FSI is an acronym for the Foreign Service Institute, "the (US) Federal Government's primary training institution for officers and support personnel of the U.S. foreign affairs community".
Over the years, the FSI has researched, designed and taught language courses to Foreign Service staff and diplomats. These courses are now available and licensed to the Public Domain.
I was surfing around this morning and ran into a pre-defined search for "foreign language" on ExpertVillage.com.
You can view individual languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, German, French and Japanese.
Loads of other languages are also available.
I was just surfing around trying to find a free bilingual Italian-English dictionary when I came across the Alternative Dictionaires, a site that has literally loads and loads of slang, vulgarisms, insults and profanities from many world languages, from Acadian to Zulu. Below you will find a list of all the languages that currently have entries at the Alternative Dictionary.
This is actually quite useful information, as people very often express themselves using these types of terms and expressions. And it's always better to understand when someone is insulting you, right?!
The Alternative dictionaries are a collection of various forms of "bad language" from many languages. At the moment, there are 2743 entries in 162 dictionaries. This is a collaborative project with contributions from a lot of people. The pages are developed and edited by Hans-Christian Holm.
Acadian Afrikaans Albanian Alemannic Algerian Arabic Alsatian American English Amharic Apache Arabic Armenian Assamese Asturian Australian English Austrian Azerbaijani Baluchi Basque Bavarian Belarusian Bengali Brazilian Portuguese Breton British English Bulgarian Burmese Cajun Cantonese Catalan Cherokee Chinese Classical Greek Corsican Cree Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Egyptian Arabic English Esperanto Estonian Faroese Finnish Flemmish French Frisian Fulfulde Galician Georgian German Greek Guarani Gujarati Gulf Arabic Haitian Creole French Hakka Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Iraqi Arabic Irish Gaelic Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kashmiri Kazakh Khmer Kirghiz Korean Kurdish Lao Latin Latvian Levantine Arabic Lithuanian Lower Sorbian Luxemburgian Macedonian Malay Malayalam Maltese Maori Marathi Mexican Spanish Min Mongolian Moroccan Arabic Navajo Nepali Norwegian Occitan Ojibwa Oriya Panjabi Pashto Persian Plattdeutsch Polish Portuguese Quebecois Quechua Rheto-Romance Romanian Russian Sami Sardinian Scots Scots Gaelic Serbian Serbo-croat Sindhi Sinhala Sioux Slovak Slovenian Somali Sotho Spanish Sunda Sutu Swabian Swahili Swedish Swiss German Tagalog Tajiki Tamil Tatar Telugu TEST Thai Tibetan Tigrinya Tsonga Tswana Tunisian Arabic Turkish Turkmen Uighur Ukrainian Upper Sorbian Urdu Uzbek Venda Venetian Vietnamese Welsh Wolof Wu Xhosa Yapese Yi Yiddish Yoruba Zulu
The ActiveChinese Channel on YouTube provides subscribers with informative cartoon lesson videos for Mandarin Chinese learners.
ActiveChinese is about providing an enjoyable and engaging language experience. We strive to create a virtual Mandarin classroom through interactive flash-animated lessons supported with extensive language resources.
The AskBenny Channel on YouTube provides subscribers with literally loads of videos for learning Mandarin Chinese.
I just read a great article on some of the most difficult and challenging aspects of learning Mandarin Chinese. The article is written in a sort of humorous and chatty tone, and brings up some of the most frustrating things Chinese learners face when they really get down to the nitty gritty details of learning.
Not all foreign languages are equally difficult for any learner. It depends on which language you're coming from. A French person can usually learn Italian faster than an American, and an average American could probably master German a lot faster than an average Japanese, and so on. So part of what I'm contending is that Chinese is hard compared to ... well, compared to almost any other language you might care to tackle. What I mean is that Chinese is not only hard for us (English speakers), but it's also hard in absolute terms. Which means that Chinese is also hard for them, for Chinese people.
A post on one of my favorite blogs brought to my attention the fact that 2008 has been declared "The International Year of Languages" by the United Nations. Cool.
Part of the UN's goal for declaring an international year of language involves "eliminating the disparity between the use of English and the use of the five other official languages." The other 5 official languages of the UN are Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish.
Not surprisingly the resolution was introduced by France's representative, who maintained that it "would ensure a 'global' approach to multilingualism and would promote a reasonable vision of multilingualism at the United Nations." Support for the resolution came from representatives of Tunisia, Andorra, Russian Federation, Romania and Senegal, who "stressed that multilingualism in the United Nations served to enrich the work of the Organization."
I am looking forward to finding out what the UN will actually do in 2008 to achieve their goals. I am of course biased, but I'd recommend putting together some high-quality, multimedia language-learning resources and distributing them online for free under one Public Domain license or another. That would be something tangible that would serve for years to come. I'd build cultural awareness into the curriculum by basing lessons around cultural aspects of the countries where the languages are spoken. I'd also include factoids, geographical info, culinary goodies, musical and historical bits and other such enriching information.
Following is the beginning of the notes from the 96th Meeting of the 61st General Assembly:
The General Assembly this afternoon, recognizing that genuine multilingualism promotes unity in diversity and international understanding, proclaimed 2008 the International Year of Languages.
Acting without a vote, the Assembly, also recognizing that the United Nations pursues multilingualism as a means of promoting, protecting and preserving diversity of languages and cultures globally, emphasized the paramount importance of the equality of the Organization’s six official languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish).
In that regard, the Assembly requested the Secretary-General to ensure that all language services were given equal treatment and were provided with equally favourable working conditions and resources. The Secretary-General was also requested to complete the task of publishing all important older United Nations documents on the Organization’s website in all six official languages, on a priority basis.
Further, the Assembly emphasized the importance of making appropriate use of all the official languages in all the activities of the Department of Public Information, with the aim of eliminating the disparity between the use of English and the use of the five other official languages.
Update on February 10, 2015: Oh no! nciku.com is no longer online as of the end of 2014. The article below has been left for archive purposes and this resource has been removed from our directory.
nciku is a sweet tool for learning Mandarin Chinese online which encourages collective user activity to create a wealth of educational material.
The Open University, based in the United Kingdom, has several free and open courses for learning Modern Languages. Currently, there are courses for learning and exploring the English, French, German and Spanish languages.
The courses on the site range from English Grammar in Context to German: Regionen, Traditionen und Geschichte, and consist of quite a lot of useful education materials, structured to flow as a "physical" university course.
