The online service will compute a list of words that have been found in the text and categorize them in multiple ways. The words are for example sorted by relevancy and subject. A click on any word will also display the relationship to other words in the text, a definition of the word and example usage from the text.

A word cloud is displayed that is showing all words that have been discovered in the text. It is possible to filter words by relevancy or subject which can reduce the amount of words quite a bit. The subject filter is interesting as it displays word that fall into subjects such as math, science or art.

VocabGrabber has been designed to create a vocabulary list which can be a great help to understand and learn the text that has been pasted into the web form. It is currently only working with text that has been written in English.

GTranslater is an Open Source language translation software for the desktop that uses Google’s translation service that supports 89 languages in total. The interface of the portable software program is pretty basic providing two panes that are used to display the original and the translated text.

The user can paste text into the left pane which will get translated by pressing F5. The translated text is then shown in the right pane. Language selectors are available below each pane that make it easy to switch languages. There is even an unknown entry for translating languages that cannot be identified positively by the user.

The translation software needs a working Internet connection to send and receive the information from Google Translate. It usually does not take longer than a few seconds before the results appear in the second pane. Users who are interested in language translation software might also be interested in the following tools: Foreign Language Identifier and 5 essential tools to learn a language.

I am currently trying to learn French and German and often find myself using many computer-based resources to ease my learning, some obvious, like dictionaries, and some not-so, like podcasts.

Dictionaries

Different languages generally have different online dictionaries. For German, I often find myself using dict.cc, whilst for French, I use Reverso. The best way to find dictionaries is to Google, but one option to definitely consider is the ever-growing Wiktionary. Effectively every language has a Wiktionary and whilst it can be difficult to navigate, it is quite large and the range of languages makes it amazing.

Verb conjugators

Verbix is another web-based tool. It allows you to conjugate verbs, and even supports irregular ones.

The free web-based tool supports verb conjugation in 97 languages, ranging from Afrikaans, to Milanese, to Old English to Welsh! They offer Windows shareware which supports over 300 languages.

Verbix also offers a tool too which analyses text and guesses its language.

Podcasts

Podcasts are a very useful way to perfect your listening.

It is very useful for me to hear a native German or a Francophone to speak.

Browsing iTunes will obviously bring up many possibilities.

My suggestions? For German, use Slow German. For French, try One thing in a French day. Naturally, I can’t make suggestions for other languages!

Vocabulary trainers

One of the best ways to learn is purely to repeat.

Many vocabulary trainers are available. These allow you to input words, or use preprepared word lists, and then be tested on them. The trainers compile statistics so you can identify weak points etc.

For OS X, try the freeware Vocab. A wide-range of options exist for Windows users; ProvaLingua seems popular. Another option, which also works under Linux, is this program.

Wikipedia

I already mentioned that Wiktionary exists in many languages, but so does Wikipedia.

To improve your knowledge of a foreign language, try reading an article on your native language Wikipedia and then on a foreign one. It won’t be the same word for word, but many ideas will be similar so you should be able to pick out some key words.

Wikipedia is also a good way to find technical vocabulary in a foreign tongue.

One excellent foreign language identifier is Polyglot 3000. The main – and only purpose – of the software program is to identify foreign languages. It does that by analyzing text that gets pasted into its interface. All that the user needs to do is therefor copy a sample of the text into the program interface and hit the F9 key to make the software analyze the text.

The software will display the identified foreign language afterwards giving a percentage value that is defining the recognition accuracy. The program will furthermore rate the recognition rate and display similar languages.

Polyglot 3000 is currently supported 474 different languages that it can recognize. The recognition can be narrowed down by only scanning for the most popular languages or only Cyrillic languages. The software program supports both Unicode and ANSI encodings.

What I love about the game is that it is a true learning experience and gives you a bit more than small flash games nowadays. After you “hear” a symbol you can say it to someone else, based on the reaction you get you will eventually decypher it. You can write down what you think a symbol means and it will be displayed before you try to say it. Since a sentence can contain a maximum of four symbols, you eventually get to some complex stuff.

The game looks great, and although the controls are a bit cluncky, playability and UI wise it’s great. the language is loosely based on Esperanto and Mayan, take a look at the info on the site, so it is somewhat realistic, the bare bones of what linguists have to do for real languages. If you think you’re up to translating the language of an alien culture, give it a go!

Let’s get started by taking a glance at an interesting website that accumulates English students from all over the world and besides providing some learning resources suggests ways to talk with the other learners world-wide using either Skype or MSN as the main framework. I think active talking is the biggest problem concerning foreign languages, all other activities seem to be much easier compared to it.

Speak-English-Today maintains a database of people who are willing to break the weird feeling of talking to other English learners and start improving their and their partner’s capabilities of self-expression. Experience conversation with people from different countries, it’s even fun sometimes. The initial courage will pay off in the end. Paid courses with native speakers are also available, optionally.

How about some listening exercise? High quality (maybe rather prestige) listening materials often cost fortune but you can try out some interesting listenings at ESLVideo without paying a single dime. There are several videos for each level of knowledge under which you can find a survey asking you question related to information mentioned in the video. There aren’t many of them so far but it’ll take you a few tens of minutes to go through all of them.

Finally, two useful online tools to help you with the studies. The first one would be an amazing Flash application called Visuwords that allows you to put in any word and consequently shows all words related to the one you provided connected with varied lines that show their relationship. Types of words are distinguished by having different colors explained in the legend.

The second tool is a definition dictionary called LingoZ, sort of a wiki for vocabulary that allows people share their definitions, vote for them or just search for them and browse glossary if they don’t intend to register.

Good luck with your studies :)

The beta version of Mango is open to all users but language courses are only provided to English speaking users. Once signed in users can select from eleven different languages including Japanese, German, Mandarine Chinese , Spanish, French and Russian. All courses are divided into several lessons which are made up of sheets each.

The Japanese language course for instance is made up of 101 lessons, the first lesson of the course has 91 sheets which are called slides here.

Each slide takes up one sheet which means information are separated to concentrate on the important aspects. I was first a little bit worried because the Japanese course began with a conversation that was only displaying Japanese characters which I could not understand.

Luckily those characters were all explained on later slides of that language lesson. I really liked how this was done. The English meaning first, below the Japanese letters and a Japanese speaker who pronounces the words. Everything can be replaced immediately and if you move the mouse over a Japanese word you get an overlay showing how the word is pronounced.

That help does not use the International Phonetic Alphabet but a simply English word of the Japanese characters. Still really helpful to get it right at the beginning.

Several slides contain important information about basic language concepts. Others ask the user a question which he has to answer (for himself) in a time given.

For example. The first sentence that you learn is “Hello ! How are you.” After showing and pronouncing these words in Japanese and giving the user background information the user is asked what Hello and afterwards what How are you means in Japanese. This is shown after a certain time so that the user exactly knows if he was right or wrong.

Speakers seem to be professionals only. I took a look at the German language course as well and it seems that all courses have the same setup. A difference in the German course is that they use colors to show which English word belongs to which German word and explain what it would mean literally.

Mango is in my opinion an excellent online language course which I will be using to learn at least Japanese. Something which I always wanted to do but never had the motivation to do. I hated those book courses with tapes or CDs which were just to uncomfortable to use.

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Mango

The add-on is configured to use Google Translation as the default Translation service. You may change this behavior if you prefer Yahoo Babelfish, PROMPT, Altavista, FreeTranslation or IM Translator. The add-on places an icon in the status bar. Right-Clicking that icon opens a menu with all the available translation options and a link to the preferences.

The add-on can be configured to translate the website in the current tab, a new window, a new tab or the sidebar. You may also select to add a quick translation option when the icon in the status bar is left clicked. You have to select the languages for quick translation by yourself.

The translator add-on is an excellent time saver if you have been using translation services before. Sure, you do not necessarily need the add-on to translate the websites. You could also do it manually by visiting the translation service and pasting the url to translate into the form field.

Not all podcasts are like radio shows of course, some look much more like audio lessons, like university courses without the classes. And this is what I will be talking about now. I found a great website that has three large lists of links to websites that offer podcasts that teach you something. That something is either languages, cultur or university courses. It is up to you of course to decide what you want to learn and hear, just download all the podcasts you like and transfer them to your mp3 player. All podcasts are encoded in mp3 format which makes it possible to have even large lessons take up just some megabytes.

Let us take a look at the three possibilities:

Languages: Links to podcasts that teach you 14 languages including German, French and Japanese. Most of the courses are for beginners, I suggest you read the explanation at the website that compiled the list before you download the podcasts.

University Courses: A compilation of links to colleges and universities (US) that offer free podcasts of some of their lectures. You find a wide variety of courses such as law and social sciences.

Culture: Many links to interesting podcasts and even audio texts. Concentrates on art, pop culture and media. Great.

All courses consist of audio and text lessons divided into chapters and those are divided further into courses like basic course volume 1 and  volume 2. Most units and audio files seem to be really big, the test mp3 files that I listened to had a size of about 10 megabytes each and lasted for about 20 minutes.

The language courses could serve as an introduction or supplement for learning the language but they seem to be rather old, the first basic volume of the German language course for instance was printed in 1961. If you want to learn a new language and lack the money to purchase one of the high priced language courses you might want to try this online course and rent additional books from a local library.

source: lifehackers