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.
It seems that the absolute best way to learn a language is to go to a country where it is spoken - live it and study it, simultaneously. This can be a challenging path to take, but the reward is instant progress, the fastest way from "I don't understand" to "As easy as falling off a log". Traveling, living and studying abroad is an exciting way to learn any language while broadening your cultural awareness.
Wikibooks is a great idea. Like Wikipedia, Wikibooks consists of content that is public domain, which means that anything you find there is reusable in any fashion you like. This means it is truly Free and Open for learning and teaching.
As always with Wikimedia projects, you are free to improve on the information created by fellow humans!
From Website
The Polish language is a member of the Western Slavic group of the Indo-European family of languages. It is easiest to learn if one already knows some other related language.
The most closely related are other Western Slavic languages: Czech, Slovak, Kashubian and Sorbian. More distant are the Southern and Eastern Slavic languages like Russian, Ukrainian, and Serbo-Croatian. Even further, but still somewhat similar are the Baltic languages: Latvian and Lithuanian. Polish is spoken by a total of approximately 40 million people, making it the second most widely spoken Slavic language in the world, next to Russian, and whose influence is almost up to par with her bigger sister. Other Slavs, especially the Bulgars (who consider Polish the most popular third language there) understand Polish and can pick it up with not much effort.
Someone who doesn't speak any Slavic language, but speaks some other Indo-European language, may still find many similarities between Polish grammar and the grammar of that language as well as many similar words.
Learning Polish is very difficult for those who don't know any Indo-European language well, especially for those who speak only Chinese, Japanese, or Korean... but as long as you are committed to learning Polish it is possible. If you are familiar with any other Slavic language (i.e Russian), then you have an advantage as this group share very similiar grammatical structures as well as a common history among them from their rise as well-organised centralised kingdoms in the Middle Ages to the Communist era.
This Wikibook is designed for anyone who wants to learn the basics of the Polish language. It is suitable for beginners and those who've been learning the language for a few years. Polish is written with a particularly unique version of the Latin alphabet.
Take control of your flashcards + share them with friends
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!
German-Flashcards.com is a fast-loading, useful site for German learners to manage and practice vocabulary lists (words and sentences). There are many existing word and sentence lists created by other users that you can snag and use right away. You can also create your own lists and sentences on-the-fly and test yourself until you know them all. As a result, this resource works for Spanish students of all levels, beginner to advanced. The self-testing is done via built-in flashcard software that you control.
Online-Spanish-Course.com is a fast-loading, useful site for Spanish learners to manage and practice vocabulary lists (words and sentences). There are many existing word and sentence lists created by other users that you can snag and use right away. You can also create your own lists and sentences on-the-fly and test yourself until you know them all. As a result, this resource works for Spanish students of all levels, beginner to advanced. The self-testing is done via built-in flashcard software that you control.
Chinese-Course.com is a fast-loading, useful site for Mandarin Chinese learners to manage and practice vocabulary lists (words and sentences). There are many existing word and sentence lists created by other users that you can snag and use right away. You can also create your own lists and sentences on-the-fly and test yourself until you know them all. As a result, this resource works for Mandarin Chinese students of all levels, beginner to advanced. The self-testing is done via built-in flashcard software that you control.
The website has an integrated dictionary that gives explanations of individual charaters and terms (two or more Chinese characters that go together to create a concept or word) and includes examples of how these are used in real sentences. In addition, when you view a sentence, you can scroll over the charaters and view annotations. NB: You can copy and past any Chinese text you want into the site's Text Analyzer and it provides you with what you see below (see grey scroll-over pop-up in image for annotation).
Something I have found incredibly useful is the Sentence of the Day email that you can subscribe to on the site. This sends a different sentence every day and shows the Traditional and Simplified versions, complete with a translation of the sentence.
If you upgrade to a premuim membership (~$5/month) you can also hear audio for the sentence. In fact, the only thing you cannot do without a membership is hear the audio on the site. Other than that, it is full-featured and incredibly quick and helpful for learning Chinese through memorizing words/sentences and their constituents.
Today's Sentence of the Day caught my attention, and reminded me to post about this cool tool for Chinese learners!
Bravo Oliver for this excellent site and keep up the great work!
From Website
Study Chinese from Home
Welcome to the website of Chinese-Course.com. Here you can learn Traditional and Simplified Chinese online with our effective Flashcard System.
Improve your Chinese with only 10 minutes a day!
Multiple Choice exercises and an innovative flashcard system will improve your Chinese in a relatively short time
New words, idioms and phrases are added slow or fast to your personal vocabulary list, depending on how fast you learn
You can listen to words and sentences with high quality sound files. Over 10.000 recorded words from Native speakers of Taiwan.
Suitable for all levels - beginner, intermediate and advanced Mandarin Chinese learner
Learn how to write with the integrated stroke order tool
Words are explained in English, German and Spanish. Pronunciation is shown in Pinyin and Bopomofo (Zhuyin)
Learn Chinese with funny jokes, famous quotes and romantic poems
Learn traditional and simplified characters at the same time
Anki is a cool piece of Free Software for learning vocabulary words and phrases. It uses spaced repetition to help increase learning speed and memorization by repeating more often the terms you don't know and gradually decreasing those that you do.
Yesterday I received an email from Jon at eduFire letting me know that Free Language had been chosen for their Top 20 Language Bloggers on the Web roundup. The blog entry alone is a great resource for those interested in languages in general as well as language learning.
eduFire is a new website for learning and teaching languages online via video chat. In addition to live language tutors, the website has videos, forums, flash cards and other resources. The design is light and bright, there are lots of smiling tutors waiting to teach eager students and it appears to be an overall smooth operation.
eduFire has generously offered Free Language readers a free hour video tutoring session for the first ten folks to email him at freetutoring [at] edufire [dot] com. Just mention that you saw this post on Free Language.
Cheers to eduFire all around for their roundup and offer for free lessons!
Omniglot is an excellent resource for learners of just about any major world language. Simon Ager has put together an exceptional amount of information about the systems used to express language in the written form, complete with images, explanations and audio samples.
This article in particular brings attention to Simon's resources regarding the Abjad (consonant alphabets) used for writing in Hebrew.
From Website
Hebrew is a member of the Canaanite group of Semitic languages. It was the language of the early Jews, but from 586 BC it started to be replaced by Aramaic as the everyday language of the Jews. Since then it has continued to be used as a liturgical language and to some extent as a spoken vernacular.
