Welcome to PolyglotPal!

Dear Current & Aspiring Polyglots,

Welcome to my horde of language learning treasures. Here you will find extensive lists of language learning tools that I have found useful, including print and online resources.

However, my primary focus will be on free online resources.

I believe that everyone who wants to learn another language should have easy access to the resources they need to do it — regardless of how much money they have or where they live!

Before you get started, please see my guide to using PolyglotPal.

I’ve only just begun putting together this website, so please be patient with me. Ultimately, it will contain hundreds of resources.

Enjoy!

Deirdre the Dragon

LearnRussian

Resource Summary

LearnRussian is a Russian-learning service offered for free by the news network RT (Russia Today). It offers basic resources that any beginner student of Russian would need, including language lessons, an alphabet pronunciation guide, vocabulary, quizzes, and grammar tables.

Review

Although I have not yet used this resource in depth since I have not yet studied Russian, it seems to be a great resource for beginners. It has all the materials needed to get you started learning Russian, organized in a clean and easy-to-navigate fashion. It is also chock full of audio for every phrase, so you get ample exposure to pronunciation.

However, I do not think this could serve as a truly effective tool for really learning the language, as the format is not very interactive, so the student must really motivate themselves to work through the lessons. I think this resource is a great supplement to other language learning strategies.

Rating: 3/5

SEAsite

Resource Summary

SEAsite is a webpage put together by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University. Their site offers large troves of language lessons, articles about culture and history, and free transcripts from university lectures/presentations. The languages they offer are Indonesian, Thai, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Burmese (Myanmar), Lao (Laotian), and Khmer (Cambodian).

Review

I have only examined the Tagalog resources in depth, so I cannot comment on the other sites. However, I have a positive impression of the site overall. Although it is very confusing to navigate, poorly organized, and contains many bugs, the information collected in this website is immense. The Tagalog site specifically is filled with audio recordings of all the basic Tagalog words/phrases you could need, as well as recordings of Aesop’s Fables in Tagalog, and much more. It even includes sections for Filipino folklore and culture.

Overall, I would say that this website is scholarly in nature and is great for someone who is willing to deal with its poor layout and navigation. It has a lot of great and accurate information, and can serve as a great reference for the language learner. If they improved the layout of the website, I would give it a much higher rating.

Rating: 3.5/5

Learn-Tagalog.com

Resource Summary

Learn-Tagalog.com is a resource for beginning students of Tagalog. It includes several free Tagalog lessons, each with about 6 sub-lessons, which are based on the Foreign Service Institute Tagalog course. The author of the website also has included some of his own video and audio recordings throughout the lessons.

Review

This is a decent resource for beginners. However, I’d double-check to make sure you’re getting the pronunciation right. Many of the audio recordings on this website are spoken by native speakers; however, the materials recorded by the creator of the website are not, and his pronunciation is a bit lacking. Within the first lesson I had already heard many mistakes in pronunciation (not bad enough that a person would not understand him, but it was still incorrect).

I don’t say this to criticize the author — obviously, a learner of Tagalog may be more helpful to another learner than a native speaker, since they may know what is necessary to explain, what obstacles the learner may run into, etc. However, for pronunciation guides, you’ll want to try to find some native recordings to make sure you’re pronouncing things correctly. Connecting with a Tagalog speaker via a social language learning website, such as LiveMocha or MyLanguageExchange, will help you find someone to guide your pronunciation skills.

Rating: 3/5

LiveMocha

Resource Summary

LiveMocha is a social language-learning website that offers basic training in many different languages, as well as an active language exchange community. Users can specify their native language(s) and the languages that they are learning. Then they have the ability to correct the exercises that other users submit in the process of learning their native language (audio recordings, practice writing exercises, etc). For every critique you give of another person’s work, you earn tokens, which you can in turn use to buy premium language-learning content (or you can just buy it with real money, but why do that when you can get it for free?).

Review

So far, LiveMocha is my favorite social language learning website. It has a massive amount of users who speak every possible language, and you can search for users for particular characteristics (Women / from Greece / speaking German). Then, like Facebook or any other social networking site, you can find a profile for them, message them, add them as a friend, and things like that. Once they are on your friend’s list, you can send review requests to them every time you do exercises (if they speak the language you’re learning as a native language).

The great thing about LiveMocha is that it easily facilitates language exchange. That means that instead of just finding someone to review your work, you can easily find a friend who speaks the language you want to learn and is learning your native language (in our case, most likely English). This helps motivate both of you to help each other. Alongside this, you will be independently completing your own language lessons through LiveMocha.

Unfortunately, not all language lessons are created equal on LiveMocha. Some languages have extremely basic content, although it is still impressive how many languages have any content at all on LiveMocha, and the basic content might still be helpful to some. However, the major languages, such as English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian have fairly extensive content that could be useful for  learners of any level. Even though the lessons do not go to a very advanced level, the writing and speaking exercises are always helpful, as well as chatting or writing messages to other users on the website.

Another downside of LiveMocha is that since all of the basic content lessons are the same in every language, it can be ineffective for teaching certain languages that should be taught differently. For instance, languages such as Mandarin Chinese, which require a huge amount of extra explanation for English-language speaking learners than, say, Spanish does, are not given this extra explanation but are simply thrown into the lessons without understanding tones (pronunciation), pinyin (phonetic spelling of Chinese words), or Chinese characters.

Rating: 4.5/5

Guide to Using PolyglotPal

To get started, please take a look at the sidebar on the left side of the site.

There are two major ways of sorting the resources in this site:

1. By language (click the drop-down menu to see a complete list).

• Select specific language (Spanish, Afrikaans, Telugu, etc.) to see resources that have material related to that language.
• Select “Multiple Languages” to see resources that contain materials for more than one language.
• Select “Any Language” to see resources that can be used to learn any language (this includes websites that allow users to input their own flashcard sets, or things like that).

2. By type of resource.

• Select type of resource (online, print, audio, video, social, etc.) to see resources that match this type of resource.

Please feel free to post any questions if you have them. As mentioned on the front page, this website is currently a work in progress.

Thank you for your patience,

Deirdre the Dragon

Seemile

Resource: Seemile is a great collection of video lectures that teach you the basics of speaking a language. Right now, the website offers Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and Russian to English speakers. If also offers some other language lectures for speakers of other languages.

Review: I have only watched the Mandarin series of lectures, but am very pleased with it so far. The instructor speaks clearly and engagingly, and the visuals are very helpful. Sometimes she goes a bit too fast, but this is not a problem, because you can always pause the video if you need a second to practice. I hope that Seemile adds more languages in the future!

Rating: 4/5

Duolingo

Resource: Duolingo is an innovative new language-learning website that was created to simultaneously teach people a second language, while having them translate parts of the web for free. They currently offer lessons for German and Spanish, but will be working on French next.

Check out the video below to understand the concept:

Review: Duolingo is a fantastic new website that uses the grammar-translation method of language teaching to instruct students in a new language. Although this is not enough to really learn a language, it can be a very effective supplement to language learning. It incorporates audio as well. Best of all, it is offered in a game-like format where users can get “achievements” and points as they go on.

Rating: 4/5

Memrise

Resource: Memrise is a flash-card like system that can be used for memorizing anything, but works especially well for language vocabulary. They currently have content for a massive variety of languages (see categories below). And this will certainly continue to grow, so if they don’t yet have the language you’re looking for, keep checking back — or submit a wordlist of your own to use through Memrise!

Description: Memrise uses adorable graphics, a point system, and a game-like interface to motivate users to continue learning. They currently offer a very wide range of languages, but since content can be user-submitted, the numbers are always growing. The most unique feature of the site are the mems — user-submitted phrases, pictures, or videos that are presented to the user when they first encounter a word, and are meant to create a memorable context for the word. Although it can be helpful for learning a new language, its strength lies in vocabulary-building as opposed to teaching grammar.

Review: I find the sections of the site that are well-fleshed out and have had a lot of time put into them are very effective and useful. I think at the moment, the strongest part of the site is their Mandarin Chinese section. Through their wonderful graphics and explanations, I have been able to learn quite a few Mandarin characters already. Memrise is one of my favorite new language learning tools. While it still has a lot of things to work out (there is a lot of inaccurate user-submitted material, sometimes the site can lag, etc), I believe that as the site grows, it will continue to improve.

Rating: 4.5/5

Language Transfer

Resource: Language Transfer offers free downloadable audio courses in Spanish and Greek. They will soon also offer Arabic, Persian (Farsi), and Turkish.

Description: “Language Transfer offers free language courses with the most engaging and effective methodology available: The Thinking Method. Composed of linguists, pedagogues and activists, Language Transfer aims to unite people with their world through language, and reactivate the thinker through the methodology.”

Review: I really love Language Transfer. Their learning materials are audio-only. So far, I have only tried out the Spanish lessons, but I imagine they are all high quality. Their methodology emphasizes effective communication and cognitive effort over rote memorization and repetition. They are a great place for beginners to start learning a language in a painless and easy way.

Rating: 5/5