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.

Now, you could have different pages like “about_english.php” and “about_spanish.php”, but this would make updating a pain, and very inflexible, plus if you have 20 languages, it means 20 files per page. So how do we get around this? Let me introduce you guys, to PHP constants.

A constant is defined just like a variable, but as its name suggests, it is in fact constant. It can be echoed just like a variable, and is great for defining set pieces of text. Let me show you my method of using constants to easily keep multiple language versions of a webpage, without having to have multiple files for each page.

First of all, let’s take a look at how to define constants. Constant names are uppercase strings, but must not begin with a number and should not start with a special character. For example, let’s define a constant:

define(“NAME”, “Daniel Pataki”);

In this exampe we have defined a constant called “NAME”, and gave it a value of “Daniel Pataki”. I gave the constant a describing name, so I know that this constant holds my name.

The way I create multiple languages is that I create 1 language file for each language. I name them according to the standard 2 letter convention. The English file is named “en.php”, the French would be “fr.php” and so on. I include the language file the user needs at the beginning of all my other files containing text, so they will automatically be defined. There are many way to approach this, but for now, let’s say that the page is always in English, unless a user clicks one of the language links. So at the beginning of the code I would write:

<?php
if (isset($_GET['lang']))
include($_GET['lang'].”.php”);
else
include(“en.php”)
?>

This way the relevant file will be included only. Each file contains the list of definitions I need in the same structure. My name in the English version is “Daniel Pataki”, but in Hungarian we put our family names in the front, so in “hu.php” I would define it as:

define(“NAME”, “Pataki Dániel”);

In the page’s code, I can then simply type the following to display my name:

<h2><?php echo NAME ?></h2>

This would show my name as a level 2 heading. If the user is viewing in English, the output would be “Daniel Pataki”, if the user is viewing in Hungarian it would display “Pataki Dániel”, since this time “hu.php” is included, and not “en.php”. Notice that when displaying contants you do no need to put any special characters before or after the constant name, just type the constant itself as you defined it.

You can use this method to create languages for larger sites too. The reason I especially like this is that it is quite easy to translate the site, you just need to send the file over to someone and he will be able to do it easily, without any training. If you have a larger site it might be a good idea to indicate where the constant will be used. You can do this by defining a constant name like “SIDEBAR_COMMENTS’, or “CONTACT_NAME”. This way you and your translators will have an easier time, especially if you also use PHP comments in the language file for further pointers.

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Instead of deleting the written text, changing the keyboard language and writing the text anew users can make use of the software LangOver which is freely available. The software can convert text instantly between languages. The application will provide access to all installed keyboard layouts but only one can be defined in the program’s options.

A Japanese user who would write in English to correspond with English speaking people could set the options to convert the Japanese alphabet to English and vice verse. The user can perform the operation with the F10 key to convert language 1 to language 2, F6 to convert language 2 to language 1 and SHIFT F10 to convert lower to upper case.

The hotkeys can be changed in the program’s interface. Alternatively the mouse can be used to convert between alphabets instead. The conversion can also be done directly in the program’s interface and copied from there into another application.

There is currently no way to switch between more than two alphabets automatically but the software developer told me that this feature would be on his list for upcoming versions.

LangOver is an interesting application that can be quite a time saver for users who have to regularly switch between keyboard layouts.

Update: Langover 5.0 is now supporting the Linux operating system as well. A Mac OS X version has been announced but not released yet. The last version has been released in February 2010. It appears as if the program is no longer actively developed.

That’s were learning software like Teach 2000 come into play. Teach 2000 offers a flexible learning system which is based on flash cards which is excellent for learning words, letters but also everything else that can be put on the left and right side of a flashcard. The world’s capitals and their countries, the mountains and their heights and so on.

Teach 2000 comes as a portable version and as a version that has to be installed on the system. It comes with a few example fleshcards that explain the principle of the learning software but the user will have to create his own flashcards after looking at the examples. There is unfortunately no dictionary included for common languages.

Creating new flash cards requires some work and it is probably a good idea if additional users would join in and create flash cards for the language or subject that they are learning.

The learning software can test the user and records the history of the results. The tests are highly flexible. The user can select the order, the type of test (multi-choice, basic, puzzle and many more), select the error training interval and set error correction (for example that case does not matter in the answer). Some other interesting features of Teach 2000 are:

• Multi-line questions and answers.
• Phonetic symbols.
• Unicode enabled.
• Print flash cards, tests and crib notes.

Teach 2000 is a very nice learning software which requires some work in the beginning but provides a good range of tests and options for the learning student.

Other languages include German, Japanese, Spanish, French and Chinese. Some features are only available to registered users, like participating in chat rooms or participating in discussions. Others are free for everyone which includes watching English videos.

That would not be different from websites like Youtube if not for the fact that every video is offering an English transcription and a translated version. Registered users can edit the translations or English transcriptions if they spot errors.

The usual social features are all available like friends, profile pages and points for activities. Currently videos make up the biggest part of the community but the developers have plans to integrate games and other activities to the website.

Shared Talk – Interlingual

This website is simply AWESOME. I’ve only registered recently and had the opportunity to only talk to several people for a short time but so far I’ve loved the way this service works. It aims at throwing people with the same desire of improving their language abilities together and allowing them to quickly and easily establish a communication channel for practicing it. The sweet thing about this service is that the website runs on highly developed Flash mainframe with tabbed interface and the communication with others takes place immediately without the need to install any kind of VoIP software. The only thing required for participation in voice chat is allowing the Flash applet to access the audio HW of your computer (either for current session only or permanently for this website) through a classic Shockwave dialog that appears while the voice channel is being set up. That is, after a quick registration where you fill in your profile and state the languages you know or want to learn plus the approximate level of your knowledge to enable the others to decide whether they feel like talking to you or preferably someone else. There are some additional functions too, like adding people you like to your “Network”, sending and receiving private messages and searching for an ideal language partner to share the experience with.
Featuring 113 languages in all, not only English (though, it is the most common indeed).

Listen and write – English

Frankly, this particular site does not appear too sophisticated at the first sight but the content’s what matters most and that’s what cought my attention in this case. Transcribing dictations in real time is what’s being dealth with here and I should say their system works better than I had expected at the beginning. You can use the embedded player to listen to the whole dictation or rather the other one below it which only plays a short part of it while you’re typing in the words you hear. That’s where it actually starts to be interesting. The system is pretty smart and it checks the typed-in words immediately to either auto-complete them or correct your mistakes in real time. Moreover, it repeats this small chunk of audio over and over until the text written by you matches what’s being said, consequently switching to the following chunk in an automated manner. The level of English in these listening exercises differs which is indicated by a number below each of them, thus making it easier to pick the one matching your abilities. RSS feeds for those exercises are available to keep you up to date as well. Some advanced statistics and features like performance diagrams are available after the registration. With the hope for slightly improving this site’s appearance to make it more catchy, I myself consider it a keeper.

BBC Learning – sole English

I’m consent about the general public being aware of various language courses broadcast by BBC, largely through the TV network. But did you know it offered a well-organized and comprehensive online course as well? With daily updated sources of grammar explanations, emphasized vocabulary in articles, audio/video stories, quizzes and thorough summary of idioms and phrases, it becomes a valuable vault of resources related to English in every way. Grab the RSS feed to have the upcoming lessons delivered as soon as they come out.

Most of the content on the website is audio content which can be downloaded as mp3 files to the local computer and from there on the mp3 player so that you could learn on the trip.

You also find Grammar Tips and interactive games that test your language skills. The quality of the spoken language is excellent but the courses remain pretty basic from what I can tell. I think it’s a great way to get a first impression of a language but one has to use additional courses to fully understand a language.

I personally prefer Mango over BBC Languages.

Each section is divided into two subsections that link to the presentations and videos. The Powerpoint presentations have to be downloaded to your computer while the videos are embedded on the website itself. Most tutorials on the website are clearly aimed at users with some background knowledge.

If you take a look at the C++ tutorials in the Language section you see that they are not beginners tutorials for instance. The first tutorial is named C++ Threads while the second and last New Features in the Next C++ Standard. Nothing a beginner to C++ programming would want to start with.

The videos however are excellent, the C++ Threads video for instance has a playtime of 1 hour 29 minutes. Strangely though the other video which was hosted on Youtube is not available anymore which is the only video that was not available. All other videos were hosted on Google Video and ran fine.

The website has a Curriculum Search as well which should help to find teaching material. It’s basically a custom Google search.

The freeware is able to detect more than 260 different language and encoding modules. Usage is simple as well, you copy and paste the text into the language identifier window and press the identify language button. The analyzer will report on the language used and languages that come close to the one used. I presume this is to avoid errors when the reported used language is not the right one, never experienced that case though.

Update: The original website is no longer available. We have uploaded the software to our servers from where you can download the latest working version. Lextek Language Identifier (4)

The program starts up fine after installation, even on newer Microsoft operating systems like a 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows 7. Once you have installed the program you will see the following interface.

First thing that you need to do is to load one, multiple or all languages into the program. These languages are then used in the language identification process. Once you have added at least one language to the interface you can start adding text to the window. This can be done by either typing the text in directly, or by copying or pasting text into the window. Please note that you need to enter at least 200 characters into the window so that text can be identified properly.

Just click on the Identify Language button once you have stopped adding text to run the language identifier. The program will then display the language the text is written in in its interface. You can also clear the text window to start anew.