Freelang’s blog

Our latest dictionaries, apart from Burmese and Khmer, bear such strange names as Rutul, Aghul or Tsakhur. We also have Khanty, Selkup, Nenets… Had you already heard of these language names? Personally I hadn’t, that is until our best friend Renato Figueiredo offered us these dictionaries. Before putting them online, we do our homework and we include very basic information on the dictionary pages, such as the main geographical area, the number of speakers, the language family and sub-group, and the other related languages. But sometimes a map also comes handy, so we searched the web for some language maps (free of rights, not copyrighted materials), and we put them on a special page here at Freelang. We retouched them a little, and we also added the maps that were on our language families page. The result is a new page of the site, called Language Maps, which shows 13 maps on various themes: North American languages, Slavic languages, the ethnic groups of Caucasus, Russia and China, the distribution of languages in India and Africa, etc. We hope you like this new section, and we will keep the collection growing, as we plan to add more maps (of Europe for instance).

We have finally finished! Every single page of the site has been upgraded to version 4.0, which is now up and running. We hope the site is easier to navigate, as we especially worked on the menus, to make them more user friendly. Our Magazine section has also been redone completely, with new sections offering language games and travel advice.

Renato Figueiredo went on sending us new updates and new dictionaries, and we had to keep them on the back burner while we were finishing the new design. Now it’s raining dictionaries! Yesterday we uploaded 12 new dictionaries, including a Burmese-English dictionary, and many other languages including Kabyle, Igbo, and less known Caucasian languages. Thanks a lot Renato, and keep up the amazing work!

We have almost finished converting the site to version 4.0. We hope you like the new design and the new navigation menus. As far as the coding is concerned, we now speak PHP and CSS. A small step for Freelang, but a giant leap for its webmaster!

Today we reorganized the Link Center, Freelang’s directory of websites. Now all pages dealing with a specific language are redirected to the corresponding page where the Freelang dictionary can be downloaded. For instance, our links to Hindi language websites can now be found on the Hindi dictionary page. So the Link Center only stores the general links, in categories such as Language learning, Dictionaries and translation, etc. There are also general categories for Asian languages, Indian languages, etc. In these categories, you can also find links concerning languages for which we don’t have a dictionary yet, like Khmer or Lao.

Please let us know what you think of the new design. Looking forward to your comments!

Mother’s Day is coming and our partner, Ectaco, is happy to announce discounts of up to $200 on Lingvosoft Suites!

LingvoSoft translation software (over 4500 products for Windows, Pocket PC, Palm, Smartphones) has received many awards as the best software online.

Following a brain surgery operation, a British man woke up speaking with an Irish accent. He had never been to Ireland, so of course it came as a shock for his relatives and friends. After an hour or so, though, his speech was back to normal. This strange phenomenon is known as the Foreign Accent Syndrome. There were several famous cases, like a Norwegian woman in 1941 who began to spoke with a German accent after her head was hurt by a bomb shell. More recently, in 2008, an American woman woke up speaking with a Russian accent after an operation. But the scientists and linguists say that the patients are simply enable to pronounce some sounds, and it makes them sound like they are speaking with a foreign accent. Anyway, don’t go hurting your head just because you want to improve your accent in Spanish! You may wake up with a broken head and a French accent…

I have considered myself a fan of Paul Auster since the time I read The New York Trilogy. I also read and enjoyed The Book of Illusions and The Brooklyn Follies, and I was really looking forward to reading Travels in the Scriptorium. A man locked in a room where there are labels for each object, that sounded so… Austerian! But I ended up really disappointed, as I felt I was reading some kind of caricature or parody of Auster by Auster. Even the old anagram trick (Trause for Auster) seemed worn-out. I read a few reviews on the net and most of them are positive, though there are some negative ones too. Anyone else read this book, if so, did you like it?

We have totally rewritten the installation manual of the Freelang dictionary. It is now more precise, still with all necessary information concerning the download and the installation, but now also with a troubleshooting guide and a description of known bugs. Most users don’t need to read this guide, as the installation is very easy (download the program and one or several wordlists, then install in the same folder), but not everybody is comfortable with the installation of a program, so we provided as much details as we could think of. If anything is missing, though, please let us know!

We still don’t have a programmer who could take care of the program and its development, so chances are that the “known bugs” will remain bugs for some time yet. Our Russian partner, Sabal, is having a close look at the code to see if he can make some modifications, so let’s give him a chance and see what happens. If it fails, we have a plan B and even a plan C, but I can’t elaborate for now.

Here is a selection of a few websites among the submissions we have received lately.

Digital Dialects has interactive games in more than 50 languages. Just click on a language and begin practicing by learning numbers, colours or fruits and vegetables. It’s very basic, but it’s fun to play with the different languages.

If you want to learn more vocabulary, check out Jonsay’s online dictionaries. There are 9 languages (Japanese, Indonesian, Cebuano, Tagalog, Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish), and the vocabulary is organized by category.

Finally let’s mention meaning-of-names.com, which is, as its name says, about names. You can browse through over 40,000 names, name meanings, origins, and name histories from around the globe.

Happy surfing!

According to this article in German, Ioannis Ikonomou works as an interpreter for the European Union in Brussels and he speaks 32 languages! Or maybe even 42, according to this other article in French. I don’t speak German myself, so if somebody understands the article in German and wishes to translate or sum up a few interesting sentences as comments in this blog, I would be most grateful. And of course, if you personally know this person or you know how to reach him, please tell him that we, at Freelang, would love to interview him! The article in French gives very few details, saying that the man is 44 year-old and he began learning English at the age of 5. He considers Chinese as a simple language (!) and mentions Hungarian as the most difficult language to learn. I had already heard that before, but coming from a guy who knows so many languages, it sounds really true. The one question I really would like to ask him, though, is how does he do in order not to forget a language?

What about you, dear reader, do you speak several languages and can you practice them on a regular basis?

Known as Ireland’s most reckless driver, Prawo Jazdy was wanted by the police after racking up scores of speeding tickets and parking fines. Strangely enough, despite more than 50 offences, the serial offender had always managed to evade the law, by leading to a different address each time he was caught. So the police had a closer look, and they finally discovered that “Prawo Jazdy” was Polish for “Driving License”! Officers taking details of Polish traffic offenders had been mistakenly using “Prawo Jazdy”, printed in the top right corner of the driving licence, as the holder’s name. A memo has been issued, so Polish nationals driving in Ireland won’t be so lucky next time!