dictionary

Summary

Collins is one of the longest standing publishers of English and bilingual dictionaries. They are currently working to pioneer ways to publish dictionaries for today's world by rapidly increasing the availability of their products in digital format.

The company has created several high-quality, professional digital products that are offered through their online store. Free samples of these products are available for download through the site.

Two of the digital products they currently offer are very useful for travelers and language learners alike: iPhraseFinders and Collins 40-Minute Lessons.

iPhraseFinders are phrasebooks tailored specifically for the iPod. These are currently available in Windows and Mac format for English to the following languages: French, German, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. You can download free samples from the link above.

Collins 40-Minute Lessons are beginner lessons designed to empower learners with the essential phrases necessary to navigate daily life in a given foreign language. These lessons are available for English speakers interested in learning Arabic, Cantonese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese. Wow! You can download free samples from the link above.

I know from my experience of testing the free downloads that these digital products are indeed professional, high-quality, practical and useful.

The website also offers a free dictionary search feature, with more comprehensive commercial versions available.

From Website

Free English, Cobuild and Foreign Language Dictionary look-ups available. Subscribe to or download a dictionary to your desktop or mobile device. Learn a language fast with iPhrasefinders and audio courses for iPods and mobiles. Free trials available.

Find out about these products and more at CollinsLanguage.com

Started using a tool with Firefox this morning that I came across yesterday: the WordChamp Firefox Toolbar for instant translation of words while browsing any web page.

It is a really cool tool! You not only get to hover over any text word and get a translation into the language of your choice, often there is an audio recording of the word that you can listen to! Here's a screenshot of it in action - click to see a larger version:

To get the extension, visit WordChamp and look on the left side almost on the bottom where it says: "WordChamp Language Toolbar for Firefox". Click that while browsing the site with Firefox and you'll install the extension and can start using it once you restart Firefox.

A proper article on WordChamp will be out soon on the front page.

Came across an excellent tool for studying, using and learning Japanese Kanji radicals and more.

From the site:

Translate Words in Japanese Text
Search for Words in the Dictionary
Find Kanji in the Database
Find Kanji (MultiRadical Method)
Handwritten Interface
Select Dictionary File
View Documentation
Graphic Interface
Keitai JE
Keitai EJ
Keitai Text Translation

Visit this online tool.

From the site:

# VDict (Vietnamese Dictionary) is the best and totally free Vietnamese-English-French Online Dictionary
# You can perform lookup for a word in all dictionaries simultaneously. VDict currently supports 8 dictionaries:

* Vietnamese-English dictionary
* English-Vietnamese dictionary
* Vietnamese-French dictionary
* French-Vietnamese dictionary
* Vietnamese dictionary (Vietnamese to Vietnamese)
* English-English dictionary (Wordnet)
* Free Online Dictionary Of Computing (FOLDOC)
* Chinese Vietnamese dictionary

Visit Vdict Online Vietnamese Dicionary

From the site:

Free Hindi Lessons and Courses

We have gathered together here a number of free language lessons and language courses for those learning Hindi, along with some other Hindi language resources, such as Hindi online newspapers, Hindi dictionaries, Hindi internet radio sites, and other sources relevant to the student of Hindi. Most of these sites will be in English, although a number are multilingual in nature.

Visit Multi-Lingual Books Free Hindi Courses.