Jonathan Stray

A woman holds an iPod displaying a screen shot of 'The Third Ear' language learning application in Hong Kong. The boom in smartphones, led by Apple's iPhone, has inspired language learning tools that would have been inconceivable a year ago. (Photo: AFP)

Free Online Language Lessons Just a Click Away

Want to learn a language? Online courses, podcasts, dictionaries and multilingual social networks can help — for free. Here is our roundup of some of the best resources.

But no matter which language you want to learn, your first stop should be FreeLanguage.org, which maintains a comprehensive directory of the tools available for learners of more than 40 languages. They even have separate blogs with news for students of each language, including Indonesian.

Podcasts

Podcasts are multipart audio courses that can be downloaded in iTunes and played on your computer, MP3 player or smartphone. Most language learning podcasts are distributed as a “freemium” service where beginning lessons are free, while more advanced “premium” lessons must be purchased.

LearningIndonesian.com is such a service, offering 48 free Indonesian-language lessons for native English speakers. These can be downloaded or played right on the Web site. More advanced lessons can be purchased.

For other languages, including English, Chinese and French, try the Praxis Language podcasts. Introductory lessons are free, while access to their full library of more than 1,000 lessons is available through subscription.

The most comprehensive collection of audio language courses can be found at fsi-language-courses.org. Each language course includes about a hundred recorded lessons, plus complete transcripts. Indonesian is not available, but students can learn Lao, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese.

Social Language Learning

Computer-based language courses have been around for decades, but the Web offers something entirely new: a social network of language students who can help each other learn.

LiveMocha.com is an exciting new way to learn a language through a combination of course work and partnered practice, as described in a demo video.

But LiveMocha is also a social network, connecting native speakers who want to learn each others’ language. Students submit written and spoken exercises to be graded by a native speaker, or connect with users across the world for an audio or video chat. I

LiveMocha claims more than 4,000,000 users and offers free beginners courses in around 20 languages, including English, Mandarin, Arabic and Japanese. Indonesian is not yet available.

Video-Based Learning

EnglishCentral.com offers hundreds of free videos for students of English, along with a unique speech training system. Learners follow the video and repeat each line from a transcript, after which the computer grades the student’s pronunciation.

Dictionaries

There are two good Indonesian-English dictionaries online: sederet.com and kamus.net. Both offer bidirectional translation and plug-ins for the Firefox Web browser that add translation to the list of options in the search bar. In our tests, Sederet usually produced more comprehensive results, including idioms.

WordReference.com offers translation between English and Spanish, French, Italian, German and Russian.

For smartphone users, Beiks sells the BDicty English-Indonesian-English dictionary for $19.95 for BlackBerry, Palm and Windows Mobile phones. They sell dictionaries in many other languages, as well as “talking phrase books.”

For the iPhone, Kamusku seems to be the only Indonesian dictionary. The user interface for this $3.99 application is a little buggy, but gets the job done.

Online Books

Wikibooks.org, a sister project of Wikipedia, offers a collection of books in many different languages, some of which are specifically designed for language students.

And, of course, Wikipedia itself is available in more than 30 languages, including Indonesian. Google provides a convenient translation toolkit with a semiautomated translation system, for those who want to help translate Wikipedia.

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