teach farsi

Language Learning Tips on Using Free Wikimedia Resources

This article points out six useful ways to use Wikimedia content from Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikinews, Wiktionary and Wikiquotes for learning languages free.

What's highlighted here is also great for teachers because it is licensed via Creative Commons and available to use for free.

Spanish is used as an example here, but the same ideas are applicable to all languages for which content is available.

1) Know General Info about Your Target Language

Find out general information about a language by viewing that language's Wikipedia entry. For example, here's the Spanish language entry on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_language

It contains loads of general information, as well as specifics about grammar, alphabet, pronunciation, etc.

2) Use Wikibooks and Wikiversity Courses to Get Started

Free Audio Books for 40 Languages

book2 is an outstanding resource for learning the basics of many languages.

This project sticks out by offering around 1600 combinations of languages, such as Japanese to English, Chinese to Arabic, etc, to use for exposure.

The method involves learning a series of short audio sequences to become comfortable in specific situations (introductions, meeting people, getting around, etc) common in daily life.

It's interesting that this specific book will become familiar to you in itself, so recalling the same material in new languages might be accelerated. Once you've memorized the whole audio sequence in one language, why not move on to another?

Google's Free Translation Engine

Google has an amazing machine translation engine which is also available via their mobile translation website and now available as an android app.

Available in over fifty languages, Google Translate is able to handle words, sentences, paragraphs, websites and documents. Their mobile website is fast and easy to use, and the Android App makes it all available natively on your Android Phone.

From Website

Listen to Words in Dozens of Languages

Forvo is an interesting project which accumulates recordings of existing words in all languages. A lofty and, indeed, ongoing goal!

Language learners interested in finding out just how a word is actually pronounced by a native speaker of a given language will love this website!

Have a look at the languages page and you can quickly see which languages have the most words. There is a handy tag cloud on the side of the page which will show you in a visual way which languages have more words already pronounced.

And if you're interested, feel free to contribute to this collective pronunciation effort!

Free Foreign Language School Online

Wikiversity is a great website for learning about all kinds of topics for free! Among the numerous topics you will find quite a lot of wonderful information about foreign language learning. Literally dozens of languages are represented (see list below) and it's truly a goldmine for those interested in getting started with some general information and often even more.