useful

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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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 recently wrote on Freestyle Language about how CaféBabel.com's Tower of Babel has articles about linguistic variations amongst 7 languages published in 7 languages!

I am planning to take this further by adding to Free Language the seven news feeds in catalá, Deutsch, English, español, français, italiano and polski. This will provide a new range of news articles for use learning and teaching languages.

As they say here in Grenada, West Indies: soon come!

Started using a tool with Firefox this morning that I came across yesterday: the WordChamp Firefox Toolbar for instant translation of words while browsing any web page.

It is a really cool tool! You not only get to hover over any text word and get a translation into the language of your choice, often there is an audio recording of the word that you can listen to! Here's a screenshot of it in action - click to see a larger version:

To get the extension, visit WordChamp and look on the left side almost on the bottom where it says: "WordChamp Language Toolbar for Firefox". Click that while browsing the site with Firefox and you'll install the extension and can start using it once you restart Firefox.

A proper article on WordChamp will be out soon on the front page.

Recently I got a link to a really cool tool that animates the writing of Arabic script and gives you audio simultaneously.

Another nice aspect is that the animations show you the letters as they appear when written in all parts of the word (isolated, initial medial, final).