MSN-Sym­pa­ti­co has been run­ning a piece that cov­ers the ins-and-outs of learn­ing a for­eign lan­guage online. The piece high­lights free resources that you can access on the web, includ­ing our col­lec­tion of Free For­eign Lan­guage Les­son Pod­casts, but also many oth­er worth­while mate­ri­als. Free lan­guage dic­tio­nar­ies, flash cards, inter­ac­tive games, lan­guage learn­ing com­mu­ni­ties, inter­na­tion­al news and radio shows, for­mal uni­ver­si­ty cours­es — they’re all list­ed here.

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Here is a quick “life­hack” for you. You can now learn for­eign lan­guages and stay cur­rent on pol­i­tics all at once. How so? By tak­ing advan­tage of a smart pod­cast con­cept being used by French and Ger­man broad­cast­ers. Radio France Inter­na­tionale (RFI) issues a dai­ly pro­gram called Le Jour­nal en français facile (iTunes — feed — web site), which deliv­ers the night­ly inter­na­tion­al news in slow and easy-to-under­stand French. Along the same lines, the Ger­man media com­pa­ny Deutsche Welle (which puts out many great lan­guage and music pro­grams) also has its own night­ly news pro­gram — Langsam gesproch­ene Nachricht­en (iTunes — feed — web site). It’s essen­tial­ly the same con­cept: infor­ma­tive news pre­sent­ed in very sim­ple Ger­man, and, in this case, it’s spo­ken very slow­ly.

Now, what’s very nice about these pro­grams is that they also pro­vide a writ­ten tran­script of the spo­ken word. So you can read along as you lis­ten and make sure that you’re real­ly com­pre­hend­ing. (See tran­scripts in French and Ger­man). Even cool­er, with the Ger­man ver­sion, if you have a video iPod, you can read the tran­script on your lit­tle portable screen. (See direc­tions).

Final­ly, check out this off­beat sug­ges­tion sent our way by a read­er: Nun­tii Lati­ni (mp3 — web site) is “a week­ly review of world news in Clas­si­cal Latin, the only inter­na­tion­al broad­cast of its kind in the world, pro­duced by YLE, the Finnish Broad­cast­ing Com­pa­ny.”

To learn more lan­guages, please vis­it our com­plete col­lec­tion Learn Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & Beyond.

Relat­ed Resource: See our arti­cle called “Cof­fee Break Span­ish & The Threat to Tra­di­tion­al Media”

We stum­bled across this video (below) over on YouTube. It offers a quick sur­vey of web resources that will teach you for­eign lan­guages for free. Among oth­er items, the video men­tions our For­eign Lan­guage Pod­cast Col­lec­tion and, for that, we want­ed to say thanks to who­ev­er put this togeth­er.

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Chi­na is on the upswing polit­i­cal­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly. Accord­ing to Gold­man Sachs, Chi­na’s econ­o­my may out­size every oth­er econ­o­my (except that of the U.S.) by 2016, and it could even sur­pass the Amer­i­can econ­o­my by 2039. Giv­en this, the hottest lan­guage being stud­ied right now by busi­ness trav­el­ers is Man­darin (see this New York Times piece). And, in my work at Stan­ford, we’re see­ing a very sharp increase in young and old stu­dents enrolling in Man­darin cours­es (and oth­er Chi­na-focused cours­es), for both per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al rea­sons.

Learn­ing Man­darin can be cost­ly — some orga­ni­za­tions charge $2500 for a week-long course — but it does­n’t have to be. More rea­son­ably, you can pur­chase CD-Roms that will sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly teach you Man­darin at home, when your sched­ule per­mits, for a much more rea­son­able price (about $200). Roset­ta Stone offers one good exam­ple. Or you can do it even more cheap­ly, if not for free, with the help of pod­casts.

As you’ll see, there’s no short­age of Man­darin lan­guage lessons, and we invite you to peruse the list below. Of all of them, two tend to get par­tic­u­lar­ly high marks from users. The first is called Chi­nese Lessons with Serge Mel­nyk (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). Put togeth­er by an Eng­lish speak­er who stud­ied Man­darin Chi­nese for almost 20 years (and who has lived in Bei­jing and Shang­hai for 12 years), the free pod­cast cur­rent­ly offers 90 lessons that last between 20 and 30 min­utes. A sec­ond option, which users also give pos­i­tive feed­back, is Chinesepod.com (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). Pro­duced by native speak­ers, these dai­ly audio pod­casts, each run­ning 10–20 min­utes in length, will immerse you in col­lo­qui­al (read: use­ful) Man­darin. Impres­sive­ly, you can now find 100 pieces of audio in Chi­ne­se­pod’s large archive. While both of these pod­casts are free, each offers addi­tion­al learn­ing resources for a rea­son­able fee (though it appears that you can get by with­out them).

For more Chi­nese lessons, please vis­it our col­lec­tion: Learn Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & Beyond

• Chi­nese Learn Online iTunes Feed Web Site
  • A dia­logue-based intro­duc­tion to Man­darin Chi­nese. Load them on your iPod and get up the Chi­nese curve.
• Chi­nese Lessons with Serge Mel­nyk iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Week­ly lessons in Man­darin that get very strong reviews from iTunes users.
• Chinesepod.com iTunes Feed Web Site
  • A series of well-reviewed lessons that will let you learn Man­darin on your own terms.
• iMandarinPod.com iTunes Feed Web Site
  • A more advanced pod­cast, this series of lessons teach­es Chi­nese by talk­ing about Chi­nese cul­ture or what is hap­pen­ing today in Chi­na.
• LearnChinesePod.com iTunes Feed Web Site
  • A Man­darin lan­guage pod­cast taught by Yao in New York City.
• Man­darin Chi­nese Con­ver­sa­tion iTunes Web Site
  • A lan­guage series put togeth­er by TimesOn­line.
• Man­darin Chi­nese Feed Web Site
  • 10 Lessons by the US Peace Corps. Make sure you vis­it the site and down­load the pdf that accom­pa­nies the lessons.
• Sur­vival Chi­nese iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Learn the phras­es you need to get by while trav­el­ing in Chi­na.
• World Learn­er Chi­nese iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Anoth­er in the mix of pos­si­bil­i­ties.

Although fac­ing no short­age of com­pe­ti­tion, Cof­fee Break Span­ish (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) has remained the most pop­u­lar for­eign lan­guage les­son pod­cast, bar none. The pop­u­lar­i­ty rank­ings on iTunes have con­tin­u­al­ly attest­ed to that.

From this posi­tion of strength, the pro­duc­ers of Cof­fee Break Span­ish have smart­ly moved into new Euro­pean ter­ri­to­ries, rolling out ear­li­er this year MyDai­lyPhrase Ital­ian (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) and MyDai­lyPhrase Ger­man (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). Now they will be fac­ing a stiffer chal­lenge – try­ing to pen­e­trate the already-crowd­ed French lan­guage les­son mar­ket.

Cof­fee Break French (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) was launched on Sep­tem­ber 26, and how it fares against the com­pe­ti­tion (see our list below) depends main­ly on whether the pod­cast deliv­ers French lessons bet­ter than the oth­ers, and whether it can cap­i­tal­ize on the estab­lished “Cof­fee Break” brand. Stay tuned. All of this remains TBD. Let’s sit back and watch how things unfold.

See our com­plete list How to Learn Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & 37 Oth­er Lan­guages, which includes audio lessons that will teach you 40 lan­guages.

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When­ev­er traf­fic flows to to our col­lec­tion of Free Lan­guage Lessons, one good out­come is that we almost always learn of new pod­casts to add to the list. (Just as an fyi, we now have 64 indi­vid­ual pod­casts that offer instruc­tion on 22 dif­fer­ent lan­guages.)

Last week did­n’t dis­ap­point. We learned of a few good new ones. Most notably, one of our read­ers flagged for us a series of video-based French lessons assem­bled by the BBC. Pre­sent­ed by Stéphane Cor­ni­card, Ma France con­sists of 24 inter­ac­tive video units that teach you the lan­guage and a lit­tle about the coun­try. You can launch this video to get a brief intro­duc­tion. The series, which assumes a lit­tle pri­or knowl­edge of French, was shot in Lyons, the Alps and in Provence. You can access the videos on iTunes, by feed, and by web.

Anoth­er new addi­tion to col­lec­tion, How to Learn Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & 37 Oth­er Lan­guages, comes from the Peace Corps. They offer some pod­casts that will teach you some French, Man­darin Chi­nese, Ara­bic, and Russ­ian. It all sounds pret­ty straight­for­ward. But then you find out that they’re teach­ing the French spo­ken in Mali (West Africa) and the Russ­ian used in Kaza­khstan — that is, the kind of places where Peace Corps vol­un­teers actu­al­ly go. It’s a bit of a dif­fer­ent twist on the usu­al lan­guage les­son pod­cast. Also, be sure to check out the instruc­tion­al PDF files that accom­pa­ny each pod­cast.