german.about.com is packed full of information for beginner to intermediate German learners as well as teachers of those levels. In fact, there is so much content there that listing it here would take too much time! Instead, this article will highlight some of the things you can find on the site, and leave the rest for you to find on the site.
french.about.com is packed full of information for beginner to intermediate French learners as well as teachers of those levels. In fact, there is so much content there that listing it here would take too much time! Instead, this article will highlight some of the things you can find on the site, and leave the rest for you to find on the site.
Of special note are the start learning section, practice materials, teacher resources, audio lab, grammar section, vocabulary section, proficiency tests, verb conjugator and the quizzes and tests area.
There is a lot more there, and it's all accessible for free. :)
Learning French is an ongoing and involved process. You can't learn French overnight, and you probably can't learn on your own, no matter how many books and tapes you buy.
What you can do is use this free website to supplement your learning: to get another explanation of something you didn't understand, to get extra practice between classes, and to brush up on what you once learned but have now all but forgotten.
Learn French at About offers hundreds of lessons and thousands of sound files to help you learn French.
Semanda offers quick and simple review and download of Mandarin Chinese vocabulary cards and online multiple choice quizzes for children/kids! These are all free. :)
Be sure to have a look at the printable PDFs of the vocabulary packs.
Free Mandarin Chinese Flash Cards
Semanda.com is a website for learning basic Mandarin Chinese vocabulary using illustrated flashcards. Online flashcards and multiple choice quizzes in several subjects are available, as well as printable PDF flash cards.
On semanda.com, you will find basic Mandarin Chinese flashcards and vocabulary exercises for children and beginners.
The flashcards use both simplified Chinese characters (hanzi) and pinyin, and are available both online and as printable PDF files.
The wordlists cover a wide range of basic concepts, such as colors, animals, fruits, vegetables, vehicles, furniture etc. New flash cards are added all the time, so please check back regularly for updates!
Verbix is "an independent non-profit organization that aims to promote and protect linguistic diversity." The tools on their site "contain verb conjugations for hundreds of languages, ranging from national and international languages to regional and even extinct languages."
There are four main things to bring your attention to in this article:
1) WebVerbix, a great free online verb conjugator for over eighty languages.
UPDATE: Byki now available for 74 languages! See list below.
Byki is freeware for learning [74] languages, including many less-taught languages for which learning materials are hard to find, such as Georgian, Mongolian and Icelandic. This is a gold mine for folks interested in learning the basics of over [seventy] languages - with no budget!
Two linguists, funded in part by the United States National Science Foundation, travel around the world to document dying languages. These include Chulym and Sora.
The film is the first ever documentary sponsored by the NSF to be invited to the Sundance Festival.
January 8, 2008
In Siberia, fewer than 25 elderly people speak Chulym, a language spoken for generations by traditional hunter-gatherers and fishermen in small rural villages. In Bolivia, a language once spoken by healers to the Inca emperor is on the verge of extinction. In the Orissa state in the east of India, younger generations no longer speak Sora, a language of the region with a complex and expressive way of putting words together.
These examples are brought vividly to life in "The Linguists," a documentary funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Producer-directors Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy Newberger of Ironbound Films accompanied scientists David Harrison of Swarthmore College and Gregory Anderson of the Living Tongues Institute on a journey to record these languages and understand the cultural and political pressures threatening their extinction.
Scientists estimate that of 7,000 languages in the world, half will be gone by the end of this century. On average, one language disappears every two weeks. The human dimension of endangered languages is brought to light in "The Linguists," which premieres at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, on Jan. 18, 2008. The film dramatizes the kind of work involved in reaching indigenous communities and documenting their languages.
"The most surprising discovery was just how interesting and dramatic it was to follow two seemingly no-nonsense linguists--David Harrison and Gregory Anderson--into the field," says Daniel Miller, the film's producer. "The linguists first had to penetrate bureaucracies, then gain trust within communities, and finally inspire speech from people often driven into not using their native tongue by decades of persecution and shame. These challenges required skills finely honed by the linguists and made the expeditions more like adventures."
The adventures were not without risk. In India, extreme poverty in the region had sparked a violent Maoist insurgency. With its travel under strict government regulation, the group was urged by its Indian guides not to travel at night or stay in local villages, and to keep interactions with the populace to a minimum. Because the linguists' work demanded otherwise, the group was forced to take certain risks in the interest of recording endangered languages.
"The resurgence of interest among linguists in smaller languages has happily coincided with an upsurge in activism on the part of the speaker communities," says Douglas H. Whalen, program director for NSF's Documenting Endangered Languages program. "This film provides a thought-provoking sample of cooperation between these groups in the urgent task of documenting endangered languages."
In India, Siberia, and the United States, the group found confirmation of a recurring pattern: schools set up to "civilize" indigenous children had taught them the pointlessness of their native tongues and pushed them toward abandoning that language and the culture associated with it. "The Linguists" lets the communities involved speak for themselves in demonstrating the power of these forces.
"We did not want to make a movie that looked at threatened ways of life with detached sentimentality," says Miller. "We sought to portray speakers of endangered languages, and the scientists who work with them, as regular people who share a sense of urgency about losing something vital. Their stories--at times sad, scary, even hilarious--reveal how the loss of a language affects us as human beings."
"'The Linguists' is a compelling story about the causes of language loss and what scientists are doing to help maintain the languages and the cultures they support," says Valentine Kass, program director for NSF's Informal Science Education program. "We are thrilled that the quality of the production has led to its premiere at Sundance."
TheChineseReader is an very useful website for people learning to read Mandarin Chinese. You can paste in any text in Mandarin and the website will use a large variety of tools (see Resources & Credits below) to transform the text into clickable annotations.
This is wonderful for anyone having difficulty with a Chinese text and wanting that extra bit of help. It could also give some idea to people who know no Mandarin (or read no Mandarin) and are attempting to understand a website written in Chinese characters.
Excellent tool - many thanks Adam!
About the Reader
This project came about in response to the continually increasing number of english-speakers learning chinese. After many years studying chinese myself, and seeing friends do likewise, there were a number of tedious functions I came to feel a computer was better suited to do. Some hair-pulling web-development later, the TheChineseReader™ (TCR) was born.
The feautures of this site are constantly under development, though the speed of that development may not be all too impressive. If you have suggestions for fixes, new features, or other general feedback & inquiries, please contact feedback@thechinesereader.com
TCR is not a commercial site per se, though we are supported by sponsored advertisements, which help cover the costs of hosting, development, and maintenance. Thanks for understanding.
About the Creator
My name is Adam. I am a recent graduate of UPenn, now living in San Francisco. I work for a Management Consultancy, which leaves not that much time to work on this site. =) But I'll try to keep it up to date and add features when time permits.
Resources & Credits
The reader would not function very well without the unsung contributions of all those behind the technologies and data-resources used in this site—particularly those in the open-source community. I would like to take a moment to acknowledge them:
Unihan Database: this database provides the foundation for all of the single character entries and cantonese functionality. It is being used here under the GNU license, and is available at the Unicode website.
CeDict Database: this database proides the data behind all multi-character lookups. An incredible amount of work has gone into this project, and I applaud the people who make it possible. It is being used here under the GNU license, and is available at the Cedict website.
Ruby On Rails: the entire site is coded in the Ruby On Rails (RoR) framework. RoR is a web-application development paradigm that is 100% open-source, and in this developers opinion, the best in class. Again, profuse thanks to those who enable this and so many other sites to be realized through their efforts.
MySQL: alongside the RoR, this site is powered by a MySQL database. MySQL is arguably the most powerful open-source relational-DB package in the world. And it has contributed more than its fair share to web-apps everywhere.
Wenlin Software: Wenlin (文林) is a piece of commerical software whose aid to chinese-learners is almost unquantifiable. I include it in the credits here because thier mouse-over dictionary lookup is the rightful inspiration for the reader's core functionality.
Avatar Languages offers a unique English language-learning experience in Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world with plenty of people from all over the world wandering around in digital forms, known as avatars. Avatar Languages has a language school for English learners right there in Second Life. You can log on and go there to learn!
This is a unique language-learning model, made possible only very recently thanks to our speedy technology. The possibilities are broad, as you can teleport to anywhere you want! Sushi in Tokyo with an English teacher? No problem. A tour of London with an English tutor? No worries!
The Linguist List, from Eastern Michigan University, has an amazing list of language links that just couldn't go unmentioned. Included are links regarding linguistics, endangered languages, natural languages, constructed languages (conlangs), writing systems, language meta-sites and language families.
This area of the LINGUIST list contains information on languages and language families, plus links to websites devoted to natural and constructed languages, to writing systems, and to language resources, e.g., dictionaries.
