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).

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

It doesn't matter how badly you want to learn another language, if you don't have a member of the opposite sex handy who speaks the language you're interested in, you simply won't have the necessary motivation. Software can't help w/ that.

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)

Which Language?

[hether]

It would help if you mentioned which language(s) you want to learn. I've ran across sites that are very helpful for a particular language, but don't want to hunt them all down right now. If we knew what exactly you were looking for, we could make suggestions.