If you are planning an international vacation, or simply want to look like less of an “idiota” when ordering at your local taqueria; look into courses on livemocha.com. Though still in beta mode, this site provides an economically non-committal alternative to pricey language courses or books, offering free multi-level language courses in Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
One of the benefits of the course is the option to chat with other students of the same language and level. Also incorporated is a peer-feedback system for audio files which helps to satisfy the oral component of language acquisition.
A great place to dabble, brush-up, or cram in your language of choice.
Brave New Traveler researched 7 other online resources for language learning. After playing around with their suggestions, here are the two sites I found most useful.
BBC Languages Best for French, German, Spanish, and Italian. For these languages, BBC offers an evaluative set of questions that help you locate material on the site that is best suited for your level. I especially love the “Mi Vida Loca” interactive video for beginning Spanish learners, an example that the site is geared towards middle and high-school age language learners. There is also quite a bit of material for beginners in Greek, Portuguese, and Chinese as well as some online and classroom resources for various other languages, including Urdu, Japanese, and Polish.
MIT shares its language courses online, complete with downloadable course material and assignments. Courses are also available in foreign literature, art, music, history and culture, to supplement your language studies. If MIT Open Coursework doesn’t yet offer what you are looking for, you can sign up for an RSS feed that will notify you when new classes are added.
