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The internet is a colossal repository of potentially almost anything. It has transcended most of the known hurdles in information exchange and social interaction. In fact, the overwhelming popularity of social media fueled the substantial rise of internet usage, drawing participation from different parts of the world.

Script Converter is a Google Labs product that allows the user to read a web page in a script of their choice. For example if the user can understand spoken Tamil but cannot read the script, they will be able to view Tamil web pages in English (Roman) script. We do not translate any content - we transform the words on the page to its phonetic equivalent in the desired script. We also support the conversion from non-Unicode encodings to Unicode, so that users can view pages without installing the custom font otherwise needed. Users will still need Unicode fonts. To start browsing a website, type the url in the text area, choose your preferred script and press convert.\n Currently we support the following scripts.\n\n * Bengali\n * English\n * Gujarati\n * Devanagari (Hindi, Marathi, Nepali)\n * Kannada\n * Malayalam\n * Tamil\n * Telugu

# 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

Dave Dodgson, who teaches English as a foreign language to elementary-school students in Turkey, has students use the web-based tool Wetoku to create split-screen video interviews. In this blog post, Dodgson shares a project in which his students used the tool to record, present and archive an interview related to the study of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." The tool allowed them valuable practice in speaking and listening in their non-native language.