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# Difficulty : Rating 1 (easiest) to 5 (hardest) of the difficulty of learning the language for an English speaker. Many additional factors will affect the difficulty you will experience when trying to learn a given language, especially the other languages you already speak. Such a rating system has obvious limitations but I take great care in assessing the difficulty of each language. Many of these ratings have been discussed on the language forum (see for example the discussion about Korean). People always complain that the rating given to their native language is 'too low' - I wonder how they would now since they never had to learn it as a foreign language. If you can make a case for a different difficulty rating for a specific language you are welcome to bring this up in the language forum. # Popularity : Subjective rating of how popular the language is with Western learners. This obviously varies a great deal from country to country, but is a good overall indicator of the availability of learning material for the language. I visit many physical language bookshops as well as some online ones and think I have a rather objective basis for establishing 'popularity' of a language with foreign language learners in the number of courses and books available for each language. # GDP : Nominal GDP of the countries where the languages is spoken. This gives an indication of the economic importance of the language on the international scene. We have not used PPP GDP as it emphasizes non-tradable goods. When a country uses several languages we used the percentage of speakers of the language multiplied by the country's GDP. If you feel that economic factors are meaningless in language learning, please disregard this column. # Countries : Number of countries where the language is an official language or where there are important communities who speak this language at home. This gives you an indication of the spread of the language across the globe. Some languages (English, Spa

In the United States, about 70 new federal grants for language education to school districts over the past year, more than half include Mandarin programs. A number of National Foreign Language Center's long-standing recommendations gained support. These include development of the language capabilities of U.S. heritage speakers, teaching languages to higher levels, development of improved K-12 programming in critical languages and articulation among K-12 programs, higher education programs, study abroad, and the world of work. NFLC website

"Livemocha is the world's largest language learning community with over 5 million members! Designed for all language goals and skill levels, Livemocha offers free and plus learning options that actually work - and make learning languages social and fun!"

Many participants in Livemocha are fellow language teachers, too. Good way to connect with other teachers around the world.

In today's world learning another language is by far easier than ever before. We have unlimited access that we never had before. New programs and iterative tactics have made it possible for anyone to learn a foreign language. This website was designed to give you the view access to great system that I have personal used to learn another language.

Learn from real native speakers excited to help you with the language that you are learning. International Community Community members from all over the world make Lang-8 a fun, social experience.

Database of resources for teaching 2nd languages - resources include animations, sound files, activities, software, lesson plans...

Find search engines from countries around the world with Search Engine Seek - Search engines are listed according to language and country. We host the largest and most comprehensive directory of world search engines, sorted by language and country.

Educational resource for teaching and learning languages - a community to share and exchange information.

This looks like an active, vibrant learning community!

Has many many many languages French is OK, but Japanese IS NOT AT ALL!

Nice post on Twitter in world languages

Twitter could not possibly be further away from the concept of a computer game or a three dimensional visually rich virtual world. Suddenly instead of learning to fly and exchanging our money for Linden bucks (the currency of Linden Labs' Second Life) we were exchanging grammatically correct sentences for status updates of less than 140 characters! Who could have seen it coming? Perhaps Gartner, who also predicted that "90 Per Cent of Corporate Virtual World Projects Fail Within 18 Months".

Twitter could not possibly be further away from the concept of a computer game or a three dimensional visually rich virtual world. Suddenly instead of learning to fly and exchanging our money for Linden bucks (the currency of Linden Labs' Second Life) we were exchanging grammatically correct sentences for status updates of less than 140 characters! Who could have seen it coming? Perhaps Gartner, who also predicted that "90 Per Cent of Corporate Virtual World Projects Fail Within 18 Months".

Includes online resources for Language Arts, World Studies, Arts, Music, U.S. history, Health/Phys Ed, Math, and Science.