The May edition of the Free Language Letter is out!

There are new resources for learning the Mandarin Chinese language.

I am reposting it here for quick access:

Fourth Edition

Welcome to the fourth edition of The Free Language Letter.

New Languages

Two new languages have been added to the site! We are happy to announce new sections for the Afrikaans and Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) languages.

New Resources

21 new resources for 11 languages have been added to the site:

Afrikaans

LearnAfrikaans.us Learn Afrikaans Free Online Language Courses
Beeld South African News in Afrikaans

Arabic

Free Learn Gulf Arabic Language Resources
Learn Arabic Free at Speak7

English

ESL Business News Podcast
Podictionary English Dictionary Podcast

French

RFI News in Slowly-Spoken French Podcast
World Nomads iPod French Language Podcasts

German

Learn to Speak German with this Free Podcast

Hindi

World Nomads iPod Hindi Language Podcasts

Indonesian

Beginning Indonesian Learn Bahasa Indonesia Course
Learn Basic Bahasa Indonesia Phrases at Expat.or.id
SEASite Indonesia Resources for Learning Bahasa
World Nomads iPod Lingo Indonesian Language Podcast

Italian
World Nomads iPod Italian Language Podcasts

Japanese

World Nomads iPod Japanese Language Podcasts

Mandarin Chinese

World Nomads iPod Mandarin Chinese Language Podcasts

Spanish

Notes in Spanish Intermediate Podcast
Notes in Spanish Advanced Podcast
Rolling Rs Learn Spanish Podcast
World Nomads iPod Spanish Language Podcasts

Coming Soon...

Our First Podcast

The first Free Language Podcast show was supposed to be here last month, but it was put on the back burner in order to launch Afrikaans and Indonesian resources on the site. We will do our best to get this out in June.

Commercial Language-Learning Resources

Once again, this was put on the back burner. In June we hope to be rolling out a better store with a larger selection of commercial language-learning products and services. Funds earned from this new section will be put into making the interface and features of the site more rich and better organized.

Full Stats from freelanguage.org

Another back burner story... but in June we will be posting the entire history of statistics for freelanguage.org. For now, you can see a hint on polyglot's blog. You can also see a visual representation of where our visitors come from by visiting the Geovisitors tag page. Here is a screenshot of visitors from today:

The Blog Grows More

There are now six bloggers over at the Free Language Blog:

• adoyles
• polyglot
• deal finder
• dexta
• opal myth
• transcombouge

If you are interested in blogging about your language-learning experiences here, you are invited to request a BETA user account on Free Language. As mentioned in the March 2007 Free Language Letter, when Free Language V3 is launched, revenue sharing for users will be implemented.

Current Languages

A quick list of all 14 languages for which resources are currently available on the site:

• Afrikaans
• Arabic
• Cantonese
• English
• French
• German
• Hindi
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Mandarin Chinese
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Spanish

Suggest a Resource

If you have a favorite language-learning resource (or manage a website of your own) that is not listed on Free Language, please let us know by suggesting a resource.

Social Bookmark Us!

If you have not already done so, please visit our site and use the social bookmark link on the left side to add us to any of numerous social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us, furl, magnolia, digg, reddit, newsvine, simpy, bluedot, stumble upon and more. Please help us grow!

Auf wiedersehen.

The Free Language Community
http://freelanguage.org

Free Language has now got six people blogging on the Free Language Blogs.

There are quite a lots of varied resources there pertaining to many languages.

Have a look... there are many things regarding Chinese:

Blog entries tagged with "chinese".
Blog entries tagged with "mandarin".
Blog entries tagged with "mandarin chinese".

I am learning Mandarin Chinese. I created a project for it over at Opal Myth.

Track my progress there if anyone is interested. I will also be pointing out good resources for learning Mandarin Chinese there.

"This Mandarin Chinese course is created for anyone who is interested in learning spoken Mandarin, the audio lessons are in Mp3 format and can be downloaded from this Website for free.

PDF transcripts and worksheets are available for a small fee.

These podcast lessons are suitable for beginners, they are progressive, so you can start from “zero” level and after completing the course, you will be able to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese on the familiar topics.

A very important feature of this course is that you can spend as much time on each lesson as you need, there is no time limit or other requirements, just download your lessons and study them at your own pace.

Every new lesson is built on the vocabulary and grammar of the previous lesson. You can spend about a week on each lesson.

There is a lot of review of the old vocabulary in the new lessons and all lessons are interconnected. The step-by-step approach in learning Mandarin Chinese is very important. By constantly repeating the key words and phrases you will remember them better.

So from now on you can take the Mandarin Chinese Lessons with you and study anytime, at any place, at your convenience. E.g. You can study in your car on the way to work or school. No need to sit in the classroom! Study whenever you want!"

Visit the site.