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Language Guides
Bonaire - Dutch Caribbean - The Antilles island group is a Dutch protectorate. It is made up of two island groups; the largest islands are Curacao and Bonaire. Papiamentu, the native tongue of many of these islands, is a mix of Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French, English, Caribbean Indian, and some African. At this page, you can learn a lot about this language, plus find out what you can do for fun if you're ever in the islands.
Chinese Multimedia Tutorial - This little tutorial is divided into three sections: greetings, expressing thanks, and some phrases about food. For each, you can see the sentence and hear it if you have audio capabilities. Now you know how to order another glass of orange juice in Mandarin!
Ernie's Learn to Speak a Little Hawaiian - (thank you very much), Ernie, for this page, which teaches just a little Hawaiian. You'll find pronunciation notes and a little glossary.
Foreign Languages for Travelers - Just select a language you already speak, and then click on a language you'd like to learn. You'll find over 60 of them here, including Hindi, Mandarin, and Zulu. Then you can decide to learn basic words and phrases ("How are you?" "What is your name?" "Where is the bathroom?") or other words or phrases in these categories: numbers, shopping/dining, travel, directions, places, or time/dates. You can read the phrase and hear it (just click on the underlined words). There are also useful links to grammars and translation dictionaries.
French Language Course - The author of this Web page admits his first five lessons on French grammar are b-o-r-i-n-g! But he promises the rest of the lessons will really help you learn to read French street signs, newspapers, and magazines. There are also audio files so you can hear words and brief phrases. Papa? That's French for Daddy. See, it's not so hard.
Friends and Partners - Cyrillic Text - The Russian alphabet is very different from the one we use in English (the Latin alphabet). To get a look at it and learn how to pronounce the letters, try this site. You'll also find links to Cyrillic fonts on the Net and instructions on how to view Web pages in Cyrillic, as well as get them to display the right way on your computer screen.
Gaelic and Gaelic Culture - If you're interested in Irish or Scottish variants of Gaelic or other Celtic languages, check this site. You'll find lots on the various Gaelic languages, plus links to music, products, literature, and more.
Hindi at SU - Hindi is written from left to right in the Devanagari script, which may look very unusual to you at first. This easy-to-use resource puts the basics of the alphabet, numbers, and color names up front in the first lessons. On the alphabet page, sound files let you hear the names of the letters, and you can see an animation of the intricate strokes used to write each letter. When you get into lessons with longer phrases and dialog, you can hear the audio files at two different speeds: "normal" is how two native speakers would talk, while "slow" allows you to really hear each word separately.
Hot Internet Sites in Espanol - This is an annotated list of Web sites in Spanish, appropriate for kids as well as their teachers. For those a little rusty on their language skills, the page offers a reminder to use the AltaVista Web page translator, Babelfish.
Languages from the BBC - The British Broadcasting Corporation offers tutorials in French, Spanish, German, and Italian. Let's look at Italian. Pick Ice Cream Shop from among the many choices. Activity One is a Shockwave game where you drag the correct Italian phrase over its corresponding cartoon. See those kids waving? They are saying " Ciao ," or good-bye, I bet. Hey look, we got a green check mark, and now there is the sound of everyone cheering! Activity Two makes us listen to a Real Audio conversation about ice cream and drag the right words into the correct sentence gaps. This is fun! There are also English as a Second Language lessons for you to try.
Native Tongue - Discover the Hawaiian Language - Learn about petroglyphs: ancient pictographs found on rocks all over the Hawaiian Islands. What do they mean? Who left them there for us to discover? Listen to audio clips of Hawaiian vowels and many common words and phrases. Check out this site wiki-wiki (fast)!
Websparol - Did you know that English and Spanish share many similar-sounding and similar-meaning words? For example, the English "delicious" sounds very like the Spanish word for "tastes good"-- delicioso. Over a thousand of these are collected and explained at the Espangl s section of this page (look in the Cognates section). You can hear pronunciation sound files, puzzle over some riddles in Spanish, try some lessons and links, and even get a Spanish-speaking key pal here.
Yamada Language Guides - This is a neatly organized set of guides to 115 languages. Let's say you wanted to learn some Italian because you're going to Italy on vacation. You could look up phrases that you'd need to know, find information about Italian culture and history, get the daily news in Italian, and even dissect a frog in Italian (that last one is really useful!). Besides languages, this gives links to cultural and historical information about the people who speak these languages. Check the Lakota or the Inuit home pages, for example; there are even pages for Klingon and the languages from J. R. R. Tolkien's books!
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