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 :)

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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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