Internet Polyglot: More Free Language Learning

Another pretty good site for completely free language learning is Internet Polyglot.  They have lists of words from different categories that you can learn (e.g., animals, colors, numbers, and more esoteric categories).  They have sound on the words, but you have to click on them to hear them.  They have a series of games you can play.  But as a caveat, all you get here is vocabulary.  There are no narratives, there is no grammar, there is no interplay with a human, just words applied in different games.

First off, there is the "slide show" which is just a series of slides where they play a word in one language and then wait for a while before they play the translation.  This is the closest to traditional flash cards as you can guess the answer.  You can check or uncheck a box that will "autoplay" each slide, or play the next one automatically after a short interval without you having to click anything.

The easiest, once you have some knowledge of the words, are the "matching game" and the "guessing game."  In the matching game, you have eight words on one side in  the target language, and eight in the source language, and you have to move them around until they match up with each other.  In the guessing game, it's basically a multiple choice test.

There's also the "typing game"--but you have to be able to type the diacritical marks for the language to get these to match.  They give you a word in one language and you have to type it in the other language.

Here you get points for playing each game, and you get to compete against others.  But don't bother trying to get the high scores.  Those are all taken by freaks who must use some computer program to score rather than doing it manually (if you play for several hours and do the math, you will see that even going your fastest for 24 hours, it is impossible to match the high score for a day.  But really, what is the point of not doing it yourself?).  They have scores by the day, the week, the month, etc.  You don't have to log in to use the site, but you do if you want to score.  As I've said, I've given up on scoring due to the pointless cheating.

The coolest thing that I find about this site is that you can easily study one language in another language.  You can study Turkish in Spanish, or Polish in French (I've done this, as well as studying Polish in Spanish, and Polish in Dutch), or, as I've been doing lately, Romanian in Polish.  And it is really easy to keep switching around both target and source languages.