open.ac.uk OpenLearn LearningSpace Open University with Free Courses in Modern Languages

Summary

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.

italki.com Free Skype VoIP and IM Language Partner Community

Big Social Language Learning Community

One of the largest and fastest-growing online social language learning networks, iTalki offers a sophisticated user interface, a large and growing user base, a shared file database of lessons and helpful info as well as a great list of language-learning resources (you have to join to access them fully).

This is a great place to meet people for a language exchange over VoIP (Skype, Gizmo, etc.) and with instant messaging. You can meet and maintain language study exchanges with people from all over the world!

About.com Distance Learning Free Online Language Courses

About.com Distance Learning Free Online Language Courses

Surfing about this morning and came across a helpful list of free online language courses on About.com. The first page covers Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian and Japanese. Page 2 of the list continues with Korean, Latin, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

I was very happy to note that lots of the resources on this list are not yet on Free Language! You better believe they will be soon...

DigitalDialects.com Arabic Language-Learning Games and Activities

Summary

This site has a good selection of online games and activities for learning the Arabic language.

There are also many other languages available on the site.

From Website

Digital Dialects was launched in January 2007, originally a by-product of a dissertation reviewing web resources for language learning. The site was conceived as an educational tool for learning languages, and as a guide to online resources.

DigitalDialects.com Afrikaans Language-Learning Games and Activities

Summary

This site has a good selection of online games and activities for learning the Afrikaans language.

There are also many other languages available on the site.

From Website

Digital Dialects was launched in January 2007, originally a by-product of a dissertation reviewing web resources for language learning. The site was conceived as an educational tool for learning languages, and as a guide to online resources.

English Language Learning and Teaching Article on Wikipedia

Summary

This Wikipedia article can help those out there lost in what I refer to as TOEFL Salad, meaning the many and varied acronyms for learning and teaching the English language. That includes ESL, EFL, TESL, TEFL, TESOL, ESOL, ESD, EAP, EOL... you get the point.

Of course, the article also does a lot more than that, delving into English learning and instruction in English- and non-English-speaking countries, differences between spoken and written English, systems of simplified English, the many varities of English and more.

From Website

A Torrent File for 500 Free Mandarin Chinese Audio Podcast Lessons from ChinesePod.com

UPDATED on February 8, 2017

It seems that this torrent is no longer available anywhere I can find.

I have removed all dead links and left this blog post here for archive purposes.

UPDATED on June 23, 2008

People have emailed me to say that the torrent is down. However, the nature of torrents is that they don't go down easy once they're out there!

At the link below you will find (currently at least) download for all levels of ChinesePod. It's not the 3.1 gigger, there are several options, but it seems to be all there. And legal.

ORIGINAL POST

BYKI.com Download Free Language Software for Learning 42 Languages!

Byki Free Language Software Downloads Logo

I wanted to throw up a quick link to the free language software download section of Byki.

Byki.com gives away free software for learning 42 languages. This is a gold mine for folks interested in learning the basics of many languages - on no budget!

They also offer a commercial upgrade for $49 USD, reasonable, and you get lots of extras with the upgrade.

Have a look!