Dumb Little Man points to a source of free foreign language courses online:
FSI Language Courses [is] the home for language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute. These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain. This site is dedicated to making these language courses freely available in an electronic format. It is an independent effort to foster the learning of worldwide languages.
The site contains a discussion forum and access to study materials for many languages, including:
- Cantonese
- Chinese
- French
- German
- Greek
- Portuguese
- Spanish
- Turkish
- Serbo-Croatian
In addition to its own library of information, FSI Language Courses links to other useful tools such as various “learn a foreign language podcasts” and this website about teaching yourself languages.
I know a smattering of German and Spanish (and recently I tried to teach myself Latin). I regret that I’ve never had the time or the inclination to learn more — foreign languages can be immensely rewarding.
[via Dumb Little Man]
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Another good source here:
http://www.learner.org/resources/browse.html?discipline=3
They sell DVD versions of these courses for $500, but you can watch them online for free! The French one is really good; I haven’t tried the others.
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I’d like to second this recommendation; I’ve been a member of this site for a bit (they just redid the entire site) and the support, the resources, the people who volunteer their time and effort to bring it to life and those who participate in the forums are great.
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I have been using http://www.chinesepod.com to learn mandarin. Somewhere on that site is a torrent for the first hundred eps, which is what you want if you are just starting out.
There are a few others in the podcast dir in Itunes that are good too.
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This is great info, I wonder how these products compare to the Pimsleur tapes? These were some language tapes made famous about 15 years ago – I probably could have learned Russian if I stuck with it. These days I’d be interested in learning Romanian, for business purposes.
More from Wikipedia (including the stuff about Pimsleur): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_education
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I took Latin in college and promptly forgot most of it.
As a U.S. government employee, I get free use of Rosetta Stone software for a wide variety of languages. I’m currently trying to re-teach myself Latin. We’ll see how that goes.
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I took Latin for three years in high school. It was immensely helpful in improving my spelling, helping me to understand English syntax, and building my vocabulary, but I was really bad at memorising tables of declensions and conjugations, so after struggling through three years, I gave up. I can still translate a sentence if I spend a few minutes with tables of endings and a dictionary, but the main benefit seems to be that I can look at a sentence in Italian or Spanish for a few minutes, and get the gist of it.
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Free Materials for Learning Foreign Languages…
A rather strange place to find something like this, but I found on the Get Rich Slowly site links to…
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I love learning new languages. I’ll try out this website.
I’ve used Pimsleur before and thought it was decent. Ultimately the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in that country and be forced to use it.
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Free foreign language courses!…
Free foreign language courses!…
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I have been using http://www.activechinese.com to learn Mandarin. They have fresh flash animations talking about hot issues and culture in Chinese. It’s really of fun. I like it. The most important thing is that it’s quite useful.
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If you want to learn modern and ancient Greek language with podcasts, you can try http://www.hitgreece.com
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There’s also a great site for Chinese learning http://www.ChineseSavvy.com.
They have podcasts, plus a couple dictionaries, and forums.
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I have been using http://www.arabicpod.net for learning Arabic. It’s really good because as well as podcasts they have videos, games and many other things
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Link to FSI website is broken, it lacks the dashes – the URL is really http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/
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