phrases

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

It's been a very long time since I've actually published a list of the latest updates to the site. So here goes with a healthy chunk of language-learning goodness...

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Just got an email link to a conversational language learning resource center and community and wanted to share it here.

From the site:

Phrasebase Language Learning Resources

Your Conversational Language Learning Resource Center and Community

Online Phrasebook - Internet's largest database of common, useful, everyday words and phrases translated into over 90 foreign languages.

Language Exchange Partners - Community of language enthusiasts around the world interested in sharing their language and culture.

Live Webcam Classrooms - Meet language exchange partners and language tutors in this live webcam based audio video classroom.

Country Information - Detailed facts, statistics and information about the political and geographical makeup of every country in the world.

Language Information - Detailed facts, statistics and information about every human spoken foreign language in the world.

Comments

This is a nice resource for basic survival phrases for many languages.

Visit PhraseBase.com

Just ran across a nice resource for learning the Afrikaans language.

From the site:

"It is easier to start learning Afrikaans, or any other language, than it is to become good at it. It can also be more fun, because when beginning you can make rapid progress without learning grammar or trying to learn words which only occur infrequently.

Learning a language can vary from knowing ten words to fluency. It all depends on your goal. Do you want to learn enough to be polite, to get by or to be able to express yourself fluently and with confidence.

Easy Afriakaans is aimed at anyone who wants to start learning the Afrikaans language or just wants to learn a few useful words and phrases before their next visit. There are also links to other resources which might be helpful.

One way to use Easy Afrikaans is to pick key or useful words and phrases that you want to learn. For example, as a visitor to another country, the key words in a foreign language are the words which will be of most use to you and which you will use most often.

These key words and phrases will vary from visitor to visitor depending on the purpose of their trip. A businessman, for example, is likely to have different language requirements to the tourist, and when only learning a small part of language may choose to concentrate on a few formal situations.

Or, if you have friends who speak another language, you might learn a few expressions that you can use in specific situations with them. In either case, you are starting to learn the language and if you continue to learn it , then the vocabulary you have learnt will be a great help."

Visit EasyAfrikaans.com

I just ran across a really great resource for phrases in many languages.

Available languages are:

Arabic
Afrikaans
Bulgarian
Chinese
Cantonese
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Farsi
Finnish
Flemish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latin
Lithuanian
Malay
Maltese
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Scottish
Slovak
Spanish
Sign Language
Swedish
Tagalog
Tamil
Thai
Turkish
Uighur
Urdu
Vietnamese
Yiddish
Zulu

Have a look at Linguanut.com