Good websites to learn languages

Lord_Snot

I enjoy learning languages as a hobby, and am looking to learn Mandarin Chinese.

Can anyone recommend any good free language sites, with lessons? I would usually just go to a language class, but there aren't any Mandarin classes round here.
Any recommendations would be appreciated.

Malodine

This one is pretty good and specifically has Mandarin.
http://www.rosettastone.com/
This is what the government uses/offers people

juggerbot

Rosetta Stone is the opposite of free. Even with military discounts, a full set of courses for a single language costs hundreds of dollars.

Due to the large demand of language-learning tools, I highly doubt you will find a quality source for comprehensively learning any language, much less Mandarin, notorious for its difficulty.

However, Wikipedia has a user-generated educational arm called Wikiversity. They do have a Mandarin course in the works, but I have no idea how it stacks up against paid materials. Beyond Wikipedia, I would want to stick to non-profit entities, like universities which may have some free content. But I think your best bet is to take some courses at a local college. Even a few introductory courses followed by independent study would be much easier than completely learning from scratch.

Aphostile

I remember http://www.livemocha.com/ being a good resource in the past.

I haven't seen it in forever though.

finral

http://www.nciku.com is a pretty good source for mandarin vocab, although I haven't used their learning tools myself.

Esh

memrise.com is great for word drills.

garroad_ran

Anki is a good flashcard program you could look into. I use it a lot for developing vocab.

Also, Lang-8.com is good for writing practice.

But I don't really know any Mandarin-specific sites, sorry!

ChopperDave

wordchamp.com is quite good for vocab drills. You can often select from flashcard sets made from other people, or make and practice your own. It also has a social networking feature that allows you to connect with language learners and tutors from other countries -- you could help teach English to a Chinese student while she teaches you Mandarin, for example.

... too bad they're going out of business in two months. Get it while it's hot!

Chanus

The DoD just recently made all its training programs available for free.

And of course I can't find the link at the moment, but I have it at home... I'll update it later if you can't find it otherwise.

grouch993

There was a chinese language teaching MMO being worked on by a university in Michigan. Named Zon. No idea if it is still around or not, enterzon.com was the site.

UrQuanLord88

A good and FREE podcast for conversational mandarin would be http://popupchinese.com/ They have episodes ranging from elementary to intermediate mandarin.

Every end of the week (as much as they can), they have a special podcast episode called Sinica, "that invites prominent China journalists and China-watchers to participate in uncensored discussions about Chinese political and economic affairs" in English. It is headed by Kaiser Kuo, director for international communications for Baidu and rockstar. Very very very informative and interesting if you are remotely interested in what is happening in China.