Need to translate words or phrases into another language? Use this free and easy to use site for translations. in various languages (Spanish, Chinese, Turkish, Russian, Romanian, Portuguese, Polish, Korean, Japanese, Italian, Hindi, German, and French). View dictionaries that exist between languages, hear audio of the translations, take quizzes, or try language games. Students can play language activities such as hangman, scrambled words, memorize, or match it, as well. Customize each game by clicking "change" next to the "settings." Choose different languages, ease of play, and categories of words.
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Imagine typing a note in Hindi! Simply click on the language of your choice and start typing! The “note” will show up in the text box in the new language. This site helps students search, type, and translate in more than 50 foreign languages. Of course the site has the more common languages: French, German, Spanish, Chinese, and others. But there is also an eclectic mix of other lesser known (to Americans) languages: Kazach, Latvian, Macedonian, Farsi Persian, Tamil, Thai, Swedish, and MANY more.

The FAQ section is extremely helpful, explaining how to use the site with different browsers and languages. It also instructs those who use the site how to zoom, change the "Skins" of the site, and how to convert text to html. Once a student or teacher clicks on a specific language, a separate keyboard appears on the screen that features any diacritical markings or other special language features. This page also contains links to relevant search engines, videos, maps, dictionaries, and other reference tools. Be aware: this site does include some advertisements. This site uses Java and Flash. You can get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.
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This site offers FREE audio episodes teaching numerous languages: Irish, Italian, Polish, Danish, Russian, Greek, French, and countless others! Featured shows have titles like "Coffee Break Spanish" and "One Minute French." Some of the programs require students to subscribe using a simple form, but most do not require any registration. They can then search the entire lesson content or just search by language. Focus languages include Spanish, French, German, Italian, English, and many other languages, primarily European, though Mandarin and Japanese podcasts are also available. Students will love being able to load the lessons on their Ipods, mobile phones, and computers! The "Guided Tour" section of the page allows students and teachers to learn how to use the site and focus on whatever their particular aims for study are. This site requires Flash. You can get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.
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For serious lovers of words and their meanings (is there perhaps a future lexicologist in your classroom?), this site offers a wealth of information using examples from 1150 words. Click on Home to get a complete overview of this site. In the “Words From” box, just click on a category: Latin, Slavic Languages, Dutch, Greek, Spanish, and many others. A list of words from that category will appear at the bottom on your screen. Now, click on a word to learn information about that particular word. Click on the “Now You Try” tab to work interactive activities for that word category. Lists of those example words may be printed as well.

Visit the official site for the Scripps National Spelling Bee (reviewed here by TeachersFirst). Check out all the links to learn how to study for the Bee, guidelines, and application deadlines. December is the annual deadline for your school’s enrollment in the National Bee. This site will have the exact deadline each year. Click on Study Zone to download the Consolidated Word List (a gigantic compilation of 794 pages of words that have been used from 1950 to the present). Students can test their spelling know-how by clicking on the "Test Your Spell It Knowledge" link on the homepage. Flash is required to enjoy the interactive activities, get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.
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This site offers language lessons for 4 languages: Spanish, English, French and German. The site plans to add additional languages in the future. Joining for free allows students to learn vocabulary, dialog, writing, oral skills, comprehension, and more - in a highly interactive format. Support from native speakers is a regular feature of this site using the interactive video chat capability. The range of topics includes more than 100 commonly used language situations. The site saves errors for review, lists of lessons already studied, results of those lessons, etc. This project of UNESCO's International Year for Languages offers lessons in "What you really need to know!" This site requires Flash. Get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.
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Internet Polyglot offers language lessons for many languages, available both with the translation from English and also from Spanish. The English lessons also include items for “regular” English classes, such as SAT words. A “widget” to embed lessons in your web site or wiki is also available. You can even share many of the lessons on mobile devices, such as cell phones. Some of the languages include Spanish, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, German, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, French, Latin, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, and numerous others. You can choose lessons to translate to and from any language (for example, Hebrew to Dutch or Japanese to Russian). Everything on the site is free, and there are many lessons for each language, categorized by usage. Most of the lessons start by having students learn vocabulary words: seeing them frequently on online-style pictorial flash cards, hearing them spoken, and then completing review activities using them. In addition to traditional language categories, students can also collect and create their own lessons, modifying lessons of others, and sharing what their friends are using. The site offers a free registration and log in which allows you to keep score results and create and modify your own materials. This site does have some unobtrusive advertisements.
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This site offers free comprehensive, interactive language and literature courses developed by MIT staff as part of their open course ware program. All courses include a regular syllabus that features assignments, interactive activities, and other resources such as videos and slideshows. There is a wide range of language offerings; the cultural courses complement the language instruction and include topics such as popular culture, history, economics, media , and thinking skills. There are courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. This site requires Adobe Acrobat. You can get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.
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This site requires free registration for access to over 200 free songs: mostly classics and holiday favorites. The site includes some young children's classics, too. As with all karaoke, only the melody plays; the words are visible in a box on the website. The language of the song displays also when not English. Use these songs for younger children, special occasions, foreign language classes and ESL/ELL students. Play the songs on your classroom computer. Be sure to turn up the speakers!

Registration requires an email address. Tip: rather than using your personal or work email, create a free Gmail account to use for membership. If you plan to have students register individually (which isn’t necessarily recommended), you may want to create your own Gmail account with up to 20 subaccounts for each group of students (by code name or number) within your classes. Here is a blog post that tells how to set up GMail subaccounts to use for any online membership service. This site requires Flash. You can get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.
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CLICK IMMEDIATELY on "Free Preview" for the only free portion of this site. This humorous preview section of a larger, paying, site has beginning level vocabulary. Students pick which activity they want to try after listening and seeing the basic vocabulary. Activities include dictation, writing vocabulary words in response to the pictures, hangman, matching, etc. Teachers or students are able to print some of the activities. This site also include beginner Spanish, French, Italian, and German – all perfect for beginning level world language classes. This site is also useful for ESL and ELL students. Click for a complete, 8-page list of all the vocabulary covered. Unit tests are also provided. This site requires Flash. Get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.
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This site converts text to speech. Students or teachers can choose which voice they'd like to hear read the text. As they listen to the oral version of whatever they've pasted into the box, keywords for the text appear in a box below the play button. Select to keep your new oral files private or make them public, using the podcast library option. Download files to an MP3 player or wav file. Students can also convert and listen to files in Spanish, French, and German, all with a variety of readers. Registration for the service is simple and free. A useful option for ESL and ELL students is the ability to control the speed of the speech being read.

This site requires registration (with an email address and user name). The registration page says that the site is available “by invitation only,” however our reviewers found that we were able to register. This site requires Windows Media Player. You can get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.
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IM or AIM on steroids? That is how MeGlobe describes itself. This site allows the user to instant message to people who speak many different languages. While they may be adding languages as the site builds, at the time of this review, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, German and Greek are supported. This is a BETA site, so forgive a few wording problems as it refines the languages. Sign-up is quick and free. Once registered, you can invite people from all over the world to chat with you in nearly instant response time. The world definitely comes to your classroom via MeGlobe.
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An exciting “text-to-speech" service offers voice readings of text you enter into the reader. In addition to having any text read, you can choose the type of voice you want (male or female) the language you want (American English, UK English, German, Spanish, French, etc..) and change its speed, tenor, and "effect." This great tool for ESL, ELL, special education, and limited-sight students does show some distortion if you choose the very lowest rate of speed, but the adjustments are helpful. New digital voices will be added, so be sure to check the selection frequently. Warning: much of this site is for a fee, including a software download that has a cost. The “free stuff” is in this Demos area. This site uses Quicktime. Get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.
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This “text to speech” service is a rare find and highly useful in ESL, ELL, and world language classrooms. This site is also ideal for students with limited hearing. The website offers two main options: Text to Speech and Text to Speech Translator. At the Text to Speech link, phrases or short stories can be typed into the text box. Space is limited, so the stories cannot be long. Then you can choose among countless avatar voices (in U.S., Australian, or British English accents). Turn up the volume, and listen to your text. At the Translator link, you are able to type in any phrase or story to translate the words from one language to another. This site offers a great variety of world languages (European and Asian) including English, Chinese, Greek, Korean, Russian, Swedish, Polish, and many others. You can even select from a variety of speakers for each language group so that different dialects and areas are covered. For example, Chinese is offered in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taiwanese. This site requires Flash. Get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.. a>
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This site offers beginning level language lessons in eight languages: Spanish, English, French, Russian, Indonesian, German, Chinese, and Italian. Students can start by learning to pronounce the alphabet in the target language. Other activities include dialogs which range from very simple to those using more complex grammatical construction. Students can hear the sentences in the dialogs line by line and repeat them as many times as they like; the pronunciation is very clear. In addition to the dialogs, there are delightful songs in all the languages as well as other language games like Memory and Bingo. Clicking on the letters of the alphabet opens the corresponding page of a picture dictionary with pronunciation. Complete verb forms, vocabulary with articles, and works by major writers are just some of the features of the picture dictionary. This site requires Flash. Get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page..
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Want to learn just a little or a lot of a new language? This is a great place to start learning vocabulary and basic phrases. The reviews and games are in cute interfaces, but there aren't many sound files. Since the description says the developer is adding more to the site each day, hopefully there will be more pronunciation added. The scope of the site is amazing: 44 languages. The languages include Albanian, Bosnian, English, Filipino, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and MANY others. The sound files, few as they are, feature native speakers pronouncing the basics. The games allow the student learner to guess and practice as much as possible by presenting the same words several times. The advanced feature provides more advanced vocabulary and the geography features the geography of the language group. This site requires Flash. Get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.
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Power up your foreign language classes with free Internet-based tools for foreign language students and teachers from the Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR). The CLEAR project leverages the power of the Internet to provide a suite of tools that give students audio and video learning experiences while supplying teachers with smart effective tools for lesson design and assessment. Teachers who are comfortable with technology and those who are confident creators of multimedia content will find these tools easy to use and backed up with good documentation and video tutorials. The tools require no download or installation for use. The supported languages include, Chinese, German, Russian, Korean, Arabic, French, Vietnamese, and others.

Teacher registration is free and students don’t need email accounts or registration to access the tools. Go to http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/ria/index.php to click on the link for Rich Internet Applications. The tools provide great ways to create interactive audio and video language prompts, record student responses, and collect them into audio dropboxes for teacher assessment.

The website also includes an extensive library of interactive multimedia modules for language learning, practice, and assessment. The modules are based on video clips that show native speakers and nonnative speakers interacting in natural, unscripted situations.
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This study tool and open content dictionary allows you to enter a web address (URL) and make all of the words on that page clickable for definitions and translation. A clicked word immediately displays its definition from the Lingro dictionary pages. The website looks visually the same within the LIngro window, but all words become clickable. You can also use Lingro to translate to and from English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Polish with more languages to be added. When students use the translation/definition tool, the site keeps a short-term record of their words and web pages, allowing them to study their own wordlists and to play games with these words. The wordlist and history feature only works short-term and at the SAME computer, unless you register for free to be able to take your personal history to any computer. With the translation capability, you can read websites in other languages. If you spell a word incorrectly, Lingro has a "best match" feature which finds likely definitions for your word of choice. There is also a tool to create electronic flash card type games from your saved wordlists.

Important technical note: Lingro cannot “see” words included in Flash interactives such as the “What’s New” rotating content on the TeachersFirst home page. If you RIGHT click on an area of text and see “About Adobe Flash Player…,” this means that the text is displayed in Flash and not “legible” to Lingro. Often pages offer a non-Flash version as an alternative.
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This site allows students to practice pronunciation in 10 languages, including English, European languages, and Mandarin Chinese. After a free registration, you can put in a search term for lessons. It's a bit difficult to guess search items, so looking at the entire list in any given language is a good way to start. Currently, English has 298 items. You are also able to contribute lessons.

One helpful document is the Chuala inventory which allows instructors to quiz ESL students on their pronunciation by having them pronounce 144 distinct items. They can then search the lessons for practice, recording, and making comparisons on these phonemes.

Some of the lessons take the whole language approach and appear as dialogs, discussions, or Q and A. Most, however, have students practice distinct sounds only, with no context. One advantage of the program is that you can select lessons by distinct language area. For example, American English students can hear examples of American English rather than British English. You can also request that other lessons be created. This site requires Flash and enabled Javascript. Get Flash and directions on enabling Javascript from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page..
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This series of free translating dictionaries allows students to search to/from English in these languages: French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and German. Once a definition comes up in English, there are links to other dictionary pages where the word appears in a sentence. You can click on the audio button to hear the word spoken in both languages. This feature is only available in more commonly used words

There are also immediate clicks to other languages, so a student could check the same word in Spanish and French very easily. In addition to the translation dictionaries, there are also “English Dictionaries” (non-interactive) available in Portuguese, Polish, Romanian, Czech, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic (coming soon). Many of the foreign language dictionaries will increase in volume as the site developers add more vocabulary.

Be aware: this site does include minor advertisements. There is a link to Language Forums. It is probably best to advise students to stay away from the forums.
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This well planned site makes language learning easy. See a complete demo from a link on the "Features" page. Select the language you wish to study after free registration. Gifted students seeking independent study of a language will enjoy the extensive offerings.Lessons begin with a conversational preview. Each portion of the conversation appears on a separate screen, with multiple practices and translation. Hear native speakers pronounce the conversation sand explore many other rich features. If you mouse over the words, you can see the phonetic pronunciation. follow the color coding to see exactly which section of the language corresponds to the English. Although the site is in BETA as of this review, more language offerings appear frequently. Unfortunately the site does not offer English as a second language except to Spanish and Polish speakers. Presumably more English is coming.

This site requires FLASH. Get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page..
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