Difference between revisions of "Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/Internet-resources-for-polyglots"

From Polyglot Club WIKI
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Line 1,505: Line 1,505:


National anthems with lyrics.
National anthems with lyrics.
I can only appreciate an unheard one by listening to it more times. It's not only me, i guess.


== <div style="color:#119922; font-weight:bold;">Fonts</div> ==
== <div style="color:#119922; font-weight:bold;">Fonts</div> ==

Revision as of 17:50, 31 July 2021

Website-polyglots.jpg
Best Free Services for Polyglots

If your English is not good, please find links with “!!”. Links with “!!!!” are the most important to improve your English. Also, go here.


The Internet is a giant treasure. It provides so many free services.

An interesting list: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/06/27/european-music-media-organizations-article-13/

This page is updated from time to time, not frequently, not regularly. “But how do I know what you have changed since the last time I come here?” Try this: hover your mouse over “Actions” on the upper right corner of this page, click on “history”, select the current and the version you saw last time, click on “Compare selected versions”.

It would be great if you pay a visit to every site on the list. Don't lose your curiosity.

Condensed version with services' names: Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/IRFP-in-brief.

If you want to do creative work to help others to learn languages and to know about cultures, please visit Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/Productivity-tools-for-polyglots.

If you see GitHub or GitLab links, please notice that the download icons mean to download the source code. Unless its language is interpreted like Python and Perl, you will need to build the program on your own. Links to download binaries (built programs) are elsewhere like “Releases” or links in the README.MD file.

It is not recommended to put some banner like “featured in Polyglot Club” on your website, because this list is dynamic.

It is highly recommend to have privacy protections on. An open-source website on privacy: https://www.privacytools.io/

Blue Light Filter & Dark Mode

!! http://jonls.dk/redshift/

Filter for Linux and BSD. Windows version is experimental. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/LibreShift/red-moon/

Filter for Android. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/Tyrrrz/LightBulb

Filter for Windows 7 and newer versions. It is open-source.

!! https://darkreader.org/

Dark mode for web browsers. It is open-source.

Reminder

!! https://workrave.org/

Rest reminder. It can lock your keyboard and mouse buttons when it is time. It is open-source.

!! https://hovancik.net/stretchly/

Rest reminder. It supports Windows, Linux, BSD and macOS. Fewer features than Workrave. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/adrcotfas/Goodtime

Pomodoro timer on Android. It is open-source.

!! https://gitlab.com/axet/android-hourly-reminder

Repeating timer. It alarms every hour or even minute. This reminds you how a minute passes by. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/thetwom/toc2

Metronome on Android. It is open-source.

!! https://www.antcom.de/gtick/

Metronome on Linux. It is open-source.

!! https://sourceforge.net/projects/openmetronome/

Metronome on Windows. It is open-source.

!! https://tmendes.gitlab.io/waterydroid/

Reminder of drinking water on Android with the notification function. It is open-source.

Self-Control Helper

!! https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/

Browser add-ons for blocking websites. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/Alikaraki95/Getoffyourphone

Lock the app and suspend the network for Android. It is open-source.

!! https://timelimit.io/

Limit your app using time for Android. It is open-source.

!! https://detoxdroid.flx-apps.com/

Some other measures to help you on Android. Need to use a PC to enable developer mode. It is open-source.

It can be downloaded from F-droid.

!! https://selfcontrolapp.com/

Block websites for Mac. It is open-source.

Activity and Habit Tracker

https://activitywatch.net/

Track your own activity. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits

For Android. It is open-source.

!! https://gottcode.org/kapow/

Timer for activities. It can also generate a report. It is open-source.

Brain Training

Notice: Whether brain training works or not is still controversial. If you don't believe it works, please skip this section.

https://www.lumosity.com/

Practise through mini-games, 3 random games everyday for free.

https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/gbrainy

Mini-games. It is open-source.

http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/

Dual n-back. It is open-source.

Its latest version 4.8.7 is not available on the website, but on the SourceForge page.

Workout

!! https://github.com/oliexdev/openWorkout

Workout assistant for Android with videos. It is open-source.

Relaxation & Meditation

!! https://mynoise.net/

Generate noises in different scenarios.

!! https://gitlab.com/tslocum/meditationassistant

Meditation assistant. It is open-source.

!! https://gitlab.com/axet/android-binaural-beats

Binaural beats. It is open-source.

!! https://ashutoshgngwr.github.io/noice/

Background noise. It is open-source.

!! https://colemak.com/

This one supports a lot of languages in Latin script, but it means to learn typing again. It is worth it. You may have noticed that “Kolemak” is even better than Colemak. How to modify keyboards will be discussed below.

A better layout image.

Note that the download link on the home page is “Caps Lock Unchanged”. The idea of replacing Caps Lock with Backspace is great because of its convenience to press Backspace, but having it unchanged is generally better because it's punitive to press Backspace, urging you to make fewer misspellings.

There is a flaw of no “„” or “‚”. You can replace “÷” and “×” with them. Also, the positions of single and double quotation marks only benefit British people for not pressing Shift. You can exchange their positions, too.

In my modification, I exchanged positions of “q” and “j”, “x” and “b”, according to the letter frequency, because the original “b” and “j” positions require a bit more movement of fingers, meanwhile “x” and “q” are less frequent. There are also some pages on this.

If you want to type even more characters, you will need the autocorrection, which can turn multiple characters into one.

People think it's uncomfortable to type “he” with Colemak because it requires stretching the index finger and shrinking the middle finger. I type “e” with my ring finger in this case.

https://bepo.fr/wiki/Accueil

Based on French, giving consideration to European languages. But if you don't type French much, it might be not ideal.

No English translation for this site, but it doesn't matter, because this keyboard is generally pre-installed in common operating systems. You just need to find it in the “French” section of keyboard settings.

https://forum.colemak.com/topic/519-rulemak-russian-colemak-layout/

Variant of Colemak for typing Cyrillic. It is available as source code. It is pre-installed in some Linux distributions including Debian, but it might require some effort as mentioned in the guidance of changing keys in “Colemak” to make sure it is listed on those 2 XML and 2 LST files. “Greek (Colemak)” is also available there.

For Windows, Portable Keyboard Layout is required. Or you can use that keyboard creator to do that manually.

!! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kl.ime.oh

It is lightweight and supports many languages, with many keyboard layouts. But it has problems, such as poor plugins.

Typing

!! https://klavaro.sourceforge.io/

Typing tutor. It is open-source.

!! https://10fastfingers.com/

A place to train typing.

Shortcut

!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_keyboard_shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts in general.

!! https://defkey.com/

Keyboard shortcuts for specific programs.

To-Do-List & Task Calendar

!! https://super-productivity.com/

Good-looking schedule with a pomodoro timer. It is open-source.

By the way, that “at a glance” video recording guy behaved so similar with some college lecturers.

!! https://www.taskcoach.org/

It has many functions: hierarchy, progress, different views of the list. It is open-source.

A video about it.

!! https://abstractspoon.com/wiki/doku.php?id=todolist-description/

A to-do-list with different views. It is open-source.

!! https://tasks.org/

To-do-list on Android. It is open-source.

!! https://crazymarvin.com/to-dont/

To-don't-list on Android. It is open-source.

!! https://eck.cologne/peafactory/en/html/calendar_pea.html

Calendar program with encryption. Java is required. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/Etar-Group/Etar-Calendar

Calendar program. It is open-source.

Notebook

!! https://github.com/zadam/trilium

Advanced notebook with hierarchy, text formatting, link map, synchronization and encryption. It is open-source.

!! https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/

Note with hierarchy. It is open-source.

!! https://www.zim-wiki.org/

A simple desktop wiki. It is open-source.

!! https://gsantner.net/project/markor.html

Text editor with markup on Android. It is open-source.

!! https://eck.cologne/peafactory/en/html/notebook_pea.html

Write RTF files with encryption. Java is required. It is open-source.

!! https://standardnotes.org/

It is privacy-focused and saves as you type. Can't insert images without payment. It is open-source.

Mind Map

!! https://www.freeplane.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Successful fork of the discontinued FreeMind. Java is required. It is open-source.

A video about it; another video about it.

!! https://github.com/juzzlin/Heimer

Simple and intuitive mind map. It is open-source.

Hierarchical Spreadsheet

!! http://strlen.com/treesheets/

It combines mind map, spreadsheet and other forms of data. It is open-source.

A video about it.

International Phonetic Alphabet

!! https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/

The site of the maker. The full IPA chart can be downloaded here. There is also a link to an interactive IPA chart.

!! https://easypronunciation.com/en/ipa-phonetic-transcription-converters

IPA and romanization transcriptions. Very detailed, but there is a limitation for each hour. Its “More Tools” is also noteworthy.

https://github.com/dmort27/epitran/

Transcription to IPA. It is open-source. It won't help if you don't know Python.

It only supports words, as is discussed. Somebody can develop a tool for sound change.

Logic

https://forallx.openlogicproject.org/

Book under a public license and is edited by different people.

https://tellerprimer.ucdavis.edu/pdf

Book under a public license. Old and short.

https://www.logicmatters.net/tyl/

All rights reserved, conditioned distribution allowed.

!!!! https://www.duolingo.com/

The best free online language courses. It is actually a collection of exercises instead of real teaching courses. It is also under criticism, from quality to method.

Don't neglect their other products.

https://www.coerll.utexas.edu/coerll/materials

This one has a lot of materials as well as other things.

https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/

Mainly courses of Foreign Service Institute, Defense Language Institute, Peace-Corps. FSI is initially aimed at middle-aged officials, so maybe not everyone likes it.

https://www.coursera.org/browse/language-learning/

Some super cool courses. This is suggested by RomDasha.

!!!! https://www.lingolia.com/

A little site with useful basic courses of 5 languages with good design.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Languages

Books are mostly incomplete and in lack of update, but some are nearly completed or completed, not bad.

Speaking

!!!! https://forvo.com/

Dictionary of pronunciation.

!! https://speechling.com/

Submit the recording and wait for the response. Supported languages are not many.

https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/

With this one, you can say you are “studying” pronunciation.

A little tutorial and a big playlist of various videos.

!! https://ivypanda.com/tongue-twisters

Try not to hurt yourself when practicing.

It covers an older site and has improved a lot. There's no copyright affair involved because such a list is not a “creative work”.

You may want to ask if this page is protected by copyright. All my comments are protected, the list of links like the one in that brief version is not.

Vocabulary

!!!! https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Offline flashcard platform. You can find its manual at “Docs” on the website. Content can be rendered in HTML and CSS. There are also many powerful add-ons for it. It is open-source.

Its community has many shared decks, but this is not mentioned at the home page. There is a successful collaborative project: Ultimate Geography.

Unfortunately, not free on iOS.

Related add-on wiki page. Some are picked out by me.

You can also set up your own server for synchronization with djankiserv or anki-sync-server.

If you want to batch rename files, there is a program to do it and it is open-source.

If you are still confused, go to communities about Anki and find solution.

!! https://github.com/tema6120/ForgetMeNot

Flashcard program for Android. More advanced than AnkiDroid in many aspects, including necessary instructions. You can even set intervals for the spaced repetition. It is open-source.

!! https://mnemosyne-proj.org/

If your want a simple alternative to Anki, try this one. It is open-source.

!!!! https://www.memrise.com/

Flashcards in high quality can be found. Some most popular languages have courses of 0-5k and 5k-8k words, or divided differently and still reach 8k. A few can be over 30k.

To see the flashcards without registration, go here.

Though it is said to be memorizing words with “mems” (memes in many cases), the “mems” are actually not in good quality.

You can import from a spreadsheet.

!! https://quizlet.com/

It is not so good at efficient memorization as Memrise. It is for having quizzes. But you can find specific practice such as reflexive verbs, weak nouns.

It even encourages you to copy other people's card decks and create your own variants, in case a good deck has flaws and the creator doesn't respond to it.

You can import from a spreadsheet.

!!!! https://www.clozemaster.com/

Learn with cloze. It is effective, but sometimes it is just repeating the same point in different questions. Also, synonyms are not supported.

!!!! https://context.reverso.net/translation/

Among its products, the mobile version of Context seems to be the most helpful: learn and practise new words with example sentences.

!!!! https://babadum.com/

It's pretty good for educating young polyglots.

!!!! https://github.com/tkrajina/10000sentences

Sentences from Tatoeba to practice. It is aesthetically same with Anki (I mean copy-paste). It is open-source.

!! https://www.languageguide.org/

Some basic vocabulary.

!! https://www.wordofthehour.org/

They may think “word of the day” is too inefficient, so do I. It is constantly being improved, but not satisfying for now. The response of a contact is quick and friendly.

http://sublearning.com/

Practice sentence translation through subtitles. Sometimes subtitles don't match sentence-to-sentence.

!! https://babadada.com/

Visual dictionary. No grammatical genders or pronunciation, suitable for reviewing.

A lot of languages has not been completed yet, without any notice. Also, look out for polyseme mistakes.

https://github.com/lexica/lexica

Word game for Android. It is open-source.

https://mainichi.me/

A great idea to learn a word each time you open a tab. Only for three languages. Only for beginners.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Swadesh_lists

Swadesh lists are basic vocabulary initially for linguistic use. But it can be the starting point of vocabulary building for language learners as well.

!! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists

Frequency lists. Make use of it with programs that help to memorise, such as Anki.

If you seriously want to learn a language, and there are no ready-made free flashcards reaching the native level, and you don't want to spend money, this may be the most effective way to memorise words.

Test

!! https://www.transparent.com/language-resources/tests.html

Test your proficiency.

There is only one set of test for each language. Don't search the meanings of the words you don't know, if you want to take this test again later.

!! https://www.arealme.com/vocabulary-size-test/en/

For testing your vocabulary size.

There is only one set of test for each language. Don't search the meanings of the words you don't know, if you want to take this test again later.

!! https://www.ezglot.com/vocabulary-test.php

Test your vocabulary size. It's faster and maybe not so accurate. The result is at an inconspicuous corner.

Reading

!! https://okular.kde.org/

Reader for desktops. It supports annotations. Dark mode at “Settings -> Configure Okular... -> Accessibility -> Change Colors”. It is open-source.

!! https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/

Reader for Windows. Dark mode and Annotation are available. It is open-source.

!! https://librera.mobi/

Reader for Android. It is open-source.

!! https://quiterss.org/

RSS feeder for desktop. It is open-source.

If you don't know what RSS is, you can read this article.

!! https://gitlab.com/spacecowboy/Feeder

RSS feeder for Android. It is open-source.

!! https://www.wikipedia.org/

Numerous articles in many languages and they are usually proofed to read.

Use Privacy Redirect to be redirected to a Wikiless instance, a private front-end.

Also take a look at its sister projects on Wikimedia.

Remember it is left-leaning and this is nothing new.

!! https://www.kiwix.org/

Make Wikipedia and some other sites offline. It is open-source.

https://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/

The largest collections of books in the public domain, mostly in English though.

There is a book catalog website with ever-changing domain names: LibGen, which contains a wider range of books. Make sure you don't see any strange link there.

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/archives.html

List of book collections. Many links are available in “https” now but appear as “http” on this page.

!! https://getflowlingo.com/

Read and create flashcards to learn. The response of a contact is quick and friendly.

!! http://paralleltext.io/

As what its domain name says, parallel text. Classical works.

!! https://readlang.com/

Articles in many languages, with online dictionaries.

!! https://vocabhunter.github.io/

Find unfamiliar words in a document. Great for getting familiar with all words in a document before reading. Better to disable the filter. Java is required. It is open-source.

For Chinese, Japanese, Lao, Thai, Vietnamese and some other languages, word segmentation is required.

!! https://github.com/jeffkowalski/gritz

Reading speed trainer. Perl and GTK are required. It is open-source.

To open it, just run “gritz.pl”.

For Chinese, Japanese, Lao, Thai, Vietnamese and some other languages, word segmentation is required.

You can also modify the source code (don't execute the file, but open it with a file editor), like these:

  • $font: font name and size.
  • $span_black_open: colors of black characters.
  • $span_red_open: colors of red characters.

p.s. Colors are “web colors”. You can find a “color picker” to get the hex values of a color.

  • $wpm = 200: default reading speed (words per minute).
  • button_slower: WPM increment per click.
  • button_faster: WPM decrement per click.

Maybe when I have free time, I can try converting it into Python and do some modification: add shortcuts, create a user interface with BeeWare, add word segmentation support.

!! https://comfortreader.rhizomaticdesign.net/

Streaming reader for Android. It is open-source.

!! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/autoscrolling/

Autoscrolling for Firefox. Good for practising reading speed. It is open-source.

!! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simple-auto-scroll/dccjkemhmffnljlnnoffljpkhkfpldff

Autoscrolling for Chrome. Good for practising reading speed.

https://www.bible.com/

Declaration: suggesting it is not for preaching.

The full Bible has been translated into at least 670 languages, more than double the number of languages of Wikipedia.

!! https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

Save the web page as a single file.

There is also a SingleFileZ, which can compress pages.

https://learning-with-texts.sourceforge.io/

This is a PHP project. The page design is very bad and you need sufficient patience to read the guide and follow it. It's a DIY, offline and free version of LingQ. Inflection is not supported. It is open-source.

LingQ is freemium, but it can't be recommended for its unacceptable limitations on free users.

A video for its introduction; a video about its setup; a video about its more features.

Their discussion is open again now. Hope they can get on well with each other.

I have a question: Why not Python?

Writing

https://owl.excelsior.edu/

It is not for learning languages, but for how to write and read.

It is teaching about English, so something does not applies to some other languages.

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/purdue_owl.html

Another online writing lab. A bit dumb but also good.

!!!! https://www.wiktionary.org/

Practical, no need to switch dictionaries, translations in many languages are shown together.

!!!! https://www.wordreference.com/

It is really completed.

!!!! https://www.linguee.com/

It is completed, with example sentences of high quality. You can even find uncommon words with meanings of common words.

!!!! https://bab.la/

It is completed for several languages.

!!!! https://github.com/meetDeveloper/Dictionary-Anywhere

Add-on for Firefox, powered by Google's partner Oxford Languages. You can download history in TSV format (with “txt” as file extension). It is open-source.

!!!! https://iate.europa.eu/

Terminology dictionary of European Union. That is to say, what you search should be a term.

!! https://glosbe.com/

It supports a lot of languages, citing results from several corpora. It is somehow messy and in many cases inaccurate, but if the dictionaries listed above have no result about a word, this one may help.

!!!! http://goldendict.org/

It supports several dictionaries in the free version, and also Lingoes in the paid Android version. No one would want to pay after knowing a link below. It is open-source.

You can search the word by selecting it and listen to Forvo pronunciation. You can also add dictionary websites.

!!!! http://aarddict.org/

Offline dictionaries. It is open-source.

Translator

!!!! https://translate.google.com/

The best translator by now. It also supports optical character recognition on mobile.

Use Privacy Redirect to be redirected to a SimplyTranslate instance, a private front-end.

There is an article on how to save its text-to-speech files

There is a video about how machine translation works.

There is a video about why machine translation makes mistakes.

!! https://www.bing.com/translator

It supports several languages that Google Translation doesn't support, but its quality is not so good as Google's.

https://simple-translate.sienori.com/

Browser add-on for Google Translate. It is open-source.

!! https://translatr.varunmalhotra.xyz/

Translate to multiple languages at one time. It is open-source.

https://nicetranslator.com/

Similar to Translatr, but it is powered by Microsoft.

https://www.soimort.org/translate-shell/

Command-line translator from different sources. It is open-source.

https://www.apertium.org/

It is open-source. Promising.

A video about it.

Conjugation

!!!! https://cooljugator.com/

Conjugation and some declension.

!!!! https://www.verbix.com/

Conjugation.

Gender

!! http://www.passion4teq.com/apps/

Apps for practising genders in 4 languages. You can also estimate how long you can practice until your battery becomes empty.

Number

https://codeberg.org/GrimPixel/Numeration

Program to practise reading numbers. Python is required It is open-source.

In progress. It can see major progresses during school holidays. Introduction: Language/Multiple-languages/Vocabulary/Numeration-Tutorial.

!! https://www.languagesandnumbers.com/numbering-systems/

Rules of writing numbers, more concise than Wikipedia's entries.

Grammar Checker

https://languagetool.org/

It supports several languages but works well on the few. It is open-source.

A video about the rule editor.

!! https://audacious-media-player.org/

Lightweight audio player for desktops. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/enricocid/Music-Player-GO

Audio player for Android with ergonomic UI design and is lightweight. It is open-source.

!!!! http://www.listeningpractice.org/

To practice listening. Voices are from volunteers and their qualities vary. It also has conjugation exercises.

If your browser doesn't play the audio automatically, then you need to grant the website the autoplay permission (next to the URL in Firefox).

!! https://librivox.org/

Books read by volunteers.

!! https://lyricstraining.com/

Listen to songs and fill in the blanks of lyrics.

!! https://rhinospike.com/

Listen to recordings.

!! https://www.languagepod101.com/

Materials can become non-free after a period of time.

It doesn't mean that you can't see an archived lesson forever if you don't pay. They offer a random lesson each Thursday for free.

Just too much English.

!! https://audio-lingua.eu/

Listening materials with public licenses. It doesn't have transcripts but can be searched according to your level.

!! https://www.audacityteam.org/

This is for editing audio files, but it can also do something else: record the playback from your computer, which means that you can record online stream radios.

There are a video about labeling, a video about pronunciation checking and a video about automatically splitting words from a vocabulary recording.

A video about tips for using Audacity.

It is open-source.

!! https://obsproject.com/

When you are playing games in the languages you are learning, it is often hard to focus on the voices and subtitles without failing your goals in the games. You can solve this problem by recording your gameplay with this program. It is open-source.

https://greatlanguagegame.com/

Listen and identify the language. It has been shut down, but it has links to other sites in the same type.

Text-to-Speech

If you don't know how to get the voices on Windows, you can see Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/How-to-use-SR-and-TTS-on-Windows.

!!!! https://www.cwu.edu/central-access/reader

A TTS program. Supported platforms are limited. It is open-source.

!!!! http://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm

A TTS program.

!!!! https://github.com/Danesprite/tts-util-app

Text-to-Speech For Android. It is open-source.

!!!! https://app-t2s.web.app/

It is the highest rated platform on Android.

!! https://readaloud.app/

Browser add-on. It is open-source.

https://pypi.org/project/pyttsx3/

Offline Text-to-Speech with Python. It is open-source.

a video about it.

https://pypi.org/project/gTTS/

Online Google Text-to-Speech with Python. It is open-source.

a video about it.

Speech Recognition

!!!! https://www.speechtexter.com/

Turn audios into texts, powered by Google.

!!!! https://speech-to-text-demo.ng.bluemix.net/

Turn audios into texts, powered by IBM Watson.

https://pypi.org/project/SpeechRecognition/

Speech recognition with Python.

A video about it.

Example Sentence

!!!! https://tatoeba.org/

Example sentences in many languages. It is open-source.

Don't forget to try searching in both directions. You can not only see the meaning of a sentence, but also try to translate a sentence into the language you are learning and see how you did.

If you want to translate, please translate sentences with audio first, because the translations may appear on sites which provide translations of audio.

!!!! https://www.dictionarist.com/

Search for example sentences of a word, with the Lingoes dictionary inserted. Many results are from Tatoeba.

!! https://deskell.sketchengine.co.uk/run.cgi/skell

Sketch from a large of text corpus.

!!!! https://weblate.org/

Website for localisation. You can easily find parallel texts. It is open-source.

https://subasub.com/

Search for parallel texts in subtitles.

Parse Tree

!! https://www.mapsofspeech.com/2017/10/02/treeform/

A tool to draw parse trees and have a better understanding of sentence structures. It is open-source.

A video about it.

!! https://ltc.sourceforge.io/

A different one to draw parse trees. It is open-source.

Text Memorization

!! https://github.com/zg/text-memorize

For memorizing text. Python is required.

For Chinese, Japanese, Lao, Thai, Vietnamese and some other languages, word segmentation is required.

!! https://rememberthetext.com/

Memorization with hints. It has some libraries of text samples. You can add your texts.

It is also useful for building the impressions of sentence structures.

Unfortunately, there are problems:

  1. It does not recognize the punctuation of many scripts such as Arabic;
  2. For Chinese, Japanese, Lao, Thai, Vietnamese and some other languages, word segmentation is required.

Phrasebook

!!!! https://www.funeasylearn.com/

It provides apps for both phrase and vocabulary, but I have categorized it in this one because it provides IPA in the apps of phrases.

!! https://www.loecsen.com/

It supports many languages, and it is detailed.

!! https://www.50languages.com/

Actually a few more than 50 languages. You can also have a test there.

World Clock, Calendar & Weather

!! https://www.timeanddate.com/

It has not only the world clock for every city but also many other features, such as calendars with festivals of most countries.

!! https://www.ventusky.com/

A lot of things about meteology.

!! https://earth.nullschool.net/

Wind, weather, ocean conditions.

!! https://waqi.info/

Air condition around the world.

Community

!! https://www.italki.com/

The most popular language learning community by now. It also pushes helpful articles written by teachers.

!! https://www.reddit.com/

It is surely a miscellany, and it is a good miscellany.

Use Privacy Redirect to be redirected to a Libreddit instance, a private front-end.

Go to r/languagelearning or r/linguistics to enjoy.

!! https://www.tolearnfree.com/free-educational-sites.php

The design of the webpages is old-fashioned but it has a lot of content, including little tests.

Its French version has something more.

!! https://polyglotclub.com/

There are some rare features of it, such as Wiki lessons, Events. It adopts ISO 639-3, almost every language is included here.

https://www.minetest.net/

Voxel game, with endless possibility for creation, ultimate immersive language learning tool. There are some bilingual servers and bilingual people. It is open-source.

If you know some language learning partners, you can go there and practice language exchange.

For singleplayer, Minetest is just a tool for development. You will need a “game” to play, like the default “Minetest Game”. There is a game called “Tutorial” that helps beginners. There are also cool mods like “technic”, “digiline”, where you can program with Lua.

To look for a good server, see if people there welcome you warmly, if signs are properly written for guidance, if the public infrastructure is complete and easy to access.

There is a server with rules banning controversial names like Hitler, where I saw a Stalin.

Questions & Answers

https://hinative.com/

Ask and answer with people around the world. Unfortunately, don't expect them to be effective in dealing with spamming and abusing. But I'm not encouraging you to do so.

Search before you ask.

Do not feed the trolls.

Do not answer blanked homework questions, because the questioner is too lazy to deserve an answer.

Do not answer the meaning of a single word. The questioners should consult a dictionary on their own. Exceptions are newbies, because they may be just following the tutorial and have a try, not lazy.

Do not ask questions in English channels, because the questions are too many, the answer rate is extremely low. Try asking at Polyglot Club.

Ask in parallel text. Then the respondent won't need to ask you about the real meaning if the sentence is not understood.

https://stackexchange.com/sites#culturerecreation

One of the most popular Q&A site.

Language Exchange

!! https://conversationexchange.com/

Find language exchange partners online.

!! https://www.lingbe.com/

An app for talking with people.

!! https://mylanguageexchange.com/

Free users can be contacted by those who have paid. Since they have paid, they are more likely to be serious learners.

https://blog.thelinguist.com/

Things about language learning. It is active.

https://blogs.transparent.com/

There are periodically good contents being presented.

https://www.thoughtco.com/languages-4133094

Languages are fewer than Transparent's, and so do the update frequency. But its quality is still high.

https://blog.feedspot.com/culture_blogs/

Blogs about cultures. There are also magazines.

Lyrics

!! https://www.musixmatch.com/

See lyrics and translations.

!! https://lyricstranslate.com/

Lyrics and translations.

Subtitle

!! https://www.opensubtitles.org/

One of the most popular subtitle sites. Subtitles in European languages are easier to find.

!! https://subscene.com/

One of the most popular subtitle sites. Subtitles in English, Arabic, Persian, Indonesian are easier to find.

!! https://getcaption.co/

For downloading subtitles. You can add websites on your own. It is open-source.

!! https://bonigarcia.github.io/dualsub/index.html

It can help to merge two subtitles. It may crash at the second time. It is open-source.

!! https://www.smplayer.info/

This player can display two subtitles. It is open-source.

What a good name of this program.

!! http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/

Turn subtitles into flashcards. It is open-source.

A video about it.

News

!! http://www.abyznewslinks.com/

Links to news websites.

Some TV have shows for free, some of which even with subtitles.

https://liveuamap.com/

Instant news about hot spots from social media.

Radio & Podcast

!! https://www.radio-browser.info/

A list of internet radio stations. You can find clients in “Apps”, some of which are open-source.

I prefer two stations: Public Domain Classical, Public Domain Jazz. Pleasing names.

!! https://www.listennotes.com/

Search Engine of podcasts.

!! https://antennapod.org/

Podcast player with search engine for Android. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/z-------------/CPod

Podcast player with search engine. It is open-source.

Live & Video

!! https://mpv.io/

Video player with fast response. It is open-source.

!! https://livetvcentral.com/

The most complete list of worldwide online TV channels.

Many links are dead, but the live stream is still available somewhere else in many of these sites.

!! https://www.squidtv.net/

Another list of TV channels, has fewer channels but contains details.

!! https://www.twitch.tv/

There are players speaking different languages. Its “IRL” section is people in real life. You can interact with them in their languages. Lots of slang to learn.

!! https://www.youtube.com/

No one can be richer in content than this. Heavy censorship, demonetization, weird copyright terms.

Use Privacy Redirect to be redirected to an Invidious instance, a private front-end.

There are some open-source alternatives to it such as PeerTube.

There are many channels teaching languages and introducing cultures, which people may forget. However, YouTube is not the only source of such channels.

!! https://newpipe.schabi.org/

Watch YouTube videos without being watched by YouTube on Android. It is open-source.

Downloading YouTube videos violates YouTube's terms of service. What a great move of grabbing your videos and claiming them as their properties.

!! https://freetubeapp.io/

Watch YouTube videos privately on desktop. It is open-source.

There is a redirect plug-in, so you can always open the YouTube links with FreeTube. It is open-source.

https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/

Download videos with command line. It is open-source.

A tutorial about it.

Language Information

https://www.omniglot.com/

It provides information about basic knowledge of many languages. Many “Alphabet and Pronunciation” lessons on this site are from there.

https://glottolog.org/

Information of languages of the world. Not only languages, but also many varieties. It is open-soruce.

https://www.scriptsource.org/

Information of scripts.

https://www.muturzikin.com/countries.htm

Linguistic maps.

https://lingvo.info/

General knowledge about European languages.

https://iso639-3.sil.org/

Codes for every language and is still being updated. You can find the whole table.

General Knowledge

https://www.britannica.com/

A comprehensive encyclopedia.

Educational Resources

https://libguides.humboldt.edu/openedu/

Educational resources including geography, history and sociology. When you have learned such subjects, you will have insights on a culture or civilisation.

Map

!! https://www.google.com/maps/

It resolves the exotic sense. If you are careful enough, you can find trivia about a place.

From the maps you can only see the appearance, not inside the societies. Actually, people in somewhere looks rich maybe not so happy as people in somewhere looks poor.

!! https://www.openstreetmap.org/

Another map site. You can even download them. It is open-source.

There is a video about its modification with Inkscape.

!! https://marble.kde.org/

Alternative to Google Earth. It is open-source.

!! https://osmand.net/

Offline maps for mobile with OpenStreetMap data. It is open-source.

!! http://ontheworldmap.com/

Downloadable maps. It even includes cities. I don't expect them to be up-to-date.

Culture & Travel

https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/

Introductions to cultures.

https://www.wikivoyage.org/

Introduction of the city and many details of countries. It is open-source.

The most important page for travelers is this.

https://www.everyculture.com/

Its information is old. There are details of peoples and countries.

http://culturalatlas.sbs.com.au/

It is about countries and in progress.

https://www.commisceo-global.com/country-guides/

It is mainly about some details about manners.

https://guide.culturecrossing.net/index.php

It is mainly about some details about manners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_subcultures

Subcultures, modern things.

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/

Cultural heritages. There is also an interactive map.

https://ich.unesco.org/en/lists/

Intangible cultural heritages.

https://rammworldcultures.org.uk/home/objects/

Cultural Objects.

https://www.tripadvisor.com/

Guide of traveling cities.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world-factbook/

A formal publication of basic information about countries.

https://worldcultures.webs.com/

Links to other sites about cultures.

History

https://www.worldhistory.org/

An encyclopedia. Articles, images, videos, 3D images, podcasts and more.

http://www.fsmitha.com/

Detailed articles about history.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.timleg.historytimeline

An app about major events of history.

https://histography.io/

It looks cool.

https://omniatlas.com/

It shows you some old news with detailed maps.

https://www.timemaps.com/

Maps of history.

https://www.wdl.org/

Items in the history.

http://geacron.com/

Map of every year.

https://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/History_n2/a.html

Looks old-fashioned, but it is not bad if you get used to it.

Philosophy & Religion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religions_and_spiritual_traditions

List of religions and spiritual traditions.

Not believing a religion itself is also religious.

https://www.philosophybasics.com/

The basics of philosophy, “by a layman for the layman”.

http://www.religionfacts.com/

Facts about religions.

Geography

https://www.youtube.com/user/GeographyNow/

Videos about world geography.

https://www.worldatlas.com/

Short articles.

!! https://gedevapps.com/flags/

Flags, capitals, currencies, some landmarks, in multiple languages. Dependencies included are not many.

!! http://worldmapquiz.qbisstudio.com/index.html

An app for practising world map in several languages. Dependencies are not all included. The form of address in Chinese version is a mixture of PRC's and ROC's, which is not good. For Chinese names of countries, there is a list: Language/Mandarin-chinese/Vocabulary/Countries-and-Nationalities.

https://userbase.kde.org/KGeography

Learn Geography on Linux. Information is incredibly outdated, though it's still being maintained. This is where I don't like KDE: no issues can be opened on their repositories. It is open-source.

For Debian users, maps and flags are at /usr/share/kgeography/

I am thinking about creating my own version.

https://www.flagid.org/

Flag identifier.

Music

!! https://www.youtube.com/user/pupsibaerle1

All about traditional music.

!! https://www.soundhound.com/

Recognize music with recording or your humming. It has some advantages over Shazam.

!! https://www.shazam.com/

Recognize music with recording. It has some advantages over Soundhound.

Art

!! https://www.wikiart.org/

All kinds of artwork around the world.

Dance

!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic,_regional,_and_folk_dances_by_origin

Dances by origin. You can search for them on video sites.

Cuisine

!! https://www.allrecipes.com/

A little bit of recipes around the world.

!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cuisines

List of cuisines.

Board Game

!! https://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/

Traditional board games. It is open-source.

There are pre-installed engines, but they are somehow old. The most versatile engine is Fairy Stockfish.

Not user-friendly. Cute Chess looks good but Xiangqi and Janggi are missing.

Folk Costume

!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_costume

List of folk costume.

Folktale

https://fairytalez.com/

Some faire tales.

https://www.worldoftales.com/

Some fairy tale books.

Festival

!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_festivals_by_country

Not complete, but still good.

https://www.world-festivals.net/

It includes more countries than the one above. I wonder if it is so difficult to gather information about festivals.

Martial Arts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_martial_arts

List of martial arts.

https://blackbeltwiki.com/

Introduction to many martial arts.

Name

!! https://www.behindthename.com/

Find the meanings of a given name.

Don't expect you can understand every Chinese name.

Astronomy

https://stellarium.org/

You can see the sky in different locations and times. There are starlores in different cultures. Some even have constellation art.

Living Standard

https://www.craigslist.org/

Living information. It's also on GTA IV.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/

Prices from the world. Sometimes inaccurate.

https://www.globalbrandprices.com/

The prices of the same products in different regions.

Statistics

https://www.statista.com/

All kinds of statistical data. Some are free.

https://ourworldindata.org/

It has detailed explanation on each data.

Trivia Quizzes

https://www.jetpunk.com/

Trivia quizzes of the world. It is available in multiple languages.

Prepaid SIM Card

https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Prepaid_SIM_with_data

Details about SIM cards.

License Plate

!! http://www.worldlicenseplates.com/

Take a look if you are interested. It's so completed.

National Anthem

!! http://www.nationalanthems.info/

National anthems with lyrics.

I can only appreciate an unheard one by listening to it more times. It's not only me, i guess.

Fonts

!! https://www.google.com/get/noto/

It presents a lot of fonts in one art style. It is open-source.

!! https://unifoundry.com/unifont/index.html

No one covers more of the Unicode map than GNU Unifont. It is open-source.

Its function is limited, such as bad support for South and Southeast Asian characters.

!! https://www.fontspace.com/

You can go to its “stuff” and search by Unicode characters.

Optical Character Recognition

https://github.com/manisandro/gImageReader

It recognizes characters on the screen with Tesseract. It is open-source.

A video about training.

https://github.com/SubhamTyagi/android-ocr

It uses Tesseract 4 data on Android. It is open-source.

Language Identifier

!! http://www.polyglot3000.com/

It identifies languages.

Resource Links

Unlike this page, those are for some specific languages, and I am not responsible for their qualities.

https://www.lexilogos.com/english/index.htm

This one is in a great quantity that even GrimPixel's resource pages can hardly match.

https://www.ats-group.net/language-resources.html

This one has a lot of languages.

http://gratisglobal.com/

A comprehensive resource database.

https://www.openculture.com/

This one has various references.

https://www.lonweb.org/

This one has more languages with fewer links for each one.

http://lexicity.com/

This one focuses on ancient languages.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Free_media_resources

Free media resources.

https://www.alllanguageresources.com/

This one includes recommendations that are not free-of-charge without notice.

http://www.meta-share.org/

Repository for language researching.

https://nlp.stanford.edu/links/statnlp.html

Academic software. You may wonder why academicians are so dumb at design. That is because they are not so good at front-end and they don't have to learn much of it.

Internet Archive

https://www.archive.org/

Archive of the Internet since 1996. Really cool!

Examples: De Agostini 5 Language Visual Dictionary (practical) and The Firefly Five Language Visual Dictionary (comprehensive).

Virtual Private Network and others

!! mailto:get@psiphon3.com

Those who are hindered from accessing the world Internet, send an e-mail to it.

Official site: https://psiphon3.com/en/index.html

!! https://www.torproject.org/

For visiting Project Gutenburg and other sites, if some books are still not in public domain in your country. It is open-source.

It won't lead you to the dark web, if you don't know any such address.

!! https://protonvpn.com/

It doesn't allow torrenting on the free plan, but there's no volume limit.

!! https://windscribe.com/

They provide 10GB each month with high speed and multiple locations for free. Great for “immersive language learning”.

Endangered Language Protection

If you are capable and responsible, please do your part to protect endangered languages.

https://www.eldp.net/

http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/

-- CRITERIA --

Resources should possess at least one of the following characteristics:

  1. be rich in free content (not just a trial or not fulfilling the need in the free part), and the free content is mostly accurate, and the free content is not all covered by other free ones;
  2. be made with a unique good idea;
  3. has no better alternatives.

Resources must not possess the following characteristics:

  1. propagate specific political or religious ideas without possibility of discussion.

Resources with the following features will be given a little priority:

  1. available offline;
  2. available on multiple platforms;
  3. multilingual user interface;
  4. lightweight;
  5. open source;
  6. privacy-friendly (including “registration not required”).

-- AUTHOR --

GrimPixel