Blog post with idea of using Google Drawings for handwriting practice: "Google's Drawing program is the perfect platform to practice orthography- the skill of writing characters and symbols to create words- in language classrooms with non-Roman alphabets, such as Arabic or Chinese."
"Middlebury College is pleased to announce The Kathryn Davis Fellowships for Peace: Investing in the Study of Critical Languages. These 100 fellowships are made possible by a generous gift from Kathryn Davis, to address today's critical need for increased language proficiency in the United States.
The Kathryn Davis Fellowships cover 100% of tuition, room, and board for one summer of summer language study from beginner to graduate levels in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Portuguese, and Russian at the Middlebury College Language Schools.
The Davis Fellowships are merit-based and intended for exceptionally qualified individuals with demonstrated interest in one or more of the following areas: international, global, or area studies; international politics and economics; peace and security studies; and/or conflict resolution. Individuals in other fields, including working professionals, are encouraged to apply if their field of expertise requires them to study one of the critical languages listed above."
Fun Input Toy: 最FIT你的Mac&iPhone输入法-全拼/双拼/全双混拼,五笔型/全拼五笔混合,笔画"
A pinyin-based input method for Chinese on a Mac, some users may prefer to the the Mac's built-in ITABC method
"CantoFish is a popup Cantonese dictionary for Firefox. It contains over 200,000 entries and works with both traditional and simplified Chinese characters. Both the Yale and Jyutping romanization systems are supported, as well as Mandarin pinyin."
You can search for concordances and concgrams with these programs, find whole sentences with the Sentence Concordancer, browse the Indexed Corpus Files or you can upload and search your own Personal Corpus. Includes English, Chinese, French and Japanese corpora
Gutenberg Books - full text search. Includes many languages - Languages with more than 50 books: Chinese Dutch English Esperanto Finnish French German Greek Italian Latin Portuguese Spanish Swedish Tagalog
Language study materials for French, German, Spanish, and Italian, plus some limited materials in other languages such as Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, Russian, Gaelic, Welsh, Irish, and Urdu.
Series of 5 courses on 1220 vocabulary words important for reading newspapers and other media in China. Includes options for studying with traditional, simplified or Pinyin characters.
Note: two of the LRC Staff love Jay Chou: Lilian and Garlim\nThis is a website with all Jay Chou's songs and lyrics, so you can learn and sing along! \nCourtesy - LRC Language Fellow Garlim Zhou
The Standards-based Measurement of Proficiency (STAMP), a criterion-referenced, Web-based assessment tool, measures students' language proficiency at levels ranging from Novice-low to Intermediate-mid. STAMP currently measures reading, writing, and speaking proficiencies in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. CASLS strives to continually improve STAMP's test design while adding new languages and new levels. STAMP is available through CASLS' partner company, Avant Assessment.
"The Sketch Engine (SkE, also known as Word Sketch Engine) is a Corpus Query System incorporating word sketches, grammatical relations, and a distributional thesaurus. A word sketch is a one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summary of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour. A Sketch Engine account gives you
* Pre-loaded corpora (60M-2B words) for
o Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Slovene
o Other languages to follow
* WebBootCaT
o Build your own instant corpus
o Extract keywords
o Specialist terminology, any language
* CorpusBuilder
o Upload and install your own corpora
Web service using standard browsers. No software installation required. "
The International Corpus of Learner English (Version 2) is a corpus of writing by higher intermediate to advanced learners of English. It contains 3.7 million words of EFL writing from learners representing 16 different mother tongue backgrounds (Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Tswana). It differs from the first version published in 2002 not only by its increased size and range of learner populations, but also by its interface, which contains two new functionalities: built-in concordancer allowing users to search for word forms, lemmas and/or part-of-speech tags and breakdown of the query results according to the learner profile information.
The Online Language Environments (OLE) Board is a web based threaded discussion instructional tool that utilizes voice, video and text to replicate the functions of a language lab. OLE is used for, but not restricted to, oral practice, listening comprehension, speaking practice and reading and writing practice. The OLE Board can be used to supplement instruction in face-to-face classes as homework assignments, and can be used in entirely distance classes.
CERCLL support provides assistance to improve the technological capabilities and establish the pedagogical strategies of the OLE Board, which has been successfully piloted in French, Arabic, various Indigenous languages and ESL. Specific deliverables for the OLE Board project include templates and pedagogical strategies with examples for Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese; online and print user and instructor documentation; lesson plans and use case scenarios; usability studies for further desired improvement; piloting of multi-institutional usage. We also provide for the protocols necessary to integrate the OLE Board for use with course management systems. The OLE Board is being developed as an open-source product that will be available to the wider language instruction community.