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Learn A Language Online
More online communities...

13 February 2008

by Huw Collingbourne

Following my recent blog on the LiveMocha online language-learning community, I’ve now discovered a few other similar (to some degree) communities.

Babbel is nice and friendly-looking and has a decent amount of ready-to-learn content to help you learn themed lists of vocabulary. It does this by showing pictures with words shown beneath while a native speaker pronounces them. You can use these to extend your German, French, Italian or Spanish. It doesn’t provide a full ‘course’ (like LiveMocha) however, so is best regarded as an addition to a traditional course rather than a replacement for it.

On Palabea you can learn a variety of languages - English, French, Italian, Hindi, Russian, Chinese and more. The learning content is not all ‘ready to run’, however. Instead, users can write or record material to help others studying their native language. The whole idea is very much ‘community based’ with learners and teachers encouraged to create self-help networks. I haven’t yet decided whether this will appeal to me in the long run. it’s worth trying out, though.

Others worth checking (but which I have not yet joined) include ITalki which is another self-help community and Mango Languages which provides lessons in Spanish, Russian, Greek, German, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian and Polish. I’ll try these out soon. In the meantime, if any readers have recommendations of these or other language learning communities please let me know.