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Languages

I have a general nag for learning new languages, and I speak a few. This page contains some random resources and information about the languages that I speak, learn, or plan to learn. You can also read the relevant posts in my blog [tagged articles] by clicking here.

- Persian Advanced

Persian [a.k.a Farsi] is a the language spoken in Iran, which I've known all my life. If you need to learn it, let me know! =)

Best online Persian <=> English dictionary: www.Farsidic.com. There's also the Aryanpour dictionary but they don't have a virtual Persian keyboard on the website.

- English [UK] Advanced

Another language I've been speaking all my life. I've also taken a few English literature courses in the past. Wasn't my favorite, but had it's charms.

I guess everybody knows www.Dictionary.com eh?

- German Intermediate

I don't know why people find it odd, but I like the way German sounds. I always wanted to learn it, and I had learned little bits and pieces of it from some German speaking friends every now and then. But currently I'm practicing it in a much more serious manner as I have to get really good at it, really fast! And oh yeah, I have to find my way around the Swiss German dialect(s) too... wee.... =)

There are tons of websites offering online German courses, but I can say with confidence that this one is the best: http://learngerman.elanguageschool.net/ . Another eLanguageschool course. Somehow these folk are really good at putting together online language courses and actually they offer quite a few.

Rosetta Stone for German is also pretty good. Not surprisingly.

Babelfish again is a good option for translating German, but if you're learning the language on your own like me, there's something even better. The LEO dictionary is and incredibly useful online dictionary that offers you a lot of useful information. Word roots, grammatical tips, and it even has audio files so you can hear the pronunciation of the words. This one I learned about from Genox.

- Esperanto Intermediate

The universal language. I've been into this one for many years now and I totally love it. Beautiful language really. Never attended a course for it or anything of the sort, I've been practicing it on my own.

Updated: Esperanto.Aasemoon.com is definitely worth checking out, It's where I've placed a large collection of Esperanto resources. Courses, books, movie clips... everything you need to help you learn Esperanto. Originally i-espero.info had this entire [Esperanto Elektronike DVD] package available for free download as 7zip archives. For a short bit of time the package was unavailable, but I just received an update from i-espero.info with some very interesting news. They now have a new self extracting package version of this DVD, containing all the previous goodies but with higher quality videos and easier to extract and use. They also have other cool packages to download [including a very neat book collection] and their torrents are seeded again. So if you'd like to download the whole thing in one 3.3 GB package, check out their website. And if you find it hard to download and extract the content [given that there's a gzillion files in it], you can just brows them online at Esperanto.Aasemoon.com. Have fun! =)

Also, Lernu.net is _the_ best source for learning Esperanto. They have courses, forums, books, music, and a pretty good dictionary.

- Spanish Intermediate

I took a few Spanish courses in the university a while ago, and I'm still Learning. Wasn't difficult because I already knew some Esperanto and they're quite similar. The "Hola Amigos" books and the connected website [http://college.hmco.com/students/] are really helpful.

Babelfish is definitely the most useful dictionary out there for translating a chunk of text in many languages including Spanish.

eLanguageschool - Spanish Course is a pretty good online Spanish course.

- Greek Beginner

I can say with certainty that Greek is the single most beautiful language I've ever listened to. Gosh this language is beautiful! I've always enjoyed listening to Greek singers and in 2006, after listening to the song "Kalimera" by Antique, I finally decided that there's no way I can live my life not learning this language. Greek also has this magical tendency of causing interesting events to happen to me when I'm learning it. Unfortunately right now the learning of Greek is not going as fast as I would like it to, due to the fact that most of my language learning time needs to be spent on German for the moment. But I'm still learning new words every now and then cause I know that I will sooner or later find the time to get darn good at it. =)

http://www.kypros.org/LearnGreek/ => This is my favorite online Greek course / resource center. There are quite a few similar websites, but this one has been the most helpful to me.

I've also tried the Rosetta Stone Greek course, and I've liked it.

Don't forget Altavista Babelfish. It actually does a good job [comparatively] translating chunks of Greek.

- Welsh Very Little!

I'm very disappointed with myself about this one. I can understand / speak very little Welsh, and that's just not very nice at all, given my family roots. Plus I love the language! But hey, I still have a long way to go, and I have every intention of learning more Welsh A.S.A.P. I swear!