Summary

Wikibooks is a great idea. Like Wikipedia, Wikibooks consists of content that is public domain. That means that anything there is reusable in any fashion, such as for teaching.

This particular wikibook was the Collaboration of the Month in 2005.

From Website

The question arose early in the development of this textbook as to precisely who would be the target audience. Although intended to be a "beginning" textbook on German, many felt that the early lessons were too difficult for younger students with very limited or no experience with German and, perhaps more importantly, limited skills in English grammar. For this reason a textbook on three levels was conceived.

Summary

Adsotrans is a truly amazing resource for Mandarin Chinese language learners of all levels. There is nothing else like it on the web when it comes to reading annotated texts. The dynamic, open nature of the user-driven annotation engine means that the lexicon is constantly evolving with every contributed entry. This enables such aspects of the language as slang, pop culture and important people to be organically maintained by the collective community. Amazing!

Adsotrans.com and the technology behind it amount to a highly-effective manifestation of the power of the web to enable truly dynamic, collective annotation databases. The unique nature of the Mandarin Chinese language has been taken into careful consideration in planning the annotation software, and the results are excellent.

From Website

Adsotrans a resource for speakers of Chinese as a second language. You can find adsotated Chinese texts, Chinese games, and NewsinChinese. Listen to Chinese music, build private vocabulary lists, play customized games, listen to recordings, and do it all in pinyin, traditional or simplified Chinese.

Some materials here are suited for beginners, but most materials cater to intermediate and advanced learners, while some are even at the graduate level. I highly recommend that beginner and intermediate students check out Chinesepod, where I work. I also encourage Linux users to become power Linux users by downloading a copy of the Adso engine. The software will automate pretty much anything you might need to get done with Chinese text.

Like what you see? Learn how to contribute to the Adso project, or let others know about what we are doing by writing a blog post or article to help spread the word. We are a collaborative project and the more exposure we get, the faster we can change the state of Chinese language education, as well as machine annotation, translation and intelligent text processing. On a different note I'm always on the lookout for good texts to annotate, so if you read something particularly engaging please send me an email.

Visit Adsotrans.

Summary

A very useful and cool tool for on-the-go learners of Mandarin Chinese. Almost everyone these days has a cell phone and, with this application, learners can make good use of them for studying Mandarin Chinese when they get a spare moment or are in transit!

Comments

This site has general information about the Hindi language. Also on the site are some useful phrases and many odds and ends about Hindi, such as dialects, dictionaries, forums, newsletters, schools, products, slang and translation.

This site is definitely worth a look for anyone interested in learning about the Hindi language, as well as those learning the language itself.

Visit HindiLanguage.org

Summary

A really solid site for learning Portuguese for beginners. There is also some content for intermediate learners, but at that point, you might as well just doing something like start reading the news in Portuguese, and learning that way.

This site also has a self-contained Portuguese course for total beginners that is well done.

There is some information about the differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese, which is handy. There is also quite a bit of travel information for both Portugal and Brazil.

From Website

From the site:

"The Italian Electronic Classroom! is a project of Centro Studi Italiani, aimed at providing free on-line, useful information on difficult aspects of the Italian language to students, teachers, translators, writers. This is a work in progress. Periodically we will add new pages on topics covering grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and so on. Visit our site again and send us your suggestions!"

Summary

This site can be an excellent companion to any web-based endeavor to learn a language, especially since the cards are stored online and you can be traveling and using random computers to access your study cards.

With this site you can quickly and easily create your own flashcard tests for anything you choose to study: vocabulary, grammar concepts, phrases... the cool thing is it's up to you.

Also at your disposition is a huge database of public flashcard packs to choose from, covering a large number of languages.

Summary

Being reminded to study your chosen number of lessons helps a lot of people stay on their language studies.

This site has lots of content, plenty of lessons and audio to back it all up. Concepts are explained clearly.

This is a very good resource for beginning learners of the Spanish language, with a concentrated focus on the business world.

From Website

businessspanishcom'll teach you how to speak and write business and conversational Spanish by listening and repeating examples and simplified grammar rules. ALL LESSONS and each topic contain vocabulary with recorded AUDIO, and they are organized in Chapters.

Summary

A really solid site for learning Spanish for beginners. There is also some content for intermediate learners, but at that point, you might be better off just reading the news in Spanish and learning that way.

This site also has a self-contained Spanish course for total beginners that is well done.

From Website

Get a Quick Fix of holiday phrases. Find out about Cool Spanish with an audio guide to slang. Follow our beginners' online course. Try the brand new interactive crossword.

From the site:

"We are happy to announce that “A Door Into Hindi,” the interactive, multimedia Elementary Hindi learning website, is partially on line and available now. We invite you to explore the website and try out the various lessons and learning resources.