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

Revision as of 07:04, 6 September 2018

Best Free Services for Polyglots

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

The following resources are all free, but you can consider donating or buying premium plans, or even help several of them on source code.

This page is updated from time to time, not frequently, not regularly.

Please also take a look at Category:Free-Resources to find resources for specific languages.

Keyboard

https://colemak.com/

This one supports a lot of languages in Latin script, but it means to learn typing again. It is worth it.

There is a flaw of no "„" or "‚". You can use Keyboard Layout Creator to replace "÷" and "×" with them.

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

It is simple and supports many languages, with many keyboard layouts.

Basic Course

https://www.duolingo.com/

The best free online language courses. It is actually a collection of exercises instead of cources. Its web version has "tips and note". Don't neglect their other products.

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

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

https://www.lingolia.com/en/

A little site with useful basic course 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://voicenotebook.com/prononce.php

Check your pronunciation through SR and TTS.

https://speechling.com/

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

https://software.sil.org/speech-analyzer/

With this one, you can say you are "studying" pronunciation.

http://www.tongue-twister.net/

Try not to hurt yourself when practicing.

International Phonetic Alphabet

https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/

Site of the maker. The full IPA chart can be downloaded there.

https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/

Unofficial site for promoting IPA, with many useful tools.

http://ipa.typeit.org/full/

A keyboard for inputing IPA. Though still lacking some, it's enough for common use.

Vocabulary

Flashcards in high quality can be found. Some most popular languages have flashcard of 5k and 8k words, a few can be over 30k. Though it is said to be memorizing words with "mems", the "mems" are actually not in good quality.

https://quizlet.com/

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

https://www.clozemaster.com/

Learn with cloze. It is effective, but sometimes it is just repeating the same point in different questions.

https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Offline and free, and its content can be in diverse formats.

https://lingvist.com/

Four languages to learn. There is a trial automatically started after you register, so don't expect all features will continue if you don't pay after 48 hours.

https://wordofthehour.org/

They may think "word of the day" is very effectless, so do I. It is constantly being improved.

https://www.languagedrops.com/

It focuses on visual training, which has both advantages and disadvantages. Free users have to wait 10 hours for the next 5 min practice session.

https://www.learnwitholiver.com/

Simply learn words.

https://babadum.com/

It's pretty good for educating young polyglots.

https://backwords.fyi/

Great idea of making use of wallpaper. Only for Mac, and languages are few.

https://mainichi.me/

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

Reading

https://www.wikipedia.org/

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

https://getflowlingo.com/

Read and create flashcards to learn.

https://readlang.com/

Articles in many languages, with online dictionaries.

https://www.beelinguapp.com/

Bilingual stories. Voices are from volunteers, the quality is not very good.

http://paralleltext.io/

As what its domain name means, parallel text.

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 supported on Wikipedia.

The site's conterpart in Islam is https://pakdata.com/. Declaration: suggesting it is not for preaching.

http://lwt.sourceforge.net/

This is a php project. The page design is very bad, but if you were a learned person, you would have sufficient patience to read the guide and follow it. It's a DIY, offline and free version of LingQ. LingQ is freemium, but it can't be recommended, for its unacceptable limitations on free users.

Dictionary

https://www.wiktionary.org/

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

https://www.wordreference.com/

It is really completed.

https://www.linguee.com/

It is comleted, with example sentences in high quality. You can even find uncommon words with common words.

https://bab.la/

It is completed.

https://glosbe.com/

It support so many languages, citing results from other sites. 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://www.lingoes.net/

The best offline dictionary. Its update is stopped, but it is still very useful.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.luc.dict.lingoes

Unofficial Lingoes on Android.

Translator

https://translate.google.com/

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

https://www.bing.com/translator

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

https://translatr.varunmalhotra.xyz/

Translate to multiple languages at once.

http://nicetranslator.com/

Similar to Translatr, but it uses Microsoft.

http://imtranslator.net/

Convenient add-ons for browsers.

Conjugation

https://cooljugator.com/

Conjugation and some declension. Some pages are lost.

Gender

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

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

Spelling and Grammar Checker

https://languagetool.org/

It supports several languages, but works well on few.

Typing

https://10fastfingers.com/

A place to train typing.

Listening

http://www.listeningpractice.org/

To practice listening. Not very good-looking. Voices are from volunteers, the quality is not very good. It also has conjugation exercises.

https://www.linguistica360.com/

News with transcripts, and the speed is slow.

https://lyricstraining.com/

Listen to songs and fill in the blank of lyrics.

https://librivox.org/

Books read by volunteers.

Text-to-Speech

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

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

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=hesoft.T2S

It can be called the best platform on Android.

Example Sentences

https://tatoeba.org/

Example sentences in many languages.

https://www.dictionarist.com/

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

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.

Game

https://greatlanguagegame.com/

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

https://www.verbling.com/game

Verbling also has this game.

World Clock

https://www.timeanddate.com/

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

Community

https://discordapp.com/

A software to chat, with prominent features, such as text and voice channels. It's very suitable not only for playing games, but also for learning languages.

https://www.italki.com/

The most popular language 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.

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.

Questions & Answers

https://hinative.com/

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

https://www.quora.com/

The most popular site for Q&A.

https://stackexchange.com/

Its advantage, also its disadvantage, is dividing itself into a lot of small sections. As learning language usually does not require inspirations from other fields, this one may be better than Quora.

Language Exchange

http://www.lingbe.com/

An app for talking with people who are as nervous to talk with strangers as you.

https://mylanguageexchange.com/

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

Blog

https://blogs.transparent.com/

There are periodly good contents being presented.

Lyrics

https://www.musixmatch.com/

See lyrics and translations.

Subtitles

https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/search/subs

One of the most popular subtitle sites.

https://subscene.com/

One of the most popular subtitle sites.

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

It can help to merge two subtitles.

Radios and Podcasts

https://mytuner-radio.com/

Radios around the world.

https://castbox.fm/

Podcasts around the world.

TV Channels

https://livetvcentral.com/

The most complete list of worldwide online TV channels. Many links are dead, but some of them just have the URL changed, they are still available somewhere else in the site.

News

https://unfiltered.news/

It reveals how media around the world report about the world.

https://liveuamap.com/

Instant news about hot spots from social media.

Videos

https://www.youtube.com/

No one can be better than this.

Live

https://www.twitch.tv/

There are players speaking different languages. Its "IRC" section is people in real life. You can interact with them in their languages.

Language Encyclopedia

https://www.omniglot.com/

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

http://aboutworldlanguages.com/

Languages are not so many, but there are essential information about them.

Map

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

It resolves exotic sense. If you are careful enough, you can find trivia of a place. You can even conjucture people's life situations.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.qbis.guessthecountry

An app for practicing 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.