Free language courses

FSI-language-courses.com is a website hosting language courses developed by the United States government's Foreign Service Institute. The website itself is not affiliated in any way with the government; it is an independent effort to foster the learning of worldwide languages.

Arabic, Cambodian, Cantonese, Chinese (Standard), Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese are currently available.

These courses are freely available in an electronic format, and are in the public domain. They are made available through the private efforts of individuals who are donating their time and resources to help others.

Pierre Thomson provides an excellent email course for learning Norwegian, called NorWord. The NorWord learning program was written by Nancy Aarsvold and Louis Janus at the University of Minnesota. The lessons arrive daily, in all 160 lessons in about 6 months, after which you should be able to hold simple conversations in Norwegian. The Norskklassen list is an informal online class for people learning Norwegian. You'll find information on how to join the list and lots of resources for learning Norwegian on the Norskklassen website. All for free.

Here's a listing of some free Dutch language courses which I'm currently studying: dutchgrammer.com, Taalthuis online Dutch and NT2 examen.nl

Are you wondering how to pronounce a word? Fonetiks.org provides free online pronunciation guides to 9 varieties of the English language and 9 other languages: French, French Canadian, German, Swiss German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, Mandarin, Thai. The site also provides links to several other resources for learning languages.