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

Over the last few days I've added eight articles on podcast resources from the LingQ podcast network. This is a group that currently consists of eight podcast websites that provide a steady (weekly) flow of listening material for each individual language. Accompanying transcriptions are made available through the LingQ [liŋk] store. Some are free, some are not.

Pursue the LingQ above or click on the huge image above to learn more about the LingQ Method.

LingQ Podcast Network

EnglishLingQ
FrenchLingQ
GermanLingQ
JapaneseLingQ
PortugueseLingQ
RussianLingQ
SpanishLingQ
SwedishLingQ

Similar Foreign Language Learning Methods

The Linguist Method
Mobile Language Learning Method
iPod and Go Method

I sort of randomly stumbled across a few good link pages for learning Japanese online for free. I thought I would put them together in a blog entry until I can write proper articles on them.

Here they are:

uPal: United Links for Japanese Learning Resources
Tom's Links for Studying Japanese
TheJapanesePage.com Booklinks

Overview

Word2Word.com has loads of resources for learning tons of languages. The only reason there isn't a proper write-up of the site yet on Free Language is that there is so much there that we really need to publish many articles to encompass the full spectrum offered!

So this is just a blog entry to bring attention to the overall site, which will be followed by proper articles outlining each of the languages and their resource sections on the site.

I recommend jumping to the section on Free Online Language Courses.

From Website

This site is dedicated to breaking down of language barriers and assisting the users who have the desire to learn a language, a need to communicate between languages, and for those who work with languages as a profession. Language students should only be using online resources in accordance with the rules and regulations set down by their schools, teachers and parents.

Link

Visit Word2Word.com

I wanted to add four resources to the list of websites to post about here on that main part of the site:

UsingEnglish.com
English-to-go.com
World-English.org
LearnEnglish.de