Free Language blogs

Free Michel Thomas Spanish Intro CDs for Brits who Buy Guardian on July 4th and Observer on July 5th, plus Holiday Phrasebooks

polyglot — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:14:30 +0000

In Britain: Get Michel Thomas Spanish Intro CDs Free

If you buy The Guardian on Saturday, July 4th, 2009, and The Observer on Sunday, you will receive two free Michel Thomas Introductory Spanish CDs (~£15).

If you aren't in Britain, but are interested in Michel Thomas, view our deal finder links at the bottom of this entry. It's not free, but certainly cheaper than full price.

From Guardian.co.uk

Improve your Spanish with our 2 free CDs on Saturday 4 and Sunday 5 July, plus 5 handy phrasebooks to collect from Monday 6 July.

For those lucky enough to be packing their bags and heading south this summer, brush up on your languages and experience your destination as the locals do.
Even if you're staying put, you'll soon be able to order that tapas with a new-found confidence.

Starting this weekend, get the two-CD Michel Thomas Method Introductory Spanish course absolutely free with the Guardian and the Observer. The two CDs will allow complete beginners to understand and construct simple phrases using Michel Thomas's unique method of teaching. You learn through listening and speaking - no pens, no homework, no memorizing.

Then every day from Monday collect one of five handy phrasebooks that will cover everything from how to book in at the campsite to bluffing your way in politics and sport. It even covers the key aspects of non-verbal communication for the more passionate discussions....

Monday: Travel & Accommodation
Tuesday: Food & Shopping
Wednesday: Culture & Sport
Thursday: Family & Relationships
Friday: Business & Politics

PLUS, Guardian and Observer readers are being offered an exclusive 50% off the entire Michel Thomas languages range. Simply visit http://www.michelthomasoffers.com for details (P&P applicable).

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/competition/2009/jun/25/learn-spanish

Source/Credit

We initially found out about this thanks to a Free Language user who contacted us. Thanks, Jane!

Find New and Used Discount Michel Thomas

You can use our handy language deal finder to get additional Michel Thomas courses for Spanish and all other available languages. Here are some quick links to help out with this:

Michel Thomas Spanish
Michel Thomas French
Michel Thomas German
Michel Thomas Italian

Or view all Michel Thomas deals.

Learn Oromo Language Basics Online Free, aka Afaan Oromoo or Oromiffa(a), an African Tongue Spoken in Ethiopia and Kenya

polyglot — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:06:29 +0000

Learn the Oromo Language (Afaan Oromoo) Online

Recently we received an email from someone interested in learning the Oromo language online, free of course! Oromo is a minority language spoken in Ethiopia and Kenya.

Well... we looked around for a while and found four resources that, together, give an introductory self-guided course in this African tongue. This is nothing profound, but will provide the very basics about the language, some useful phrases for travel, a humble dictionary and some other useful goodies.

We thought we'd share this here for everyone, all on one neat page, so you don't have to scour around like we did!

http://www.digitaldialects.com/Oromo.htm
http://www.oromoenglish.com
http://www.freelang.net/dictionary/oromo.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oromo_language

About Oromo Language

Oromo, also known as Afaan Oromoo, Oromiffa(a), Afan Boran, Afan Arsi, and sometimes in other languages by variant spellings of these names (Oromic, Afan Oromo, etc.), is an Afro-Asiatic language, and the most widely spoken of the Cushitic family. It is spoken as a first language by more than 25 million Oromo and neighboring peoples in Ethiopia and Kenya, such as the Werji. Older publications refer to the language as "Galla", a term that is resented by Oromo people and no longer used.

More Minority Languages Coming

We are currently building a directory to promote minority languages worldwide, and will be posting more resources for learning many lesser-known and lesser-spoken languages here on the site soon. Stay tuned!

Congratulations! Busuu.com Wins the Silver Lion Prize at the Cannes Festival, the Most Presitious Prize in Advertising

polyglot — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:23:08 +0000

Silbo Gomero Campaign Wins at Cannes

This just in from our friends at Busuu.com:

busuu.com wins a Silver Lion in the International Advertising Festival in Cannes for our Silbo Gomero campaign.

In October 2008 we contracted the Madrid agency La Despensa in order to launch a campaign to improve the awareness of our website.

The outcome was the amazing campaign to “Rescue the Silbo Gomero” for which we won now the most important price in the advertising industry.

We loved the idea from the beginning: If you can learn languages on busuu.com - why not also learn a nearly extinct whistled language from the Canary Islands - el Silbo Gomero? It´s not only an entertaining campaign but it draws the attention to an important cause which we from busuu.com fully support: to prevent smaller languages from their extinction! So we decided to create a fascinating video explaining the history of this amazing language and launched a special section within our website where you can find lessons of “el Silbo” (if you log in, you can see the full content and start practicing).

The outcome was impressive - we received huge media coverage in Spain (contacting all important media by sending them a bird cage with a plastic singing bird inside… they loved it! ;-) and “el Silbo Gomero” was in the news again. The media even supported the application of this charming language to be recognized as UNESCO world heritage.

http://blog.busuu.com/busuu_com_wins_a_silver_lion_in_cannes

Props!

Congratulations, guys, this is excellent stuff. We here at Free Language appreciate your bringing attention to an unusual, endangered minority language, and taking the time, effort and care to integrate it into your system so that people around the world can learn about it, and learn it... for free!

Click here to view our original post on this cool feature - and to watch the prize-winning video!

Visit http://www.busuu.com to learn English, French, German, Spanish and Silbo Gomero for free!

How to Get Pimsleur Language Products for Cheap including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and more

polyglot — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:07:59 +0000

Look no further for Pimsleur language product deals!

Yesterday we published an article about how to get Rosetta Stone products cheaply using our handy custom language deal finder.

So many people appreciated our article that we decided to do the same for Pimsleur language products!

The links below will take you to a cool little tool we've put together to get you the absolute best deals available on all Pimsleur language products.

Use these links any time you want to find Pimsleur products cheaply for any of their available languages (listed below). The deals are always fresh and hot!

Find more deals on other language products in our discount language store. Best of luck in your language-learning endeavors!

How To Get Rosetta Stone Cheap for Any Language including Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Italian and more

polyglot — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:18:44 +0000

Look no further for Rosetta Stone deals!

The links below will take you to a cool little tool we've put together to get you the absolute best deals available on all Rosetta Stone products.

Use these links any time you want to find Rosetta Stone products cheap for any of their available languages. The content is always fresh and the deals are always hot!

Click the following link if you wish to see all available Rosetta Stone product deals for all languages at once.

Also find other language deals at our language shop!

Free Language Shop: Get Cheap Prices and Major Discounts on Language Products - All While Supporting this Resource!

polyglot — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:42:42 +0000

Free Language has been working for a while on a new tool for site users interesting in narrowing down the absolute best deals available online for language learning products.

We have scoured the web and created a quick and simple way for Free Language users to save BIG on products from Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur and Michel Thomas, plus language education materials including DVDs, software, books, dictionaries and much more!

Free Language now brings together the absolute best deals - for you to save. By saving on language products in our shop, you help support future development of this free public resource! Everyone wins.

Visit the new shop and locate the deal you're looking for:

http://shop.freelanguage.org

Some of the most popular products Free Language users ask about are:

Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, language software and language DVDs.

Here are just some of the languages for which you will find cheap/discount products:

Afrikaans, Arabic, Bahasa, Bengali, Cantonese, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Farsi, Filipino, French, German, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Luxembourgish, Mandarin, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Body Language and Sign Language

Byki iPhone App

polyglot — Fri, 08 May 2009 10:08:36 +0000

Byki has a new iPhone and iPod Touch application in the works for language learners. This new app offers many features for language learners, incuding:

Download thousands of free Byki lists through List Central, including your own custom content created through Byki Deluxe. Make lists out of text book material or articles, add them to List Central, and import them to your iPhone!

See a cumulative history of your progress in the new Statistics section

Adjust volume within an activity with improved volume controls

Customize font size for Chinese and Japanese transliterations

Byki for iPhone is great because users can take their learning with them to study wherever time allows, be it in line at the bank or on the commuter train. A quick 5 minutes here and there really adds up when you're learning a new language.

The app is currently available in Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Find out more...

"What we need in language learning" by linguist Steve Kaufmann, plus Why we need public domain language resources

polyglot — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:23:56 +0000

Just came across an interesting (and short) blog entry by linguist Steve Kaufmann, of LingQ fame:

http://thelinguist.blogs.com/how_to_learn_english_and/2009/04/what-we-need-in-language-learning.html

In this article he states that those interested in improving the language learning climate need to do the following:

1) Convince learners that they need to leave the learner content behind as soon as possible. i.e. within 3-6 months.

2) Stop wasting money on text books, schools, conferences, linguistics research, language teacher training, and spend the money on transcribing all the wonderful content that is available free of charge on the Internet.

3) Show learners how to find content of interest, and how to learn from it, meaning mostly listening to it in a concentrated fashion.

Bravo Steve! To this, Free Language would add that any resources created by learners and teachers would benefit from remaining Free and Open in the public domain - protected for future learners - by empowering the content with the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL), the same license chosen by Wikimedia for all of their projects (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiquotes, Wiktionary, etc.).

It is important that we move collectively on the Web towards truly Free and Open language methods, resources, materials, etc. A recent article here overviews some of the existing Free and Open language learning materials.

Let's make sure access to language education materials is free for everyone, learners and educators alike.

Added Language FAQ Section for the Most Popular Language-Related Questions and Answers

polyglot — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:42:25 +0000

Overview

We have just added a language faq section to Free Language! Here you can find many of your burning questions about languages in general and specific languages in particular.

This page is updated daily with fresh frequently asked questions, so be sure to visit back if your question has not yet been answered.

Visit FAQ Sections

Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese, Chinese (Mandarin), English, Farsi (Persian), French, German, Hindi, Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Body Language. Or view all language FAQs.

Rosetta Stone Spanish Software for Cheap!

polyglot — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:55:18 +0000

Just released a nice tool for people to find cheap Rosetta Stone Spanish software!

This is part of a growing marketplace for language products being made available here on Free Language.