downloads

Byki has a new iPhone and iPod Touch application in the works for language learners. This new app offers many features for language learners, incuding:

• Download thousands of free Byki lists through List Central, including your own custom content created through Byki Deluxe. Make lists out of text book material or articles, add them to List Central, and import them to your iPhone!
• See a cumulative history of your progress in the new Statistics section
• Adjust volume within an activity with improved volume controls
• Customize font size for Chinese and Japanese transliterations

Byki for iPhone is great because users can take their learning with them to study wherever time allows, be it in line at the bank or on the commuter train. A quick 5 minutes here and there really adds up when you're learning a new language.

The app is currently available in Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Find out more...

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

Just got an email from a guy over at FooSchool.com who brought my attention to a site in development that will offer free videos for learning English and French (and presumably more eventually).

Currently, only the videos for learning the French language are available, with English coming soon.

The French videos I have checked out are organized by Parisian Arrondissement , which is pretty cool.

I would suggest checking them out and subscribing to their video lessons feeds for both languages so you can know right away when new content is added to the site:

FooSchool.com Learn English Video Lesson Feed
FooSchool.com Learn French Video Lesson Feed

The site still needs some development as the Contact and About pages are currently not up, but this is a true "first look" at the site in progress. If they keep up the quality and pace of content publishing, they'll certainly end up being an excellend multi-media language-learning resource.

Check out FooSchool.com

From Website

About FooSchool

FooSchool was launched in November 2007 with the aim of providing multi-media language lessons in a range of subjects -- for free!

We launched with a very basic design and 40 high-quality French video lessons, each of three minutes duration.

We intend to improve the design and add to the number of lessons in the near future.
FooSchool is Free?! What's the Catch?

There's no catch. FooSchool is free for three reasons:

1. We passionately believe in free education for everyone. We believe that the right to learn is a fundamental human right -- regardless of age, gender or location on the planet.

For an adult living in a developed country, learning a language may help keep the brain healthy. For someone in a developing country, it may help avoid poverty.

2. With the IT/internet revolution, the technology costs of creating and distributing multimedia lessons are no longer exorbitant. Thus, we don't have technology costs to pass on to you.

3. Our main costs are in devising and producing the lessons, as well as maintaining the website. So, while the lessons on this website will always be free, we intend to eventually make a profit through ancillary revenues (e.g. advertising).