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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Learn the Oromo Language (Afaan Oromoo) Online

Recently we received an email from someone interested in learning the Oromo language online, free of course! Oromo is a language spoken in Ethiopia and Kenya.

Well... we looked around for a while and found four resources that, together, give an introductory self-guided course in this African tongue. This is nothing profound, but will provide the very basics about the language, some useful phrases for travel, a humble dictionary and some other useful goodies.

We thought we'd share this here for everyone, all on one neat page, so you don't have to scour around like we did!

http://www.digitaldialects.com/Oromo.htm
http://www.oromoenglish.com
http://www.freelang.net/dictionary/oromo.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oromo_language

About Oromo Language

Oromo, also known as Afaan Oromoo, Oromiffa(a), Afan Boran, Afan Arsi, and sometimes in other languages by variant spellings of these names (Oromic, Afan Oromo, etc.), is an Afro-Asiatic language, and the most widely spoken of the Cushitic family. It is spoken as a first language by more than 25 million Oromo and neighboring peoples in Ethiopia and Kenya, such as the Werji. Older publications refer to the language as "Galla", a term that is resented by Oromo people and no longer used.

Read more on Wikipedia.

More Minority Languages Coming

We are currently building a directory to promote minority languages worldwide, and will be posting more resources for learning many lesser-known and lesser-spoken languages here on the site soon. Stay tuned!

Silbo Gomero Campaign Wins at Cannes

This just in from our friends at Busuu.com:

busuu.com wins a Silver Lion in the International Advertising Festival in Cannes for our Silbo Gomero campaign.

In October 2008 we contracted the Madrid agency La Despensa in order to launch a campaign to improve the awareness of our website.

The outcome was the amazing campaign to “Rescue the Silbo Gomero” for which we won now the most important price in the advertising industry.

We loved the idea from the beginning: If you can learn languages on busuu.com - why not also learn a nearly extinct whistled language from the Canary Islands - el Silbo Gomero? It´s not only an entertaining campaign but it draws the attention to an important cause which we from busuu.com fully support: to prevent smaller languages from their extinction! So we decided to create a fascinating video explaining the history of this amazing language and launched a special section within our website where you can find lessons of “el Silbo” (if you log in, you can see the full content and start practicing).

The outcome was impressive - we received huge media coverage in Spain (contacting all important media by sending them a bird cage with a plastic singing bird inside… they loved it! ;-) and “el Silbo Gomero” was in the news again. The media even supported the application of this charming language to be recognized as UNESCO world heritage.

http://blog.busuu.com/busuu_com_wins_a_silver_lion_in_cannes

Props!

Congratulations, guys, this is excellent stuff. We here at Free Language appreciate your bringing attention to an unusual, endangered minority language, and taking the time, effort and care to integrate it into your system so that people around the world can learn about it, and learn it... for free!

Click here to view our original post on this cool feature - and to watch the prize-winning video!

Visit http://www.busuu.com to learn English, French, German, Spanish and Silbo Gomero for free!

Free Language has been working for a while on a new tool for site users interesting in narrowing down the absolute best deals available online for language learning products.

We have scoured the web and created a quick and simple way for Free Language users to save BIG on products from Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur and Michel Thomas, plus language education materials including DVDs, software, books, dictionaries and much more!

Free Language now brings together the absolute best deals - for you to save. By saving on language products in our shop, you help support future development of this free public resource! Everyone wins.

Visit the new shop and locate the deal you're looking for:

http://shop.freelanguage.org

Some of the most popular products Free Language users ask about are:

Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, language software and language DVDs.

Here are just some of the languages for which you will find cheap/discount products:

Afrikaans, Arabic, Bahasa, Bengali, Cantonese, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Farsi, Filipino, French, German, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Luxembourgish, Mandarin, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Body Language and Sign Language

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...

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.