Freelang’s blog

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!

It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow! This is a great occasion to express your feelings in all languages, and thanks to Freelang you will be able to say “I love you” in more than a hundred languages. We wish you love and happiness!

Scott had the correct answer to the question we asked in our previous post. It was indeed the flag of the Ainu people, which is also the latest dictionary added to our collection, thanks to our friend Charles Lippert.

Maybe the question was too easy or too difficult, I don’t know. So here is another one for you: can you give me an example of two countries which have the same flag? I can think of at least two different examples, if we don’t take the proportions of the flags into account.

Let’s play!

Here are a few hints:
- This is the flag of a group of people whose language is classified as an isolate (it doesn’t belong to any family).
- The blue represents the sea and the sky, the white represents snow.
- In their traditional culture, the men never shave and thus wear full beards and moustaches. Women tatoo their lips.

Can you guess?

Page after page, we are now working on version 4.0 of our website. You can already see the new version on several dictionary pages, like Spanish, Dutch or Irish Gaelic. Each page is being carefully personalized, which is why it takes such a long time. The links to other websites are now included directly in the dictionary main pages, so the “link center”, our old directory of links, will be discarded and redirected.

We hope you like this new layout!

Freelang wishes you a Happy New Year 2009!

May this new year bring you health, prosperity and happiness for you and all your loved ones.

This is one of the most visited pages of the site at the moment: our collection of “Merry Christmas” in all languages. Not really all languages, of course, but exactly 90 languages (and counting), which is not that bad. Thanks to the feedback provided by all the people who visit this page, new translations are added on a regular basis, and existing translations can also be improved. So please beware of imitations (I mean the unscrupulous bloggers who copy/paste our data without our authorization). The updated list will always be found at Freelang!

Merry Christmas everybody, Joyeux Noël, Hyvää Joulua…!

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