online

2012 Language Survey Uncovers Interesting Trends in Language Learning

Busuu, one of the world's most popular online language learning platforms, has just announced the results of its 2012 Language Barometer Survey.

With over 45,000 participants from 230 countries, this survey sheds light on successful and popular learning processes and well as what the future of language education may look like.

From busuu blog

More than 45,000 busuu.com users from 230 different countries responded to our survey, held at the beginning of March 2012. Let’s have a look at our users’ preferred methods for improving their language skills, what encourages or hampers their learning process and many more exciting outcomes!

The future of language learning relies on online methods!

Read more.

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!

This resource has quite a few links to sites that have instructional materials for learning numerous foreign languages. Eventually, these sections should be put individually on the site for each language section. But for now, here they are all at once on the blog. The following languages are available.

Here's the link to WannaLearn.com/Academic_Subjects/World_Languages.

* Albanian
* Arabic
* Chinese
* Danish
* Dutch
* English as a Second Language
* Finnish
* French
* Gaelic
* German
* Greek
* Hebrew
* Hungarian
* Indo-Chinese
* Indonesian
* Italian
* Japanese
* Korean
* Latin
* Norwegian
* Polish
* Portuguese
* Russian
* Sanskrit
* Sign Language
* Spanish
* Swahili
* Swedish
* Tagalog Filipino
* Thai
* Turkish
* Vietnamese

Here is a quick link to my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged with learn+chinese+free.

This is a great place to keep up on that latest I've been researching for Mandarin. Whenever I find something, I'll always tag it right away using the Firefox extension for del.icio.us

Most of these will eventually reach Freestyle Language, but it takes longer for them to get there.

Surfing about this morning and came across a helpful list of free online language courses on About.com. The first page covers Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian and Japanese. Page 2 of the list continues with Korean, Latin, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

I was very happy to note that lots of the resources on this list are not yet on Free Language! You better believe they will be soon...