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Languages
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A.Word.A.Day - Do you love words? Then you'll want to get on the A Word a Day (AWAD) mailing list. It's free! Each day you'll get a new word, definition, and brief quote showing how the word is used. Net-mom's on the AWAD list, along with 200,000 other people! The home page has sample words from today and yesterday, or you can look through the archives to see what the list is like.
AltaVista Translations - This great Web page is also known as Babelfish. You may not need it right now, but it's a good one to remember, just in case. Say you're exploring the Web and your search engine turns up a resource that looks useful for your school report--at least it looks that way because of the pictures. If you could only understand the language the page is written in! But you don't speak German, or French, or Spanish, or Italian, or even Portuguese. Ask Babelfish. He speaks those languages, and if you give him a Web page address, he will do his best to return a translated page to you. This is fun to try--check it out. Remember, if your original search was using the AltaVista search engine there is a handy Translate button next to the appropriate foreign-language hit. It will automatically take you to Babelfish to perform the translation.
Braille: History, Use, and Current Research - Imagine if you could read words by the way they feel to your touch. That's one of the ways blind people read, by feeling the little bumps, which represent letters. This is Braille, and you can learn about it at this page. There are also sources for fonts, equipment, and even music in Braille.
Esperanto: Multilingual Information Center - Esperanto is a fairly new language as these things go: it's been around 100 years or so. It is no one's native language. Rather, it's an attempt to have a common world language many people can easily learn to speak. According to the information at this resource, "About 75 percent of Esperanto's vocabulary comes from Romance languages (especially Latin and French), about 20 percent comes from Germanic languages (German and English), and the rest comes mainly from Slavic languages (Russian and Polish) and Greek (mostly scientific terms)." In Esperanto, every word is pronounced exactly as it is spelled. There are no "silent" letters or exceptions. This makes Esperanto one of the easiest languages to learn quickly, according to experts. Here is how to say "I love you" in Esperanto: Mi amas vin . Try it on your mom.
Ethnologue, 13th Edition, 1996 - What languages do they speak in Croatia? Did you know that in Kenya, more than 60 languages are spoken, including Kenyan Sign Language? You can select any of the 228 countries on this page and then discover which languages are spoken there. Also find out how different languages are related, using the language family tree. The Inuit language, Aleut, is related to the Russian Siberian language, Yupik. Do you know why that could be?
Grammar and Style Notes - Are you a little shaky on the parts of speech? Can you tell a preposition from a present participle? The names may be strange, but you use these elements in everyday conversation. A preposition usually describes the object of the sentence and its location in time, space, or relationship to the rest of the sentence. For example, in the next sentence, the prepositions are capitalized: BEFORE the alarm rang, the cat was ON the table. A present participle just adds "-ing" to the rest of the verb: singing, sitting, walking. This resource teaches the parts of speech in a fun and easy way. You'll also learn about punctuation, building sentences and paragraphs, and yes--even spelling. Knowing the correct names for these grammatical terms becomes very important when you begin to learn another language. You'll want to know what the teacher means when talking about French subjunctives and superlatives!
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.
Say Hello to the World Project - If you wanted to say "Hello!" to the world, you'd have to speak 2,796 languages, according to the Internet Public Library. Learn to greet others in quite a few languages here, including Tagalog, Swahili, and Mayan. Hear Real Audio files of the words and then practice on your own.
Secret Language - Psssst! Want to send a secret message to a friend, one that nobody else can possibly decipher? Head on over to this page at San Francisco's Exploratorium, where you can print out a copy of some substitution cipher wheels. Put one inside the other, twirl them around a little bit, and you're in the spy biz!
SignWritingSite - Did you know that there is a sign language alphabet? You may be familiar with finger spelling alphabets, but this one is different. It's an alphabet for the motion of the hands and body as well as the facial expressions used in making the sign for a particular word. The result looks somewhat like hieroglyphics to someone seeing it for the first time! This type of notation has been around since the 1960s; the idea came from DanceWriting--a pictorial shorthand for writing down dance movements. Why not do the same type of thing for sign language movements? The results are here. Be sure to see if you can read "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" and the other children's stories (look in the Library): all the words are in SignWriting.
The Human-Languages Page - Do you like to amaze people by saying things in a different language? Here's the place to get more vocabulary words in your favorite language. There are tons of links to over 100 different tongues. You'll also find lots of translating dictionaries, tutorials, organizations, internships, and much more.
Tower of English - The Tower is a fun, interactive online magazine for English students and teachers (or anyone else). Visit the Movie Theatre, Music Room, Debate Room, Library, Study Hall, and lots more.
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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