Summary

Lang-8 is a free, unique and popular website for learners of many languages to come together and correct one another's writing. Native speakers review writing submitted by learners who wish to improve. You can help and be helped!

The free tools provided in the interface are straightforward and tuned in such a way that it's quite easy to correct another user's writing, as well as to see exactly how others have corrected yours.

Lang-8's interface also provides social tools for interacting amongst users, including a way to find language matches to suit your needs.

Lang-8 has a large user community, coming from over 180 countries around the world, and together they provide access to help in some of the more exotic languages for which it's often hard to find resources, much less free help. Yes, there really are plenty of people out there willing to help you improve your writing for free! In turn, you can choose to help others as well.

Also available is a mobile version of the website.

From Website

Real Interactions

Learn from real native speakers excited to help you with the language that you are learning.

International Community

Community members from all over the world make Lang-8 a fun, social experience.

Keep Track

Tag and keep track of the things you learn from native speakers. Refer back and remember!

See Results

By using Lang-8 you will get better, make friends, and see real results. There’s no better help than native speakers.

Lang-8 Intro Video

Visit Lang-8.com

Summary

Babbel combines multi-media visual and auditory learning, social networking interactivity, sound educational methodology, mobile apps (for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad - Babbel Mobile) and desktop goodies (Babbel Refresh) in a one-stop integrated platform for learning English.

They've very recently expanded their platform by adding loads of new features to the Web interface as well as mobile and desktop apps to enhance your English learning efforts online - and take them mobile:

Babbel Refresh: Bite-sized units catered to your individual English learning program, spaced out appropriately and delivered to your via a free desktop app! (Free, works with Windows and Mac.)

Babbel Mobile: Synchronizes your Babbel account with iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, allowing you to study English on your mobile device - even if you're offline! Babbel Mobile is free to download for everybody, and access to the Vocabulary is available for free for those who already are subscribers to Babbel. If you're not on Babbel, you can purchase the vocabulary as a stand alone app, which has 3000 words and phrases, for a onetime $7.99 USD.

Babbel's interface is the definition of eye candy, works on any modern Web browser, loads quickly and runs solidly. The dynamic learning system reviews you on terms and phrases you've learned while seamlessly incorporating new ones on topics you select. This guarantees you'll be interested in what you're studying - and that it will be the most applicable to your specific needs and goals.

Part of the Babbel learning system involves media-rich (and user shared) virtual flash cards. The flash card stacks are organized into "packages" (groups of cards) that treat common themes (eg, youth hostels, winter sports, restaurants and eating out, fruits and vegetables, clothing, standard greetings, giving and receiving compliments, etc). With input and contributions from the users, these packages get consistently better as more contributions flow in.

Furthermore, an intelligent system organizes all the vocabulary words you've learned. You get a comprehensive overview of everything you've studied - and it signals which are your problem words so you'll know you need to practice them again. This syncs seamlessly with the Babbel Refresh desktop application as well, using your personalized Vocabulary list to calculate reminders for what's best to review next and how often. Wow - talk about helpful!

Add to all of this Babbel's social networking tools, including the ability to hook up with other users interested in sharing and exchanging language skills, and you have a dynamic English-education platform that covers all the bases.

In addition to English, Babbel is available for learning Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish.

So try a Babbel lesson free and see if it works for you. You can select one of various options for your free lesson, too. Chances are you'll be up and learning in no time, making friends to share with, quizzing yourself on the go and progressing more quickly than you thought possible.

Treat yourself and have some fun learning English - go Babbel!

Free or Subscription?

Wading through the resources for learning English online is tough! Thus it's well worth subscribing to a paid service to truly open the doors to your virtual classroom.

Having researched and tested free and paid options extensively, we definitely say that Babbel sits right at the top of your options - it's incredibly fun and intuitive, offers online and offline solutions and is amazingly fairly priced: between $6.62 and $11.95 USD per month depending on your subscription option. (Compare that with $539 for the full Rosetta Stone English course, for example. You could use Babbel for 67+ months - that's over 5 years - at that price!)

For most people's needs, we recommend the 3-month option which runs $7.95 per month. It's a great way to leap ahead.

Summary

Wikibooks.org is a community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. The Wikibook's Languages of Europe category can serve, for the language learner, educator and enthusiast, as an enormous doorway into the many European languages, both living and historical.

The European subcontinent has birthed and/or attracted an enormous variety of languages from many sub-branches of what linguists call the Indo-European languages.

Below you'll find direct links to a wide variety of European language open-content textbooks. These are free and open source, for everyone to use and benefit from. And collaborate on - especially language educators who have the knowledge to share with all through this open medium.

To boot, Wikibooks.org itself is available in a wide range of world languages!

From Wikibooks.org

Wikibooks Category: Languages of Europe

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

These language books concern Languages of Europe. See also Subject:Languages of Europe.

European Languages with Books or Pages

Albanian, Aragonese, Armenian, Austrian, Basque, Belarusian, Breton, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chechen, Croatian, Danish, Galician, Gothic, Greenlandic, High Icelandic, Hungarian, Høgnorsk, Icelandic, Insubric, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Leonese, Lowland Scots, Macedonian, Manx, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Old Church Slavonic, Polish, Provençal, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovene, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Welsh

This may be incomplete when you read this. Please check the Languages of Europe page for the latest content.

European Language Wikibooks Subcategories

Dutch language
English language
Finnish language
French language
German language
Greek language
Latin language
Lithuanian language
Portuguese language
Scottish Gaelic language
Spanish language
Yiddish language

Visit Wikibooks.org on Languages of Europe.
Wikipedia.org also has a category on Languages of Europe.

Summary

This (lengthy) article brings together a pile of Free Software (GNU GPL'd as Public Domain), freeware and shareware for language learning and reference for Mac OS X.

Software descriptions are taken from Apple Downloads. We will be adding more GPL applications soon.

Summary

The now-ubiquitious Wikipedia.org has some multilingual gems tucked away in its folds. This article serves to point out one of the most powerful polyglot culture feaures that Wikipedia offers: the myriad articles in a multitude of languages at a single click away.

For instance, while browsing the topic "Language" on Wikipedia in English, down the left navigation bar you will find entries for the same topic in literally dozens of languages:

Afrikaans, Alemannisch, العربية, Aragonés, Arpetan, Asturianu, Avañe'ẽ, Aymar aru, Azərbaycan, Bamanankan, Bân-lâm-gú, Basa Banyumasan, Башҡорт, Беларуская, Беларуская (тарашкевіца), Boarisch, Brezhoneg, Български, Català, Чăвашла, Cebuano, Česky, Cymraeg, Dansk, Deitsch, Deutsch, Diné bizaad, Eesti, Ελληνικά, Español, Esperanto, Euskara, فارسی, Français, Frysk, Furlan, Gaeilge, Gàidhlig, Galego, ગુજરાતી, 한국어, हिन्दी, Hrvatski, Ido, Ilokano, Bahasa Indonesia, Interlingua, isiXhosa, Íslenska, Italiano, עברית, Basa Jawa, ქართული, Kernewek, Кыргызча, Kiswahili, Коми, Kongo, Kreyòl ayisyen, Kurdî / كوردی, Latina, Latviešu, Lëtzebuergesch, Lietuvių, Limburgs, Lingála, Lojban, Magyar, Македонски, Malagasy, मराठी, مَزِروني, Bahasa Melayu, Nederlands, 日本語, Нохчийн, Norfuk / Pitkern, Norsk (bokmål), Norsk (nynorsk), Nouormand, Occitan, پښتو, Polski, Português, Ripoarisch, Română, Romani, Runa Simi, Русский, Саха тыла, Sámegiella, Sardu, Scots, Seeltersk, Sicilianu, Simple English, Slovenčina, Slovenščina, Српски / Srpski, Suomi, Svenska, Tagalog, தமிழ், Tatarça/Татарча, ไทย, Tiếng Việt, Тоҷикӣ, Türkçe, Türkmen, Українська, Volapük, Võro, Walon, Winaray, ייִדיש, 粵語,Zazaki, Žemaitėška, 中文

This list discludes several languages for which this particular computer does not have fonts installed. Many of you will see font-related issues for some of the languages above. Find out more here if you do.

How to find the links.

This image shows how to find what other languages are available for a given topic on Wikipedia:

These are not translations.

Each entry is an organically-written encyclopedia article on the topic of "Language" in a language. The time and space for language and culture persists!

It's quite intriguing surfing Wikipedia for multilingual goodness. If you'd like to hear more on this topic or have something of value to share, please comment on this article!

Use these to learn!

This feature of Wikipedia can be used to learn and teach languages. Find a topic of interest and study up on the vocabulary in your target language, build a linguistic knowledge of specific interests, get materials for educating, compare entries in different languages to bring out cultural nuances and more. There are many ways to twist and tweak this vast maze of plurilingual content!

From Website

A language is a dynamic set of visual, auditory, or tactile symbols of communication and the elements used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon. Strictly speaking, language is considered to be an exclusively human mode of communication. Although other animals make use of quite sophisticated communicative systems, sometimes casually referred to as animal language, none of these are known to make use of all of the properties that linguists use to define language.

In Western Philosophy, language has long been closely associated with reason, which is also a uniquely human way of using symbols. In Ancient Greek philosophical terminology, the same word, logos, was used as a term for both language or speech and reason, and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes used the English word "speech" so that it similarly could refer to reason, as will be discussed below. More commonly though, the English word "language", derived ultimately from lingua, Latin for tongue, typically refers only to expressions of reason which can be understood by other people, most obviously by speaking.

Visit "Language" on Wikipedia in English and look at all the languages on the left navigation bar. Those are the languages for which the article you are viewing has equivalents.

Summary

BBC Radio's 6 Minute English Podcast is great for weekly doses of useful English for practical situations. It is one of many podcasts from the BBC.

From BBC Website

Learn and practise useful English language for everyday situations with the BBC. Your weekly instruction manual for saying or doing something in English is published every Wednesday. Each programme is six minutes long and contains examples and explanations to help you improve your knowledge of the English language across a wide range of topics.

Visit BBC Radio's 6 Minute English Podcast.