Learn French Wikibook

Free Online Wiki Portal for Learning French

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.

The Wikibook for learning French contains free lessons for several skill levels. There is grammar information including adjectives, adverbs, gender, negation, preposition, pronouns, sentences, tenses and verbs. There are also several texts which are used for instruction.

Exam English Free Practice Tests

Summary

This resource has many useful materials for English language learners interested in studying for and passing the essential ESL/EFL exams (mentioned above).

The practice tests are very useful... and free! The level test is great for people interested in determining their level of English knowledge in terms of the standard English proficiency tests.

BBC Better at Languages

Summary

A simple test to see what tips could be handy in your particular language-learning situation.

BBC offers good language courses for many major world languages. Even if the BBC does not have materials for your target language, you can still make use of the questionnaire to evaluate what you can do to improve your general language-learning skills.

From Website

Are you up for improving your language skills?

BBC Languages French

Summary

A really solid site for learning French for beginners to advanced students.

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

From Website

French Steps - A self-contained beginners online course

* Topics
* Grammar
* Fast track
* Pronunciation
* Vocabulary
* User guide

Quick Fix
Printable holiday phrases with audio and mp3 download.

Learn German Wikibook

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.

Adsotrans Dynamic Chinese Annotation Website and Software Project

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.

HindiLanguage.org Website

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

BBC Languages Portuguese

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

Centro Studi Italiani Online Classroom

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!"