Free Software Linux

Today marks a milestone for the innovative language-learning site Chinesepod: it has published its 1000th Mandarin lesson. Those not familiar with the Chinesepod phenomenon will be surprised to learn that the lesson, like the other 999, is freely available: for Mr. Chinesepod, the Shanghai-based Dubliner Ken Carroll, is a connoisseur of the Web 2.0 world.

In addition to its new ability to automatically detect what language you're trying to translate, Google Translate adds 10 more languages to its capabilities: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish,...

You can learn various languages using your iTunes application. There are various free language courses courses available as individual Podcasts. To get the entire list of language learning podcasts, hit the browse button on the lower-right corner of your iTunes window—it’s the icon that looks like an eye. Then browse to the Podcasts/Education/Language Courses directory. Alternatively, you can even do a search for your favorite language.

Windows only: Ever use an online translation service and wonder if you can get more accurate results elsewhere? Translate.Net, a free Windows translation aggregator, knows just how you feel. The...

Now that's what I call open content: WALS is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of more than 40 authors (many of them the leading authorities on the subject). WALS consists of 141 maps with accompanying texts on diverse features (such as vowel inventory size, noun-genitive order, passive constructions, and "hand"/"arm" polysemy), each of which is the responsibility of a single author (or team of authors). Each map shows between 120 and 1110 languages, each language being represented by a symbol, and different symbols showing different values of the feature. Altogether 2,650 languages are shown on the maps, and more than 58,000 datapoints give information on features in particular languages.

What I want to say it’s quite obvious, if Linux vendors want to penetrate the newbies market, they must provide fully localized ISO images, there are no excuses. This is my point of view.