interesting

This just in from the Babbel blog:

From Babbel.com Blog

There’s always a little bit of anxiety that comes along with traveling abroad, whether for business or for pleasure. Possible scenario, night before — for example — the flight to Berlin, a sudden pang: “Oh right, they speak German in Germany, and I don’t even know how to say ‘how are you’. How am I going to manage to order my morning coffee?!?”

We at Babbel have now developed a stress-reducing linguistic survival kit (and perhaps path to that caffeine fix in a foreign country) for the last-minute language learner: the Mini-Vocab Package. Compiled especially for the spontaneous traveler, it offers essential words and phrases - in German, French, Spanish, Italian and English - to get through that first encounter with the locals unscathed.

For those who’ve got a little more time before the big trip, besides the Mini-Vocab, there are twenty other in-depth packages for all relevant situations while traveling, from leaving the airport to arriving at the car rental desk. There is of course also the opportunity to hook up with someone from Babbel’s now more than 350,000-strong community to chat, trade travel tips or set up a language exchange.

To go directly to the newly compiled Mini-Vocab package, click here. If you are not already registered at Babbel, after a quick and easy registration you will be taken straight through to travel vocabulary. For our press release, click here.

From Mara at Babbel

Hello, Hola, Bonjour, Buongiorno, Hallo!

Babbel.com, the intuitively designed online language learning platform, has just released a Mini-Vocab Package specially designed for the last minute traveler. It offers all the essential vocabulary for that first encounter with the locals in Spanish, French, German, Italian and English.

Take a look at the Babbel Blog (http://blog.babbel.com) for more information.

Thanks and happy learning!

Mara

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Just came across an interesting (and short) blog entry by linguist Steve Kaufmann, of LingQ fame:

http://thelinguist.blogs.com/how_to_learn_english_and/2009/04/what-we-need-in-language-learning.html

In this article he states that those interested in improving the language learning climate need to do the following:

1) Convince learners that they need to leave the learner content behind as soon as possible. i.e. within 3-6 months.

2) Stop wasting money on text books, schools, conferences, linguistics research, language teacher training, and spend the money on transcribing all the wonderful content that is available free of charge on the Internet.

3) Show learners how to find content of interest, and how to learn from it, meaning mostly listening to it in a concentrated fashion.

Bravo Steve! To this, Free Language would add that any resources created by learners and teachers would benefit from remaining Free and Open in the public domain - protected for future learners - by empowering the content with the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL), the same license chosen by Wikimedia for all of their projects (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiquotes, Wiktionary, etc.).

It is important that we move collectively on the Web towards truly Free and Open language methods, resources, materials, etc. A recent article here overviews some of the existing Free and Open language learning materials.

Let's make sure access to language education materials is free for everyone, learners and educators alike.

Visit LingQ.com to learn ten language and counting, including Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.

Update from Busuu.com

Wow! More interesting news just came in from the folks at Busuu! They've done something, well, unprecedented as far as the Free Language team can tell: they've added an endangered language called Silbo Gomero to be learned right through their website!

This language is not spoken, but whistled (silbar = to whistle in Spanish), and is used by the people of Gomera, one of the Canary Islands off Spain, to communicate between long distances and over rough terrain. How cool is that!

Check out this video from Busuu about this fascinating language:

From Website

Become a Silbador!

The existence of the whistled language of Silbo Gomero on the beautiful Spanish island of La Gomera has for years fascinated linguists and language enthusiasts alike.

Silbo Gomero was invented in order to facilitate communication between the people of the island across the deep gorges and valleys long before mobile phones were invented. The tradition continues even now with the local government including it in the educational system of the island.

Learn Silbo Gomero at Busuu.com

Yesterday I received an email from Jon at eduFire letting me know that Free Language had been chosen for their Top 20 Language Bloggers on the Web roundup. The blog entry alone is a great resource for those interested in languages in general as well as language learning.

eduFire is a new website for learning and teaching languages online via video chat. In addition to live language tutors, the website has videos, forums, flash cards and other resources. The design is light and bright, there are lots of smiling tutors waiting to teach eager students and it appears to be an overall smooth operation.

eduFire has generously offered Free Language readers a free hour video tutoring session for the first ten folks to email him at freetutoring [at] edufire [dot] com. Just mention that you saw this post on Free Language.

Cheers to eduFire all around for their roundup and offer for free lessons!

I wanted to throw up a link to a predefined search for "language" on content4reprint.com.

This search yields a bundle of articles pertaining to language, such as 8 Reasons To Learn A New Language and The Advantages of Learning a Foreign Language.