Listed on these pages are links to useful websites that either aren't language-specific, or that cater for a variety of different languages.
We've divided them roughly into categories:
- Reference [new page]
- For teachers [new page]
- Language resources and courses
- News & media
- More collections of links
Language resources and courses
- Studying Languages at university provides straightforward and relevant information about studying languages, linguistics and cultural studies at uni. There are sections with details and advice for before, after and during your degree, including plenty on your year abroad and for international students coming to study languages in the UK. They also have Q&As with students, an essay competition and Début, an undergraduate journal.
- Internet for Modern Languages - a free "teach yourself" tutorial to help university students to develop Internet research skills for modern languages, created by university lecturers.
- Lingu@net is an online resource centre providing good pathways for learning languages using quality websites. It offers support for adult learners on how to learn a language, how to assess your level and how to communicate with other learners online, developed by language learning specialists throughout Europe (co-ordinated by CILT).
- BBC Languages includes several self-contained online courses, plus lots of supplementary material for their courses, transcripts etc. There's a separate site for their published course materials.
- Language Buddies at Sussex - if you're a student or staff member here at the University of Sussex looking for informal language practice, you can subscribe to our Study Direct site and use the forums to find someone to chat with in your target language; we also organise an occasional language buddy evening to bring together Sussex students who are learning foreign languages with overseas and exchange students who are studying English.
- busuu.com is an online community for learning languages, with their own audiovisual learning and grammar units but also integrated video-chat so that you can practice your language skills in a live conversation with a native speaker.
- MyLanguageExchange.com does something similar, enabling language exchange by listing other members who are native speakers and who may be learning your language, so you can then communicate as an email pen pal, by text chat or Skype.
- WordChamp helps students learn vocabulary, via six different types of drills, audio clips of native speakers, verb conjugations, and dictionary lookup. The most interesting feature though is the web reader, which helps students to read foreign websites by showing the English definition of a word if the user points the cursor at it. The user can also add these words to a list, to be tested on later.
- LanguageGuide.org has absorbing pictorial vocabulary guides where users place their cursor over any of the images to hear their names pronounced and see them spelled out. Available so far in English, Spanish, French, Russian, Mandarin, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and Korean. A few interactive grammar guides and readings are also available.
- Use your Language, Use your English is an excellent self-study translation site operated by Birkbeck College London. It provides short source texts, model translations and commentaries into English from Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. You must register - by emailing useyourcontact@bbk.ac.uk - but membership is free.
- Fonetiks - pronunciation guides with native speaker sounds and accents.
- Goethe Tests - test your English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Hungarian and Indonesian vocabulary with gap-fill exercises.
- Linguascope and Linguacentral are good for young learners, offering lots of games and exercises for French, German and Spanish.
- LangMedia offers a wealth of video clips of authentic language spoken in its natural cultural environment. Most clips have transcripts and English translations, plus cultural notes and some still images.
- Find-a-Linguist - locate a language tutor for private classes (or a translator or interpreter) courtesy of the Institute of Linguists.
- Cactus Language - a Brighton-based language travel agency for study abroad.
- Grant & Cutler - one of the UK's leading suppliers of foreign language books and media; Bay Language Books are another. MovieMail have a good range of world cinema DVDs, listed by country.
- Routledge's Colloquial series - good quality book+audio courses in 50 or so languages.
News and media
The University of Sussex Language Learning Centre receives satellite TV in several languages and takes several newspapers and magazines; the main Library has more newspapers.
- Abyz News Links has links to news media all over the world, and Kidon Media-Link categorises some by language.
- A selection of online English-language news from the EFL page here.
- BBC World Service broadcasts in over 40 languages; their website carries text from most of these and audio from quite a number too.
- Voice of America is a US Government-run radio station which provides audio news broadcasts in over fifty languages. Audio files are available through the Internet, updated several times a day.
- World Radio Network - live and archived radio news broadcasts from around the world.
Visual media
- The BBC have an area on their site dedicated to their language programmes, including lots of interactive material and transcripts. Most of their language programmes are broadcast in the Learning Zone slot. There are also full TV and radio programme schedules.
- The Internet Movie Database is a comprehensive searchable catalogue of film details - plots, credits, reviews etc. The All-Movie Guide has plenty on foreign films too.
- The European TV Web has schedules and other details of most channels that can be received in Europe.
- Live Radio and TV on the Internet - a country-by-country list from comfm of stations broadcasting on the Internet (you'll need RealPlayer or similar). For radio, you could also try the BRS radio-directory or radio-locator.
- LyngSat has full details for all satellite TV & radio channels in the world including links to home pages, teletext services, footprint maps and address info; this also lists all satellites each channel is on and can be browsed by country. There's even a list of free channels by country.
- UK Free TV - lots of up-to-the-minute technical detail about receiving free TV channels in the UK (analogue, Freeview and satellite), including transmitter engineering works.
- Worldwide TV Standards - a guide to the mysteries of NTSC/PAL/SECAM and more from Bevis King at Surrey University.
- The World Clock - current local times across the world.
- Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon is a good source for authentic images for language learning - handy for teachers.
More collections of links
- The big links page: Tyler Chambers' encyclopaedic iLoveLanguages.
- alphaDictionary links to a good selection of learning and reference grammars as well as dictionaries; maintained by Robert Beard, founder of yourDictionary.com.
- CALL@Hull has plenty of links aimed at the UK HE language community.
- MERLOT is a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education. Links to online learning materials are collected here along with annotations such as peer reviews and assignments.
- Yahoo's Linguistics and Human Languages directory. They have pages for most Countries too.
- Webring of Languages & Linguistics - a collection of websites linked together which can be browsed sequentially or at random.
- Cactus Language - a Brighton-based language travel agency for study abroad.