Free Language Learning Software?

An anonymous reader asks: "Just curious with all the news in the recent years of MIT having courseware online and such.. Has anyone run across any quality free software/courseware for learning new languages (not programming languages, rather, the verbal ones)? This seems like an integral part to the free flow of information on the WWW."

Comments

Esperanto

[InfiniteVoid]

There's Kurso de Esperanto (A Windows program with multimedia files to help with pronunciation.)

You can also find free online courses (with a tutor via e-mail).

Nuku

[lexarius]

http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=885 6&db=mac Good GPL'd kana tutor for Mac.

Re:sanskrit

[solferino]

answering my own question after 10 minutes spent googling...

this appears to be a good online course in sanskrit hosted at the IIT in madras

from the intro page :

The series of twelve lessons is aimed at giving the student a reasonably good introduction to the language. The student will be able to frame sentences relating to daily activities in life and thus will gain enough confidence to converse in Sanskrit though with a smaller vocabulary to begin with. The structure of the lessons is quite different from that of lessons found in conventional Sanskrit primers. It is hoped that the twelve lessons would provide enough details for the student to understand the basic grammar of Sanskrit and sentence formation rules.

i am still interested in hearing from ppl with actual experience in the language as to what they think are good resources - google is great but humans are still the best heuristic :)

(of passing interest : browsing some of the pronunciation guides on the net,
i just discovered that guru is correctly pronounced
with a very short first u - like the u in put or full;
the second u is a full u)

There is NO WAY a computer can help you here...

[Dunkalis]

I'm taking German courses, and there is no way you could ever learn the ins and outs of a language that way. There are exceptions that exist in standard German (Hochdeutsch) that are confusing. I only learned them by using them conversationally.

Suggestions

[StJefferson]

Here's a good link to answer the original question. Diffferent students will learn in radically different ways. Where one person could sit down with a good text and come away with a working knowledge of a language, another person will achieve the same only with a full immersion program.

That said, the closer you can come to complete immersion, the better off you'll be. I'd suggest (just for fun) setting your computer's localization to the language you want to learn. You'll quickly learn a few bits of vocabulary from the translated menus, etc. Of course, if your target language has a radically different alphabet, you'll probably want to Google up a guide to sounding it out. (Arabic and Thai still stop me dead here...)

Next, I'd go looking for some newspapers in your target language published online. You'll doubtless find plenty of cognates (words with similar sounds and meanings across two languages) to words you know, and you'll have an opportunity to start getting an idea of grammar.

You'll probably want to Google for a dictionary for your target language, too -- there are good ones available for every language I've ever tried.

Good luck -- this is a great project!

Re:sanskrit

[xueexueg]

I work for these people: the Digital South Asia Library. We have tons of free stuff -- dictionaries and pedagogical stuff being particular focuses. I could try to pitch it, but just check it out. I'd actually be interested to hear what others have to say.