Conscious Manifestations

Welcome to the Eighth Edition of The Free Language Letter.

25 new free resources for 12 languages have been added to the site. There are not as many updates as usual because I have been working behind the scenes on the new overview pages for each language.

Quick View of What's Inside

• New! Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese Overview Pages
• Now Available: 34 Languages :)
• New resources for Catalan, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish
• New Social Language Learning Resources
• New News Feeds in Catalan, French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish
• Featured Resource: Lingro Public Domain Dictionary and Online Translation Tool (and so much more)
• Language Factoid

New! Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese Overview Pages

As I did for the Spanish language before the last newsletter, I have now completed four more language overview sections. Now you will find new homes on Free Language for Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese.

These overview pages are basically a single spot where all the resources for a given language are brought together for users to quickly view and navigate. I like to think they are quite packed with excellent resources for learning the respective languages. :) Some are more filled than others, and the overview pages do include an overview of the language, a list of resources for learning the language, podcasts, news resources, a tag cloud, InternetTV stations, recommended software, an aggregator link and feed and other such useful info.

Now Available: 34 Languages :)

With some of the major changes I have been working on, I have also slipped in a large number of new languages. Since the last newsletter, this includes Bengali, Catalan, Czech, Dutch, Filipino, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hungarian, Latin, Polish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Before you get too excited, know that I cheated a bit on most of these and they list mainly resources for learning languages socially, and do not yet list specific resources for those languages. Catalan, Polish and Swedish are the exceptions with one specific resource for each plus the social resources. Specific resources for the rest will come as soon as I can manage!

OK, onto the latest resources added for specific languages and other such goodness.

Catalan

CaféBabel.com Café Babel Local European Political, Economic and Cultural News Magazine in Catalan and 6 Other Languages

English

Blabbinit.com Blabbinit Learn English with Podcasts, Comics, Karaoke, Blogs, Videos and Chat
EnglishLingQ.com English LingQ Podcast with Free iTunes iPod MP3 Audio using Linguist Method by Steve Kaufmann
ECPod.com ECPod Upload and Share English and Chinese Video Podcasts with a Community and Find Language Exchange Friends
Babbel.com Virtual FlashCard Language Share Site w/English, French, German, Italian, Spanish Tools and Video Game-Like Interface

French

FrenchLingQ.com French LingQ Podcast with Free iTunes iPod MP3 Audio using Linguist Method by Steve Kaufmann
CaféBabel.com Café Babel Local European Political, Economic and Cultural News Magazine in French and 6 Other Languages
FSI-Language-Courses.com US Foreign Service Institute French Free Audio Lessons Downloads
Babbel.com Virtual FlashCard Language Share Site w/English, French, German, Italian, Spanish Tools and Video Game-Like Interface

German

GermanLingQ.com German LingQ Podcast with Free iTunes iPod MP3 Audio using Linguist Method by Steve Kaufmann
CaféBabel.com Café Babel Local European News Magazine in German and 6 Other Languages
FSI-Language-Courses.com US Foreign Service Institute German Free Audio Lessons Downloads
Babbel.com Virtual FlashCard Language Share Site w/English, French, German, Italian, Spanish Tools and Video Game-Like Interface

Italian

CaféBabel.com Café Babel Local European Political, Economic and Cultural News Magazine in Italian and 6 Other Languages
Babbel.com Virtual FlashCard Language Share Site w/English, French, German, Italian, Spanish Tools and Video Game-Like Interface

Japanese

JapaneseLingQ.com Japanese LingQ Podcast with Free iTunes MP3 Audio using Linguist Method by Steve Kaufmann

Mandarin Chinese

EnterZon.com Zon MSU Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) for Learning Mandarin Chinese Interactively
ECPod.com ECPod Upload and Share English and Chinese Video Podcasts with a Community and Find Language Exchange Friends

Polish

CaféBabel.com Café Babel European Political, Economic and Cultural News Magazine in Polish and 6 Other Languages

Portuguese

PortugueseLingQ.com Portuguese LingQ Podcast with iTunes MP3 Audio using Linguist Method by Steve Kaufmann
FSI-Language-Courses.com US Foreign Service Institute Portuguese Free Audio Lessons Downloads

Russian

RussianLingQ.com Russian LingQ Podcast with Free iTunes iPod MP3 Audio using Linguist Method by Steve Kaufmann

Spanish

SpanishLingQ.com Spanish LingQ Podcast with Free iTunes MP3 Audio using Linguist Method by Steve Kaufmann
CaféBabel.com Café Babel European Political, Economic and Cultural News Magazine in Spanish and 6 Other Languages
FSI-Language-Courses.com US Foreign Service Institute Spanish Free Audio Lessons Downloads
Babbel.com Virtual FlashCard Language Share Site w/English, French, German, Italian, Spanish Tools and Video Game-Like Interface

Swedish

SwedishLingQ.com Swedish LingQ Podcast with Free iTunes iPod MP3 Audio using Linguist Method by Steve Kaufmann

Social Language Learning

Below are the latest additions to the social language learning section.

Babbel.com Virtual FlashCard Language Share Site w/English, French, German, Italian, Spanish Tools and Video Game-Like Interface
Palabea.net Palabea the Speaking World Social Language Exchange Network with Videolectures, Podcasts, Images, Docs
Worldia.net Worldia International Community for Making Friends to Learn and Teach Foreign Languages via Skype

News Feeds

Below are the most recently added news feeds that Free Language syndicates.

CaféBabel.com Café Babel Local European Political, Economic and Cultural News Magazine in Catalan and 6 Other Languages
CaféBabel.com Café Babel Local European Political, Economic and Cultural News Magazine in French and 6 Other Languages
CaféBabel.com Café Babel Local European News Magazine in German and 6 Other Languages
CaféBabel.com Café Babel Local European Political, Economic and Cultural News Magazine in Italian and 6 Other Languages
CaféBabel.com Café Babel European Political, Economic and Cultural News Magazine in Polish and 6 Other Languages
CaféBabel.com Café Babel European Political, Economic and Cultural News Magazine in Spanish and 6 Other Languages

Featured Resource

Lingro is a truly useful site with a decidedly free and open approach to multi-lingual dictionaries and online web translation. It provides users with quick and powerful online translation dictionaries and study tools, vocabulary lists and games. The site is "committed to building the Web's largest collection of open dictionaries."

I was struck by the straight-forward, no nonsense approach to open content. The site content is empowered and protected by the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 License. In short, this means the multilingual dictionaries can be copied, adapted and distributed with proper attribution. Equally, content editors must allow their additions to continue to be worked with under the same license. Thus, in an open and free way, lingro appeals to the users for help in creating "relevant translations and definitions" for the these language translation dictionaries.

Since I published the original article, several new changes have been in the works at the Lingro headquarters. Here's a list on their blog of some of the major improvements. There is also a great sections for webmasters that explains how to integrate Lingro into your website. Also added is a new feature for showing each user's personalized reading/vocabulary profile.

They are really cranking it out over there and I send lots of good vibes to this crew that is working to improve Public Domain tools for language learning. :)

Continue reading about Lingro.

Language Factoid

Mandarin Chinese is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and south-western China. When taken as a separate language, as is often done in academic literature, the Mandarin dialects have more speakers than any other language.

Factoid thanks to Wikipedia.

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Chapman
Free Language
http://freelanguage.org

Free Language has now got six people blogging on the Free Language Blogs.

There are quite a lots of varied resources there pertaining to many languages.

Have a look. It might be interesting to you.

I have been traveling around Central Europe for a month, then moving back to the States for a while. Thus, I have not been posting info here lately. I left the aggregator going, though, for fresh info to be on the site. ;)

At any rate, I figure I owe those people out there who are interested an explanation about what is happening with cmanifestations.net and all the other sites that I have in this network including freewiki.info, freemusicsoftware.info, freelanguage.org, freethesounds.org, anonymousphoto.com, mandarinchinese.info, woodriff.org, freereality.org and mychinablog.com. Not to mention the many more that I have in the works and have no released just yet.

Well... here goes.

I am going, little by little, to update or just plain start over, with each of the sites using the newly updated and really sweet Drupal 4.7 content management system (galore). I want to keep up the work with putting lots and lots of information out on the web for free - info that has to do with the things I am most interested in. I think that if it works out to make a living by putting free information on the web, researching what I love and having a few (unobnoxious) text ads and affiliate-encoded links throughout the quality info, I will be a happier person that I already am. :)

For the time being I am working like mad to release a drupalized version of the Heart of the Initiate website. The folks over there are wonderful beings and we are working together to get their site brought up the speed with the wonderful world of Web 2.0.

Until I get that site up and running - and it is a big one - I will be putting off the upgrades of the cmanifestations sites.

No worries though! The new sites will be released in a timely fashion, as well as the old ones to be upgraded.

In fact, I am really looking forward to it.

So please do keep checking in as I will be leaving some notes of progress as I move along.

If you have not already done so, you can keep up easily by signing up for my Feedburner RSS/XML Feed.

In order to quickly and efficiently add many more useful resources to the users of this site, I have added a lot more aggregator link feeds. Basically, these are feeds that provide links to the resources users are interested in by taking search terms from the search engine zniff and pulling them into this site to accompany the many other resources that are here.

This allows users to see the link feed for the terms "learn (language name) free", where "language name" can be any of the ones below (more coming soon).

Note: These links are not personally selected by me, but are available to users for their benefit and are made possible thanks to the wonders of web syndication.

Arabic
Cantonese
English
Esperanto
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Mandarin Chinese
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swahili
Vietnamese

I plan on adding Hebrew, Hindi and others as soon as I can.

Soon I will be implementing a series of resource pages for each language with personally selected links regarding each language. These resources will also contain reviews of the sites that I add in order to best allow users to know what to click and why!

For those of you interested in the search engine optimization side of all of this, it must be noted that this is a great way to add numerous (mostly) quality links to a site quickly and efficiently using the Drupal aggregator module.