also set up simple word lists. To do this click on "[Manage Lists]" in the navigation. Then click on "[Add List]" to create a new list. If you want to share this word list with other users select the box "Public List". If you want to immediately add new words to this list select "Also Activate". You can create as many lists as you want. In the navigation bar you can always see which list is active at the moment. Words will be added to the currently active list.