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Well like a lot of people I've bought an iPad over the summer and I've been having my first taste of shopping for apps to extend the capabilities of the iPad. I've also been having a look at how some of these can be used for language learning, so I thought I would share with you a little bit of information about the first few apps I've tried.

Opportunity for language instructors to participate in piloting new proficiency tests.

Impressed by the "tour" of Twine and how nuanced it seems to be, I registered for the beta.

Eventually useful in upper-level language courses? A Quintura for foreign languages on a social-networking scale?

quick information sheets on emerging technologies, including blogs, videoblogging, wikis, podcasting, clickers, and social bookmarking

# 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