The
Global Language Online Support System (or GLOSS), produced by the Defense Language Institute in sunny Monterey, CA, offers over
six thousand free lessons in 38 languages from Albanian to Uzbek, with particular emphasis on Chinese, Persian, Russian, Korean, and various types of Arabic. The lessons include both reading and listening components and are refreshingly based on real local materials (news articles, radio segments, etc.) rather than generic templates.
[more inside]
posted by theodolite
on Oct 11, 2012 -
23 comments
"
Rosetta Code is a programming
chrestomathy site." Each page describes a programming concept or task, then lists how it's implemented in dozens of programming languages. Useful for learning a new programming language, especially if you're already familiar with how to do it in another language.
posted by Deathalicious
on Feb 16, 2012 -
13 comments
Discover Europe's television heritage.
EUscreen offers free online access to videos, stills, texts and audio from European broadcasters and audiovisual archives. Explore selected content from early 1900s until today.
[more inside]
posted by Lezzles
on Feb 7, 2012 -
3 comments
"For over half a century, the
UCLA Phonetics Laboratory has collected recordings of hundreds of languages from around the world, providing source materials for phonetic and phonological research, of value to scholars, speakers of the languages, and language learners alike. The materials on this site comprise audio recordings illustrating phonetic structures from over 200 languages with phonetic transcriptions, plus scans of original field notes where relevant."
(Description from website.) Many more recordings -- indexed by
language,
sound, and
geographic location -- are available
here.
posted by cog_nate
on Dec 9, 2008 -
12 comments
At
One Minute Languages you can learn greetings, talking about names, counting, and more in
Catalan,
Danish,
French,
German,
Irish,
Japanese,
Luxembourgish,
Mandarin,
Norwegian,
Polish,
Romanian, and
Russian.
posted by sveskemus
on Nov 11, 2008 -
25 comments
Mango is a new beta service offering free online language lessons. 11 languages available (each with 100 lessons). For English speakers there are lessons in French, German, Italian, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Pig Latin. For Polish and Spanish speakers, lessons in English.
posted by nickyskye
on Nov 7, 2007 -
35 comments
Qoolsqool is "a free and open educational resource for educators, students, and self-learners around the world."
posted by anjamu
on Sep 29, 2006 -
9 comments
Wikiwords is a collaborative project to create a dictionary of all terms in all languages.
posted by anjamu
on Aug 11, 2006 -
18 comments
Discovering Chylum: Swarthmore Professor David Harrison traveled to Siberia to learn about
Chulym, a previously
undiscovered local language that reflects its population's culture of hunting, animastic belief system, and bear worship. [More Inside]
posted by gregb1007
on May 21, 2006 -
17 comments
"When I read his work, I forgive him all his sins". Edmund Wilson
disliked being called a critic. He thought of himself as a journalist, and
nearly all his work was done for commercial magazines, principally Vanity Fair, in the nineteen-twenties; The New Republic, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties; The
New Yorker, beginning in the nineteen-forties; and The New York Review of Books, in the nineteen-sixties. He was
exceptionally well read: he had had a first-class education in English, French, and Italian literature,
and he kept adding languages all his life. He learned to read German, Russian, and Hebrew; when he died, in 1972, he was working on Hungarian.
Edmund Wilson and American culture.
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posted by matteo
on Aug 25, 2005 -
12 comments
Twisting Tongues in Other TonguesThis page was originally created to give a good group of tongue twisters to people in speech therapy, to people who want to work on getting rid of an accent, or to people who just plain like tongue twisters. I hope you enjoy them.
posted by miss lynnster
on Dec 30, 2004 -
32 comments
Do Most Of You Yanks Really Understand What The Brits Here Are On About? Although the cultural mistranslations are probably more a question of tone and habits of irony and understatement, Jeremy Smith's online
American·British
British·American Dictionary, to be published next September, might be of some assistance. Although I still prefer Terry Gliedt's older but pithier
United Kingdom English For The American Novice and even Scotsman Chris Rae's
English-to-American Dictionary. Here's a little BBC
quiz to test your skills. It seems that
Canadians,
Australians and [
another cute quiz coming up!]
New Zealanders are the only Metafilterians to completely capture all the varieties of English usage here. Perhaps it all comes down to the fact that non-U.S. users know much, much less about England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand et caetera than vice-versa? Does anyone else get the occasional feeling we're not exactly speaking the same language here?
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Apr 5, 2003 -
66 comments
