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Foreign Languages
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!
Dakota Language - As you were growing up, you learned your language. You heard other people speak, and then you imitated the sounds yourself. Here's a way to do just that while you learn the Dakota language, one of many Native American languages. Native speakers help you make the sounds of the Dakota language as you explore a color-coded language "keyboard."
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?
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.
Native Languages Page - Would you like to learn a little Navajo or a smattering of Quechua? Maybe you'd like to try using a Cherokee font or learn something about Mayan hieroglyphs. This page offers links to all of this and more.
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)!
Nurit Reshef: Funland - This site is chock-full of fun little Java games to help you practice Hebrew. For example, check out Word Match. There are four pictures of common objects. Click on English and match the words with the pictures. Now click on Hebrew and see if you can do as well! (Hint: Play the audio of each word, listen to how it sounds, and match the picture to the word that looks the closest to what you heard.) Press Score to see how well you did; then click on New to get four new words 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.
Speaking Chinese - This site offers three short lessons in Chinese and includes audio files. Learn some useful words and phrases to help you meet new Chinese friends. Don't think you'll ever need to know how to say hello in Chinese? Don't be too sure. Once we used CU-SeeMe's Internet video to meet students in China, and they were very impressed we could at least say, " Ni ha o."
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.
The Icelandic Alphabet - If you're wondering what those strange runes in Icelandic words are, check this page. There's also a handy pronunciation guide.
Web Spanish Lessons - Sometimes it's tough to learn a new language if you don't know how it sounds. Here are some Spanish lessons, complete with pronunciations that you can hear. This page will also test you on translations of written phrases. It's like having your own built-in Spanish teacher!
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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