Type: Webpage
Chinese-Tools.com is by far the best site for learning Chinese I have ever come across. This site contains just about everything you could hope to learn about Mandarin Chinese and the Chinese culture all in small, easily digestible lessons. The lessons are available for a variety of languages to learn Mandarin, not just English. These languages include English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Catalan. Chinese-Tools.com has over 40 lessons which cover more than just speaking the language, it has audio samples that you can download, charts and explanations of Chinese characters, explanations of the culture behind the words and phrases and their proper useages. These lessons are broken up into easy ten minute exercises which can easily be fit into a daily routine. This seems like so much to offer but really their lesson plan only scratches the surface, much of the rest of the site is dedicated to learning more about china, it's culture, it's history, it's art, and so much more. The site also includes many tools which will help you better grasp the language, these tools include basic ones like dictionaries and thesauruses, as well as less common tools, like a Chinese name gender game, to help you distinguish female and male names. There are also games to help you learn how to use the proper Chinese relationship terms, and many tools to help teach you how to write and read Chinese characters. Perhaps the most valuable feature of this site is it's incredibly active community of various nationalities trying to learn each other's language. Here you can talk with Chinese people who are learning English, and help each other in your pursuit of fluency. Here you can ask any question about culture, travel, daily life, or anything about China and the Chinese culture. Perhaps the most useful feature of this kind of large, active community is the ability to connect with others who are natural speakers, there are many threads on these forums where people connect and call each other over the Internet for free using Skype to talk to each other in real time. This allows you to help them learn English, and for them to help you lean Chinese. If Mandarin Chinese is what you are interested in learning then this site comes with my highest recommendation, if you really are serious about learning the language I can think of no better way than to talk via Skype to natural born speakers of the language and work with them directly, there really is no substitute.
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Type: Webpage
The Indo-European Language Tutorials is more like a cross reference site for many Indo-European Languages. It includes some tutorials, pronunciation guides, and language comparison tutorials for the similar languages. There is even some historical information explaining the roots of the language, and how it evolved, as well as linguistics theory and information on how these languages influenced each other. The French tutorials also have mp3 snippets to aid with pronunciation. The languages are grouped into the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages, with several non Indo-European Languages represented as well, including Finish, Indonesian, and Turkish. In the Romance languages French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese are represented, in Germanic, German, Dutch, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, and in Slavic, Croatian, Ukrainian, and Russian. I would say this website is most useful or serious language students, or those with a familiarity in one or more of the languages, but weakness in the others, where these kinds of comparisons and references could be used to further their understand of the languages and concepts as a whole.
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Type: Interactive Videos
Ma France is an excellent program from the BBC, these interactive learning French videos are targets at British citizen looking to learn more about France, and speaking French. The high production qualities of the BBC make for an engaging and fun series that feels like a travel adventure guide, showing you the sites, customs, and culture of France all while helping you learn about their language. Each video is subtitled in both French and English so you can follow along with each video to get a feel for the natural speaking experience of the language. Each lesson also contains vocabulary, grammar, and extra exercises to help tie memorizing of the language to the videos. These really are top quality videos, perfect for anyone wanting to learn French, however, the videos are geared towards someone who already speaks some French, so it may be hard to use them as a starting point to understanding the language.
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Type: Book (Online)
Mike Gasser, a computer science and cognitive science professor at Indiana University started writing this book after teaching an introductory linguistics course and finding the available textbooks to be inadequate. The book doesn't teach any one language, but rather covers the structure, assembly, and composition of languages as a whole. This isn't for someone just looking to learn how to communicate, or pick up some conversational bits and pieces for an upcoming trip, but instead is for the serious linguist. If you find you really want to understand the how and why of language assembly this is probably one of the best resources around. The book isn't that long, and many of the earlier lessons could potentially be of great help to someone looking to get a better understanding of the language they are learning, understanding "how" and "why" a language is the way it is will certainly accelerate the process of integrating a new language. In short, everyone should take a look at this book, some will find a few useful tidbits, others will be engrossed by the depth and attention to detail.
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