Best Language Learning Software?

There is no best language learning software. Linguistic needs and motivations vary widely. A wide variety of high-quality resources, tools and exposure empowers language learners to be successful in their goals.

Exposure alone to these tools is not the whole picture. There's a motivation, some kind of reason, behind the effort required to truly achieve. This is where you'll find the reason to keep it up, stay learning and move toward personal language goals.

Much also depends on what language you are learning and how you learn best.

These are part of the factors that make up your personal language profile. If you learn about yourself a little, you can know exactly which resources will be most helpful in your individual case.

Follow our News, Twitter, Fbook, YouTube and RSS for all kinds of goodies about language, specifically how to learn and teach more effectively. More successfully.

Mobile

Babbel

Babbel offers Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Indonesian, Dutch, Swedish and English. Straight out of Berlin, they use a combination of online learning platform, offline desktop application and iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch apps.

Babbel's interface works on any modern Web browser, loads quickly and runs solidly. The system reviews you on terms and phrases you've learned while seamlessly incorporating new ones on topics you select. In this way you can weild it for your specific needs.

An intelligent system organizes the materials you learn, gives you a comprehensive overview and signals areas for practice. This syncs seamlessly with the Babbel Refresh desktop application as well, for personal vocabulary list reminders.

Busuu

Busuu offers Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Turkish and English.

Clean, crisp, fast-loading and full of fun colorful graphics that change as your language skills improve (called the Busuu Language Garden), Busuu is a strong social language resource with mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android.

The lessons are divided into three levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced. Each lesson has a photo/audio component along with writing practice, native speaker exchange and a review test. You can keep a track record of your studies as you complete them.

Busuu weilds a healthy lessons archive and active user community. Finding potenial exhange partners through the search function is quick and free. Plus the trees are awesome!

Praxis Language Podcasts

The Praxis Language podcast line offers a content-driven social platform for learning foreign languages. Currently they offer Spanish, Chinese, English, French and Italian.

Praxis Language's podcasts and community are open to users for free. Subscriptions to gain access to additional materials and instruction start at low monthly prices.

Praxis products are based on combined Web-based and mobile learning. Community, fresh media content, talented course-design team, tools for practice and review. A unique combination of self-produced media with method and technology.

Popup Chinese and Popup Cantonese

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.

The same great folks also bring you Popup Cantonese.

Desktop

Byki

Freeware for Learning 70+ Languages

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! View full list of languages.

Along with the freeware, learners can access the Byki community and share vocabulary lists, instantly providing loads of user-generated content.