How To Find Internet Resources for Learning Any Particular Language

by Reid Wilson

First appeared: Language Learning #6 
Links last checked: 31 January 2000

For this article, I'm going to use Brazilian Portuguese as an example--my wife grew up in Brazil and speaks it and I would love to learn it. If you are learning Brazilian Portuguese then I'll be doing all of the work for you; otherwise follow me and you can find many resources for whatever language you are studying.

From my past internet experience, I think that I should be able to find the following kinds of resources. I'll discuss looking for each type of internet resource using this order.

• online newspapers in (Brazilian) Portuguese
• online voice broadcasts and music in Portuguese
• online Portuguese dictionaries
• translating to and from Portuguese via the internet
• e-mail discussion lists on learning Portuguese
• e-mail discussion lists written in Portuguese
• Portuguese-speaking chat rooms
• web sites on learning Portuguese
• other web sites in Portuguese

1) Finding Online Newspapers in a Particular Language

To look for online newspapers I first go to http://emedia1.mediainfo.com/emedia/, the E&P Online Media directory. From there, I click on the map of South America, then I click on "Brazil." There site lists 55 entries and includes the name, frequency, type, and location of each newspaper.

As a language learner, I'm really only interested in finding a couple of good ones that I can keep going back to, so I check out some out and end up bookmarking "Brasil Online" (http://www.uol.com.br/bol/) and "Jornal do Brasil" (http://www.jb.com.br/).

2) Finding Online Voice Broadcasts and Music in a Particular Language

To look for broadcasts in Portuguese, I first go to http://rivendel.com/~ric/resources/realad.html and select Portuguese. I see 14 Portuguese-speaking radio stations listed there, and decide to bookmark http://virtualbairro.com/radio/, which actually contains many more stations from Portugal, Angola, the USA, and of course, Brazil. (Note: to listen to audio broadcasts over the internet you will need the free Real Player software, which you can get from http://www.real.com.

If the rivendel site doesn't list your language, or if you want to find more than it lists, you can also check out the following:

Deutsche Welle Online
http://www.dwelle.de/language.html

Voice of America
http://www.voa.gov

Radio Free Europe
http://www.rferl.org/realaudio/

Finally, go to http://realguide.real.com/ and do a search on the web for all audio and video in your language of interest simply by typing in the name of the language and pressing the search button. (Portuguese turned up 55 pages of hits!)

3) Finding Online Portuguese Dictionaries

To find an online dictionary, I first go to http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/rbeard/diction.html, which has links to over 800 dictionaries in 160 languages. I click on Portuguese, but end up having to scroll through a list categorized by language family. I scroll until I find Romance languages, and then find Portuguese, and see that they have five dictionaries listed, including English-Portuguese, Portuguese-English and Portuguese-Portuguese.

Another site that contains many online dictionaries is http://dictionaries.travlang.com/. From there I find Portuguese dictionaries that go to and from English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, Swedish, and Esperanto.

4) Translating to and from a language via the internet

If there were some text or even a web page that I want to translate from English into Portuguese or vice-versa, I can go to http://www.tranexp.com/ and select their InterTran internet translator. It's free, but when I translated a simple, short text and showed it to my wife she wasn't that impressed with the translation and said that they got some verbs mixed up, but that she could understand the gist of what it was wanting to say. She said that language learners shouldn't use it and expect the translation to accurately represent their original text. It looks like this service allows translation to and from about 25 different languages.

Another site, http://www.systransoft.com/, translates fewer languages but according to my wife did a much better job on my short text. If you are learning English, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, or Spanish, our very simple test suggests that this is the free internet translation site for you.

5) E-mail Discussion Lists on Learning a Particular Language

To find e-mail discussion lists on learning Portuguese, I first go to http://www.onelist.com and do a search for "Learn Portuguese." I'm surprised when I don't find any with that search, but before I give up I do a search for "Portuguese." I find a list called "owl" that is for Japanese speakers learning Portuguese and a couple other languages, and then I find a list called "portugues" that is for learners of Portuguese. (I can subscribe to these lists by sending blank messages to owl-subscribe@onelist.com and portugues-subscribe@onelist.com.)

Other places to look for such discussion lists are http://www.topica.com, http://www.egroups.com, and http://www.icq.com. I'll talk more about ICQ in #7 below.

If you can't find an e-mail discussion group on learning your particular language, why not create one? It's simple: just go to http://www.onelist.com and follow the directions from there. If you do, send me an e-mail about it and I'll announce it in this newsletter.

6) Finding E-mail Discussion Lists Written in a Particular Language

To find e-mail discussion lists written in Portuguese, I can go to the same sites listed in #6 above. For Portuguese there were many, many lists to choose from on a variety of topics. A significant percentage of them seemed to be "adult content" lists, so be sure you know what you're signing up for instead of just randomly selecting a group to join.

7) Finding Chat Rooms in a Particular Language

To find a chat room that uses Portuguese, I go to http://www.icq.com and then click on the "Languages Center" link. I click on the Portuguese link. From there I see discussion lists, interest groups, and chat rooms. I click on "Portuguese speakers" under the chat rooms list but get nothing, so I try both "Brazil" and "Portugal" and get no chat rooms there either. I do have the opportunity to create one, though, and you may find one there for the language you study.

At ICQ I also had the opportunity to issue a chat request, letting people know that I was interested in chatting in Portuguese with them, and I could also do a search through the ICQ white pages and look for Portuguese speakers.

Not finding anything specific at ICQ, I then go to http://rivendel.com/%7Eric/resources/langchat.html and find two Portuguese chat rooms, "Universo Online' at http://chatter.uol.com.br/batepato and then click on "bate-pato" and also "ZAZ - chat bar" at http://chat1.zaz.com.br/chat/.

8) Finding Web Sites on Learning a Particular Language

I'm not a big fan of doing generic internet searches on whatever topic I am interested in learning about, but of course I do that when I am willing to wade through all of the results that I get, both relevant and irrelevant. I would encourage you to use the major internet search engines and see what you can find on the language you are learning. Doing this for Portuguese, I found an interesting site at http://www.stories.org.br/ as well as many commercial sites offering Portuguese learning books, schools, and software.

You can find what books are available for learning your language by doing a search at http://www.amazon.com. Some of these books also come with cassettes; I would personally recommend focusing on those.

In addition, here are some sites that contain information on learning various languages. For each one I'll list the languages that it incorporates:

http://home.about.com/education/
English-as-a-Second-Language, French, Latin, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish

http://call.lingnet.org/ 
Many languages, including less-commonly-studied ones

http://jltc.army.mil/JLTC/foreign.html
Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, German, Korean, Thai, Russian

http://www.lingnet.org/linkdex/ 
Many languages, including less-commonly-studied ones

http://www.june29.com/HLP/ 
The Human Languages Page (click on Languages and Literature to see links on many languages, including less-commonly-studied ones)

http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/default.htm
Off-line resources for learning less-commonly-studied languages

http://www.lang.soton.ac.uk/students/langlinks.htm 
English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German

9) Finding Web Sites Written in a Particular Language

If you are interested in the 25 languages that the search engine covers, http://www.altavista.com will find pages that use the language you are learning. I searched for all the pages in the Portuguese language that contain the word "o" ('the' in English) and got over 9 million hits.

Another way to find sites written in the language you are learning is to click on banner ads and other links of pages that you find in the language. For example, the Portuguese-language newspapers listed above have banner ads that click through to other Portuguese-language sites.

If you do all of the above and can't find anything on your language of choice, even using the major internet search engines, and if you are beginning to wonder if your language is even mentioned on the internet, then you can at least find mention of it in the internet version of the Ethnologue, a listing of all the 6700 or so languages in the world. You'll find it at http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/. From there you can also click on a link to the top 100 languages by population (top 10: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, Wu Chinese).

The Ethnologue also gives alternate spellings for languages, so if you are learning a less-commonly-studied language you may find some other spellings that you can search for on the internet.

Whew! That's a lot of web searching. I trust that the above will help you find internet resources for whatever language you are learning. Once you make a list for yourself on your language of interest, why don't you share your wealth and send a copy to any discussion groups on learning the language that you are subscribed to? And while you're at it, I would appreciate having a copy too.