I was sent a link recently about Cool Gorilla, a website that offers free downloads of mobile phone phrasebooks for French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and Greek. These handy phrasebooks are quite useful for travelers.

Currently, these phrasebooks are available for Nokia and Sony Ericsson mobile phone models.

From Website

Each of the lastminute.com mobile phone phrasebooks has hundreds of sound files that can be accessed through these easy to use applications. Simply decide which language you want on your phone, follow the steps and you could have the translator of your choice within minutes.

Find out more and download these mobile phone phrasebooks.

Woah - just came across beaucoup knowledge in one place: The Archive.org Chinese University Lectures Collection

You can view a tag cloud of the topics for which lecture exist, or simply browse through them.

These lectures could be great to intermediate to advanced Chinese learners who want interesting audio materials to work with.

From Resource

This library of open educational resources features 173 courses from 14 universities in China. The lectures and resources are presented in Mandarin, though a few include English. Subjects covered are business, Chinese culture, communications, computer Science, engineering, humanities, law, mathematics, and medicine. These university level materials are available for free download.

Participating universities include: City University of Hong Kong, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Northeast University, Peking University, Shandong Medical University, Shandong University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, South China University of Technology, Southeast University, Tong Ji Medical School of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Xi’an Jiaotong University, and Zhongshan University.

This collection was donated to the Internet Archive by Professor Li Xiaoping of Peking University.

Visit the Archive.org Chinese University Lectures

License

View the Archive.org License and Terms of Use

There is some really great info about languages over at the Wikipedia Language Portal. It is a great place to start looking into general information on any world language or linguistics and language itself. Furthermore, you can delve into specific detail about many topics in the vast wealth of collective knowledge available at Wikipedia.

From Resource

A language is a system of symbols, generally known as lexemes, and the rules by which they are manipulated. The word language is also used to refer to the whole phenomenon of language, i.e., the common properties of languages. Though language is commonly used for communication, it is not synonymous with it. The scientific study of language, its historical development, characteristics, and use in society is known as Linguistics.

Human language is a natural phenomenon, and language learning is instinctive in childhood. In their natural form, human languages use patterns of sound or gesture for the symbols in order to communicate with others through the senses. Though there are thousands of human languages, they all share a number of properties from which there are no known deviations.

Humans have also invented (or arguably in some cases discovered) many other languages, including constructed human languages such as Esperanto or Klingon, programming languages such as Python or Ruby, and various mathematical formalisms. These languages are not restricted to the properties shared by natural human languages.

One excellent thing to point out while mentioning Wikipedia is the fact that you can read about a large variety of topics in numerous languages. Just look on the left side for the "In Other Languages" menu, and you can click on any available language and jump over to the corresponding Wikipedia entry - page. portal or what have you. Note: This is not machine translation we are talking about here - it is the current entry for that same topic in other languages - some may be larger, some smaller and many may not exist at all.

Visit the Wikipedia Language Portal.

Started using a tool with Firefox this morning that I came across yesterday: the WordChamp Firefox Toolbar for instant translation of words while browsing any web page.

It is a really cool tool! You not only get to hover over any text word and get a translation into the language of your choice, often there is an audio recording of the word that you can listen to! Here's a screenshot of it in action - click to see a larger version:

To get the extension, visit WordChamp and look on the left side almost on the bottom where it says: "WordChamp Language Toolbar for Firefox". Click that while browsing the site with Firefox and you'll install the extension and can start using it once you restart Firefox.

A proper article on WordChamp will be out soon on the front page.