Summary

Linkua will interest language instructors at least as much as it does language learners, if not more. Linkua is a place for language learners and educators to come together around an agreed hourly instruction price and engage in a secure language education environment. Learners can pay tutors to learn. Tutors can offer their services to a wide range of potential clients.

Linkua currently has hundreds of willing tutors for dozens of languages.

Have a look at the Linkua FAQ section for more information about exactly how this works for other learners and educators.

Below is some info from the Linkua website - be sure to read their take on why distance learning can be more advantageous than learning in person.

Also, be sure to check out this page for a free language lesson!

From Website

What is Linkua?

Linkua is a meeting point for people interested in teaching and learning languages. As a student you find language teachers from all around the world and learn from them from the comfort of your home. As a teacher you'll be able to connect with students and can teach them from home, with total flexibility.

Why distance learning is better than face to face learning?

You will get a stronger result by learning by telephone or VoIP than if you learn in person.

Many people are surprised when they first hear this but after you read these ten reasons you will be convinced!

#1 - Better Comprehension

When you are tutored by telephone you learn to hear voice. When you are taught face to face, about 30 percent of what you think you hear are the non-verbal gestures. People who are taught in person will finish a course of study, go to talk with someone on the phone, and freeze because they just lost 30 percent of their communications!
People who are taught on the telephone will do well on the telephone. They will also do great in person, because they get an additional 30 percent in the non-verbal gestures that they were not even accustomed to in normal learning process!

#2 - Better Pronunciation

People typically talk about 10 to 15 percent more loudly on the phone than in person. To speak more loudly you need to open your mouth more widely, and we all know that opening your mouth widely is a prerequisite to developing good enunciation and pronunciation.

#3 - Better Concentration

As you are not influenced by the non-verbal gestures, you can concentrate more on what you are told and what you say. For instance, while you drive, don´t you have to concentrate more on what you say on the phone than what you say to the person next to you? Furthermore, using the phone quickly helps you get over the fear of speaking.

#4 - Leverage Your Time

Instead of spending your precious time driving to a school or to someone's home to take a language class, you can use that time to learn more.

#5 - Flexibility: Wherever You Are

If you do any traveling, you can stay consistent in your learning by simply picking up a telephone. It does not matter if you are in Spain, New Jersey, Australia, Mexico, Sudan or Germany. If you can get to a PC with internet, you can take your class.

#6 - Flexibility: Whenever It Is

If you have a schedule that is variable, you can schedule learning on an "as you go" basis. You do not need to lock into the same times every week. You can schedule as you go and around the clock. You will always be sure to get a learning time that meets your needs.

#7 - More Relaxed

You can go home from work, get relaxed and enjoy your learning from your favorite chair. It is a lot more fun taking learning in casual clothes than in dress clothes. If you have a cordless telephone, you can even do learning from your garden while you are enjoying the sunshine!

#8 - Prepared for Real Business World

Since you learn to deal with voice, you will be better prepared for the real business world where much of what we do is by telephone. Also, if someone happens to be out of your line of vision, you will be able to understand even if you cannot see him or her. As I have already mentioned, if you are trained in person, you will freeze when you get on the telephone. When you are trained by telephone, you do not become dependent on lipreading, gestures, etc.

#9- Consistency of Training

You can have learning more consistently for the same amount of money than you could by going to a school. Telephone learning sessions are tipically shorter (around half an hour) and sessions at most schools are at least one hour in length because they have to justify having an instructor come in.

A half-hour on the telephone twice a week is more consistent, and better, than having one onehour session a week. Of course, four half-hour sessions weekly are better than two one-hour sessions.
It is just like exercise. Which is better? Three or four times a week for a half-hour, or once or twice for an hour or two at a time? We all know that consistency is critical to the development of a new skill or habit. You'll feel like you have more attention for the same amount of time... and money!

#10 - Higher Completion Rates

Our studies show conclusively that students who take their learning by telephone more consistently complete a full course of study. This is due to the fact that they learn better and that they learn in an environment that meets their needs from a logistical and scheduling standpoint.

Visit Linkua.com

Summary

Quizlet.com is a great website for effectively learning vocabulary, for languages and anything else! For a quick video on how the whole thing works, check out the demo video. Cool fact: It was started by a 15-year-old high school student!

Basically, you can add and share vocabulary lists, make them public, private or share only with certain groups. Once you have them in the system (or you find an existing set you want to study), you can choose between several options for learning/familiarizing and self-assessment.

The site is slick, fast and has lots of active users. It's really a cool place to learn anything from the Greek Alphabet to TOEFL and SAT vocabulary and plenty more.

There are already gobs of lists available on the site - so many that individual attention is being brought to amazing collections available on the site, such as the HSK Test Vocabulary Preparation Pack and more.

So take a look at Quizlet when you get the chance. It's likely that content already exists for what you need to study! I have added this to all the language sections even though there are not vocabulary stacks yet for all of these. Reason being you can use the site to create any vocabulary lists you want - it's wide open!

From Website

The Quizlet Story

For lack of a professional writer working for Quizlet, here are some ramblings from me, Andrew Sutherland, creator of Quizlet, president of Brainflare, web developer, and high school student.

Quizlet is how I occupy my free time and even some of my non-free time. My mission for Quizlet is to make learning vocabulary not a chore. I know a lot of teachers assign vocabulary to students, but few students actually "absorb" words into their vocabularies after they take their test. Which kind of defeats the purpose, right? So Quizlet is my response - it aims to make learning fun, thus make learning effective. At the very least, it can help students do better on quizzes and tests even if they don't fully "absorb" their words.

I started Quizlet in October 2005, back when I was a mere 15-year-old (human years). I had just received a list of 111 French Animals to memorize from my magnanimous French teacher. I was puttering along with my dad with some call-and-response type quizzing. "Man, I love doing this" was NOT what I was thinking. So I put my thinking cap on, and the first line of code for Quizlet was written that night. Of course, that code was all deleted when I thought about what Quizlet would be. You really should plan first.

Quizlet is a shoestring operation. For its first 420 days, it was the work of only myself. I did all the designing, programming, debugging, and perfecting. The project had no product managers, no marketers, and no venture capitalists. It was just me and my testers. Recently I've realized some things are out of my field of expertise (I'm not a lawyer, for example). So there are a few other people involved these days.

Quizlet is free and will remain free to all users. The current plan is to offer targeted advertising on the non-studying pages. I'm hoping to make some deals with some educational and test-prep companies and perhaps some universities. If you're interested in advertising to my userbase of highly-motivated high-school and college students, shoot me a note (see above right).

Let's see, what haven't I covered? Ahh, the name Quizlet comes from Quizlette, the name of the "little" quizzes my French teacher gives. She could have charged royalties, but that just wouldn't be right…

And because you really want to know, I made Quizlet using only the finest ingredients:

PHP
MySQL
Apache
Mootools Thanks Valerio!
XHTML, CSS, Javascript, JSON, etc etc…

Visit Quizlet.com

Summary

The Firefox web browser from Mozilla is not only a great open source web browser. It's also a fabulous tool for language learners! It would take a long time to list and go through all of the cool things you can do with the addons (extensions of Firefox's core functionality) in the language section of Firefox Addons. Several articles have already been published a few of articles on the topic (see related articles below), one of which contains a link to Firefox addons for translation.

However, another, cooler, resource has just popped up on the radar and anyone dealing with learning languages online, translation, researching and/or reading content in foreign languages on the Web is encouraged to check out this amazing repository for Firefox addons for Language support. The link has been pre-defined for showing the addons that have been updated most recently, both experimental and stable. Here are a few more pre-defined links that will sort the addons by number of downloads, rating and name.

There is a lot of them, but it's definitely worth the time to sift through and find the ones that work for you.

Cheers to CodePublic.org for the link! Below is an example of an addon listing for a Chinese pop-up translator.

From Website

Add-ons extend Firefox, letting you personalize your browsing experience. Take a look around and make Firefox your own.

Related Articles

Quick Translation Firefox Extension to Translate Single Words in 17+ Languages
Foreign Language Translation Extensions, Tools, Plugins, Add-Ons for the Firefox Web Browser
FoxLingo Free Firefox Browser Extension Software for Translating Web Pages

Summary

Palabea is a social network site for practicing, learning, teaching and otherwise communicating in foreign languages. It has a beautiful site design and its features are quite strong.

After testing thoroughly the entire user interface, I am convinced that this is one of the most solid social language learning network platforms in cyberspace. It has a clean and friendly interface, the site loads quickly and the wide variety of features were well thought-out and executed.

The features include:

• uploading and sharing audio, video, photos and documents
• managing friends and meeting new people
• creating and partcipating in virtual classrooms
• watching videolectures, reading documents and listening to podcasts from other users
• calling friends and translating on the fly
• tool for recording audio and video right through their site!

There are plenty of others, too. And the team seems to be active in developing more features and improving upon those already available.

Palabea is currently ad-free! I'm not sure what their business model is, but they've partnered with Deutsche Welle, Babylon and Café Babel. They partnered with Babylon on the widget to translate on the fly while talking with someone (or just surfing), but I am not sure exactly how they are affiliated with the other two - both of which are very cool, by the way!

The site is localized in 6 languages: Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish.

So congrats to the folks at Palabea! I know I'll be stopping in over there.

From Website

Learning a new language just became fun, easy and free.

palabea.net is an e-learning website and social community that offers opportunities to learn and practice foreign languages. It offers a wide range of tools and technologies which support its users with their learning endeavours, and allows people to communicate and learn about different cultures.

Changes in society triggered by the effects of globalization developed the need to learn and respect cultural diversity. To maintain a dialogue between people in different countries, and to forge multicultural relationships, learning foreign languages is essential. Some obstacles in learning a foreign language, including: lack of motivation and time, and high costs, but using palabea.net everyone has the opportunity to learn a foreign language and communicate with people around the world without leaving their home.

palabea.net users are able to:

- Access a portal of contents (video lessons, podcast and multimedia educational material), information on language schools, au pair opportunities and traveling abroad. More information will be added as the portal develops.

- Have online conversations in a foreign language: palabea users can easily find friends who share similar interests, and who will help them learn and practice languages. Users will be able to speak about any topics, or if they prefer, use lessons or situation games designed for to improve language skills -Practice comprehension with audio and video applications. The users can listen to podcasts in other languages or watch video lessons, which help explain grammatical aspects of the language. -Play teacher and assist others in learning their native language which allows for innovative ways in collaborative learning.

- Generate their own content, as individuals or a group. People can present themselves with information, pictures/videos. - Unlike other social networks, palabea.net offers an integrated video-chat system that appears on the page and doesn't require users to download an extra application. -palabea has created virtual classes to help users practice their written language skills. In these classes the users collaborate with documents and assist each in learning languages. These virtual classes can be created by a group of users, or if the user prefers, they can request the services of a professional language teacher.

Palabea.net complements traditional language schools rather than competing against them. It is another distinctive aspect of palabea.net, who from the outset, worked with many schools to help produce e-learning applications that are both be easy to use and effective.

Palabea.net was founded by Sebastian Schkudlara, Guido Veth and Patricia Sierra Fernandez in Berlin. The Palabea.net team is a small and international group of multilingual speakers, with three official languages: English, German and Spanish.

Visit Palabea.net

Summary

Worldia is a social networking tool for making friends and practicing languages. It focuses on using Skype to bridge the virtual gap and connect with real people worldwide as friends. The foreign-language-learning networking tools are accompanied by community building possiblities and paid private language lessons. The ensemble creates the potential for someone to quickly and interactively learn to speak foreign languages.

At Worldia, members can become tutors and earn money teaching online. This adds a nice twist to the social language learning gambit, and makes it a feature-rich web community for learning and teaching foreign languages - and getting paid! Nice.

One aspect of Worldia that I dig is the world map feature that allows you to view locations of all the friends you encounter on the site. Sweet.

Worldia is also available in Japanese. I imagine they'll add more languages in the future.

From Website

My Page

My Page is your home in Worldia, where.you give your self-introduction to others, write your diary and manage your activities in Worldia. You can also see what's going on with your friennds and communities and send/receive messages and let other members to start Skype conversations with you.

Find Friends

You may find someone who can related to while reading diaries and joining communities. You may also be able to search members to find your friends. You can find out more about the person by visiting his/her "My Page."

If you find someone interesting, send Friend Request politely. It would be wonderful if you fill up your World map with friends.

Communicating with Other Members

There is a dedicated messaging system in Worldia. Worldia also use Skype features so that you can actually talk with your friends. Some members are actually teaching native languages to each other using this feature.

You should actively provide and exchange information by wrting comments in community topics and friends' diary, and writing reviews of books and movies.

* Since Worldia is inter-cultural site, please make sure to respect others and act courteously while communicating with others.

Join Communities

Communities are where people with the same interests join to form a place for discussions and events. You can search existing communities to find the one you want to join or you can start a new community yourself.

Take or Teach Language Lessons

In Worldia, members who have registered as tutors are teaching language lessons to regular members. For student members, they can find the language and lessons they want since tutors are coming from all over the world. For tutor members, they can start lesson business with students from all over the world. Try the free trial lessons today!

Since starting as WannaTalk in March 2007, Worldia has grown to the site with close to 10,000 members from 170 countries and regions of the world. We will continue to work on improving our service so that more users will use our site.

Visit Worldia.net