World Languages and Cultures

This site has video files and activities from the Italian state broadcaster, Rai.

Under Free Materials there is access to digitized Spanish language books in the public domain.

Russia Today, a state broadcaster, offers free educational content.

For learning slang Italian.

A website for Spanish Thesauri

French language thesauri.

An e-thesaurus hosted by Italy's newspaper of record, Il Corriere della Sera.

Free access to numerous dictionaries, a verb conjugator, and word forums.

Weekly podcasts produced by the Spanish Chapter of Amnesty International with a Madrid-based association of community radio stations.

This course emphasizes all aspects of language learning from listening comprehension, rapid vocabulary expansion, exposure to Spanish grammar and common idiomatic expressions, to pronunciation practice and interactive grammar exercises.

This site has resources for the advanced beginner to immediate level French student.

The motto of this site is "Learn Spanish while watching TV".

This site is hosted by Clarin, Argentina's main newspaper. It offers free streaming video.

From the University of Minnesota, the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) is one of the U.S. Department of Education's Title VI National Language Resource Centers, whose role is to improve the nation's capacity to teach and learn foreign languages effectively.

From Indiana University, CeLTIE provides "leadership and technological expertise to support excellent in language teaching, learning and research."

Here you'll find 14301 audio clips, over 55741 dictionary entries, 826 images and illustrations, message boards, and a friendly world-wide community of folks who are interested in Thai language, culture, residency, and travel.

BBC Quick Fix offers a selection of essential phrases for forty languages. The list of phrases varies slightly for each language, but they all include greetings and other essential polite phrases like "I'm sorry I don't speak Icelandic." All lists can be printed. You can also hear all of the phrases pronounced. The pronunciations can be downloaded as MP3 files to take with you on your iPod or phone.

The Digital Dialects website features free to use online games for learning languages. Language resources include games for learning phrases, numbers, useful words, spelling, verb conjugation and alphabets. Games use Macromedia Flash Player.

The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory will be open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.

With Duolingo you learn a language for free while helping to translate the web.

Imendi helps people to learn basic vocabulary of foreign languages. It uses simple game mechanic where you pair meanings in selected languages.

BBC Quick Fix offers a selection of essential phrases for forty languages. The list of phrases varies slightly for each language, but they all include greetings and other essential polite phrases like "I'm sorry I don't speak Icelandic." All lists can be printed. You can also hear all of the phrases pronounced.

Visual Link® Languages was created by the U.S. Institute of Languages and exists to help people bridge communication gaps and to give back to the world in which we live.

Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it. Free audio books, free online courses, free movies, free language lessons, free ebooks and other enriching content — it’s all here. Open Culture was founded in 2006.

“Spanish is Your Amigo” the book teaches grammar foundation and vocabulary. To supplement your listening skills, I have created some videos and tutorials. The more you hear Spanish, the easier pronunciation and recall become.

Verbling is a language learning service that launched back in July. When it launched its purpose was to match native speakers of Spanish and English to help each other learn a new language. Since then it has added support for French, Italian, German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew, and Russian.

The users of this Encyclopedia will have the opportunity to learn about the details of Puerto Rican history, organized in 21 topics, including a special section on the Puerto Rican Diaspora. The content is presented either in Spanish or in English.

The Goethe-Institut is the Federal Republic of Germany’s cultural institution operational worldwide. We promote the study of German abroad and encourage international cultural exchange. We also foster knowledge about Germany by providing information on its culture, society and politics. Our educational and training products enable mobility in an international learning community.

On PONS.eu you will find a free dictionary for translating into many foreign languages. This dictionary offers editorially verified quality content and as such is the ideal reference at school, university and language school. It is also of great use in the office and at home. Reknowned PONS top-quality lexicography is now also available online! Our PONS.eu editorial staff of lexicographers regularly checks all dictionary entries, reworking them whenever necessary.

Surface Languages provides free online language learning resources in thirty-eight languages.

A systematic approach to learning German from Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcaster.

Learn Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and English. Totally fun. Totally free.

This site contains hundreds of visual aids (illustrations) that can be used to support instructional tasks such as describing objects and people (i.e., teaching vocabulary) or describing entire events and situations (i.e., teaching grammar).

This large collection of foreign language media materials orients itself toward scholars pursuing independent study and students preparing for study abroad.

Hear Names provides guides for pronouncing names

The Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey was published in 1942 by the Chicago Public Library Omnibus Project of the Works Projects Administration of Illinois. The purpose of the project was to translate and classify selected news articles that appeared in the foreign language press from 1855 to 1938. The project consists of 120,000 typewritten pages translated from newspapers of 22 different foreign language communities of Chicago.

Geared toward English speakers, this free language resource--for elementary through upper-intermediate Russian--is hosted by RT, a US-based Russian-language television network.

Lingualy is a free Google Chrome extension designed to help you learn a new language while browsing the web.

It draws from 80-plus print journals--and a host of commissioned web resources--to stimulate "a common intellectual discourse among an international readership."

This site aims to provide Americans with resources that advance all aspects of French culture.

Llyfr Aneirin (‘The Book of Aneirin’) is one of the Four Ancient Books of Wales. It is a relatively small medieval manuscript of 38 pages containing an unique text of what may be the earliest surviving Welsh literature. Historically, it may testify to the former existence of Welsh-speaking peoples beyond the territory that we recognize today as Wales, during the post-Roman period.

The European Word Translator is a map and translation tool created by UK Data Explorer. Type a word or phrase into the map's search tool and the translations appear over the countries in their respective official languages.

The Chicago Homer is a multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek.

The Literacy Center provides tutorials and games in English, Spanish, German, and French. The tutorials and games are designed to teach students the alphabet, writing the alphabet, numbers, shapes, colors, phonics, and basic spelling.