woodriff.org what goes around surely must come around

Things are blowing up over a Free Language! -->

Welcome to the Ninth Edition of The Free Language Letter.

30 new free resources for 14 languages (4 new!) have been added to the site. There are now 343 resources available for 34 languages.

Quick View of What's Inside

• New! English Overview Page
• New Languages! Hebrew, Irish, Luxembourgish and Norwegian
• New resources for Arabic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Irish, Luxembourgish, Mandarin Chinese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian and Spanish
• List of new web feeds including news and podcasts
• Online Translation Resources and Mozilla Firefox Addons
• Featured Resource: The New BBC Languages
• Language Factoid

A few of the latest updates to Free Language include the August Free Language Letter, Wikipedia entries for Italian and Portuguese and commercial resources for Rosetta Stone Learn Italian and Rosetta Stone Learn Brazilian Portuguese.

It's been a while since I have announced the latest resources to the blog subscribers. Here they are:

Beeld South African News in Afrikaans
Beginning Indonesian Learn Bahasa Indonesia Course
Learn Basic Bahasa Indonesia Phrases at Expat.or.id
SEASite Indonesia Resources for Learning Bahasa
World Nomads iPod Lingo Indonesian Language Podcast
World Nomads iPod Spanish Language Podcasts
World Nomads iPod Japanese Language Podcasts
World Nomads iPod Italian Language Podcasts
World Nomads iPod Mandarin Chinese Language Podcasts
World Nomads iPod Hindi Language Podcasts
World Nomads iPod French Language Podcasts
Learn Arabic Free at Speak7
italki.com Free Skype VoIP and IM Language Partner Community
Study and Learn Afrikaans Easy at EasyAfrikaans.com
Improve Your French with the Lille Podcast from France
Improve Spanish with Español Podcast or Spanish Podcast
Taste of Russian Podcast with Free MP3 Audio and PDF Transcripts

We also published a newsletter for May 2007:

Read the May 2007 Free Language Letter.

I thought I'd re-distribute the April edition of the Free Language Letter here:

Third Edition

Welcome to the third edition of The Free Language Letter.

New Resources

Since the last newsletter, 18 new resources for 7 languages have been added to the site:

Arabic

University of Chicago Arabic Circle Lectures Podcast
Madinah Arabic Beginner Language and Reading Courses

English

languagecaster.com Learn English through Soccer/Football Podcast
Breaking News English EFL/ESL Learning Podcast
Exam English Free Practice Tests

French

Learn French by Podcast
Easy French Poetry Podcast
BBC Languages French
Learn French Wikibook
The French École French for Beginners Podcast

German

Learn German Wikibook
MyDailyPhrase.com German Podcast

Italian

MyDailyPhrase.com Italian Podcast

Mandarin Chinese

Mobile Chinese Flashcards Cell Phone Software
Adsotrans Dynamic Chinese Annotation Website and Software Project

Spanish

Chile Podcast and Video Podcast
InstaSpanish.com's Insta Spanish Podcast

General Tools

BBC Better at Languages

Coming Soon...

Our First Podcast

The first Free Language Podcast show will be coming by the end of this month!

Commercial Language-Learning Resources

Within the next month we will be rolling out a better store with a larger selection of commercial language-learning products and services.

Full Stats from freelanguage.org

We will be posting the entire history of statistics for freelanguage.org within the next month. For now, you can see a hint on polyglot's blog.

12 New Languages

The list of potential languages to add to the site will be narrowed down to 12 and posted before the next newsletter!

The Blog Grows

There are now three bloggers over at the Free Language Blog:

• polyglot
• opal myth
• transcombouge

If you are interested in blogging about your language-learning experiences here, you are invited to request a BETA user account on Free Language. As mentioned in last month's Free Language Letter, when Free Language V3 is launched, revenue sharing for users will be implemented.

Current Languages

A quick list of all 12 languages for which resources are currently available on the site:

• Arabic
• Cantonese
• English
• French
• German
• Hindi
• Italian
• Japanese
• Mandarin Chinese
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Spanish

Suggest a Resource

If you have a favorite language-learning resource (or manage a website of your own) that is not listed on Free Language, please let us know by suggesting a resource.

Até a proxima.

The Free Language Community
http://freelanguage.org

Two new podcasts from the folks at Radio Lingua International were added to Free Language:

MyDailyPhrase.com German Podcast
MyDailyPhrase.com Italian Podcast

These are the same folks that produce the very popular Coffee Break Spanish Podcast.

A new language feed section is being put up at Free Language. Here are some of the latest resources that have been added:

Radio Free Asia News in Cantonese
BBC World News in English
BBC Afrique News in French
Deutsche Welle News in German

Thanks to Drupal taxonomy and the pathauto module, this site is able to have quite an extensive category list with corresponding URLs.

For those interested out there, here is an image of the mindmap that shows how this roughly breaks down for the site as it is now. This example show what each language has as far as categories, so there is one of these for ech language on the site. Thus far, that includes Arabic, Cantonese, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Click to view the mindmap.

I hope this helps everyone understand better the thinking behind the category structure on the site. It is definitely not perfect, and the community is always open to suggestions.