Having knowledge of more than one language (and to be clear, this is about spoken and written languages, not programming languages) is an increasingly important and valuable skill. The problem is of course, the older we get, the harder it can be to pick up another language.

This is why the Internet is so awesome. It can make the challenge of learning a new language or even picking up a few key phrases much easier and more intuitive.

In that vein, last week, Tokyo-based Cerego launched content creation tools for its open language platform, iKnow! to the public. These tools allow users to create learning modules in 188 languages of study and then collaborate with other users to make corrections, add additional items and discuss the process.

iKnow! isn't just about lists of words and phrases, flash card style. It also leverages the semantic web and lets you "remix" the web. You can add content from Google, Flickr and YouTube to supplement the items you are studying -- a picture from Flickr to represent a term, a video from YouTube to help show something in use -- making the process more engaging. There is also text to speech translation, so you can hear how something sounds and then select the correct context and usage.

There are also courses, although right now they are limited to English and Japanese, that let you study terms. You select what level language you are and what format you want to use and a number of items to study. The web app will then show you words, let you hear them, define them and then move on. After a few words, you will be asked if you "know" a word and you are quizzed and asked to choose what a word means and what it means in the context of a sentence. Very cool stuff.

There's a nondescript little link on the Google front page that might have escaped your notice, even if you search Google every day. If you've ever clicked "language tools," though, you know how many languages Google supports. The relevant one for our Download Like a Pirate Day here at Download Squad is, of course, "pirate."

When you set Google's language to pirate, you can "searrrch," look at some nice "engravin's," or set "me likes an' dislikes." This is all pretty silly, of course, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to point out the language features of Google, which can actually be quite useful. Except for this one day of the year, not too many people still speak pirate, but I hear Chinese, French and Arabic are pretty popular.

Learning a foreign language on your own can be frustrating, but it's much easier if you've got a good coach to help you out. Forvo aims to help out by providing a database of words pronounced in various languages by native speakers.

Forvo is still growing, and currently boasts a user base of about 2,700 contributors and 22 editors. Anyone can register and submit new words they'd like to hear pronounced or add their own pronunciations to existing words. The site makes it easy to learn topical words by tagging submissions in groups like fruit, sport, or bad words (for example).

There are currently 186 different languages supported: everything from English, French, Spanish, and Italian to Gaelic, Hawaiian, and Maori. Obviously, some languages are more active than others (read: we want to learn more Maori words!).

Ever wish that Derek Zoolander had decided to open a night school? Or maybe opened a secondary school, so that once those kids that couldn't read good or do other stuff too well got better at it, they could go on to learn to do other things? What if Zoolander teamed up with the University of Phoenix, and offered online courses?

Your prayers have been answered, sort of. Gramlee is an online service for grammar checking and proofreading (and yes, there are definitely differences between the two). The idea behind Gramlee is fairly simple. You just cut and paste your writing into the Gramlee submission form, supply your email address, and an editor (yes, a live person) will proofread it for you and make revisions.

There's no word on what the Gramlee submission form does with smart quotes, but they do seem to heavily recommend a text editor (like Notepad) for document creation. There's no reason why you couldn't use Word, but we're having a lot of fun imagining editors using some colorful language when they get certain document formats.

To get you hooked, the first hundred words are free. You can buy additional words (up to 2,625) for varying amounts, or email a longer document for a price quote. Turn around time is allegedly about twenty-four hours on most documents.

The disclaimer here is that we didn't submit a piece to Gramlee. The "Examples" page shows some nicely edited pieces, complete with red ink mark ups. It would be endlessly cool if documents were revised with the revisions somehow marked. We fear they aren't marked, and that makes our linguistic spidey-senses tingle. So if you use the service, proofread the proofreaders, please. Even people who write good well make mistakes.

And of course, we needn't tell you that it's really not a good thing to submit your term paper to Gramlee for editing, right? Um. Right?

[Thanks for the tip, Mark!]

Craigslist has just added more languages to its online classifieds service. While there was no official announcement on Craigslit, founder Craig Newmark announced the news on his personal blog.

The added languages include Spanish, French, Italian, and German. Future supported languages might include Basque and Klingon, though the latter has fallen out of everyday usage here on planet Earth.

In case you've been hiding under a rock (and said rock doesn't have an internet connection): Craigslist is a free online classifieds service that serves pretty much every major metropolitan area in the US and abroad.

[via cnewmark]

Some linguists say that most of the time people speaking any language only use about 1000 words. If you believe that, then you might also think that if you learned those 1000 common words, you would have a basic degree of fluency. If the idea of rote memorization and vocabulary building in this manner strikes your fancy, LearnItLists is there to help.

LearnItLists is essentially a web gadget that quizzes/flashcards you with 10 words a day in the language you would like to learn. You sign up for an account, pick your language, add it to your Google homepage (optional), and get busy memorizing. In a hundred days, doing 10 a day, you'll have your 1000 words, and be ready to rock with the best of them. Or close to it. Currently, the gadget supports about 16 languages, with more on the way (such as simplified Chinese).

The interface is clean, easy to use, and is intuitive in the way flash cards and vocab sheets are. So if you have been running from building your linguistic skills, give LearnItLists a look.

[via MakeUseOf]

There was a time when Facebook only came in one flavor: English. Well, no longer; there is now an option under "Languages," which you can get to via "Account," to change Facebook's primary language to Spanish.

Currently, there are about 2.8 million registered Facebook users in Latin America and Spain. Both regions will begin to load the Spanish version of Facebook by default starting on Monday, but users will have the option to change the default language back to English should the change be considered bothersome.

Though critics are weary of Facebook's ability to maintain itself and its large social-networking market-share, the company is now destined to grow internationally. Good luck, Mr. Zuckerberg.

[via Mashable]

Apparently it's foreign language week here at Download Squad, because a few days ago we told you about Mango, an excellent online resource for learning a new language. And today we've discovered LiveMocha, a site that not only lets you learn to speak a new language, but also lets you practice your language skills with other users.

Fortunately you don't have to choose between the services because they're both free. But since there's a social aspect to LiveMocha, we have to warn you that once you sign up, you should expect to receive a bunch of emailed friend requests. This is great if you're looking for folks to practice speaking with, but can be annoying if say, you registered with the site just to check it out for a few minutes.

Like Mango, LiveMocha features a number of easy to follow lessons in several languages. LiveMocha lessons are available in Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, and Spanish. The site features a clean interface with illustrative pictures and easy to understand voices. But what really makes LiveMocha stand out is its social angle.

You can do text chats or have voice and/or video conversations with users who want to practice a language you speak. In other words, if you're an English speaker trying to learn Hindi, you can find someone who speaks Hindi and start a conversation. Or if someone else wants to learn English, they might try you. This is miles ahead of the old fashioned, practice with the person sitting next to you in German 101 method.

Learning to speak a foreign language can be hard work, especially if you don't have someone around to practice speaking and listening with.

Mango is a new online website that makes learning foreign languages a whole lot easier. When you begin a lesson, you will hear a brief conversation, and then you can flip forward and backward through a series of slides at your own pace. Mango does an excellent job of combining audio clips and written text. Want to hear a phrase again? Just click the sound icon. Want to skip ahead, just click the slide advance button.

There are a variety of languages to choose from, including Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarine, Brazillian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. The lessons are almost all geared toward English speakers, but the infrastructure would easily lend itself to adding lessons for native speakers of any language.

You can choose from about 100 lessons for each language, so while Mango might not qualify as an advanced language course, it's a pretty good way to start learning a new language or to brush up on the Spanish you never really learned during high school.

Mango is free while in beta, although you'll need to register for an account. We're not sure whether the ultimate plan is for Mango to become a subscription-based or advertising-supported service, but we're assuming the developers wouldn't have put together this fine resource without a plan to make some money off it one day.

[via Lifehacker]

Sometimes you just need to know a little bit more information about the site you're looking at. Maybe you're trying to decide if it's trustworthy, or maybe you're just a little bit (or too) curious. Well in any event, if you're looking to snoop, check out GreatDB.

Punching in a URL into GreatDB will bring back most of the following information: Whois, Site Age, Blacklisting Status, Language, Web Host, Ping Time, Pagerank, Alexa Rank, Backlinks, Search Engine Indexes, DMOZ Listings, Wayback Entries, Top 5 Keywords, Domain Extension Availability, and a Preview Image. Not bad considering all it takes is about 20 seconds of your time.

Probably the creepiest data point on the list is web host, which could be used nefariously to prey on hosting companies with weak security. But everything on the list is information that is publicly available if you know where to look, so it's hard to take issue with any of them.

I'm not sure if I'd call Cucumis a Web 2.0 site; nevertheless, it's yet another site featuring luscious-looking fruit in its logo! I read about Cucumis at TechCrunch today, and I have to say, I disagree with Michael Arrington a bit on this one. What he sees as a weakness of Cucumis, I see as its most appealing (and distinguishing) feature - the fact that the service is available only to those who are willing to give back to the community by offering translations of their own.

I see Michael's point that this framework certainly isn't going to make Cucumis any big money - but if they're able to run the site on donations alone, I say more power to 'em. It seems like the linguistic equivalent of many peer-to-peer file sharing networks out there: you can't be a freeloader. Share and share alike.

Of course, this is further complicated by the fact that in the U.S., at least, we are sadly lacking in foreign-language skills. But hey, maybe this'll motivate some people to learn more Spanish than just "cerveza grande."

I don't have to tell you what PHP is obviously, many of you could run circles around me. I don't have to tell you how widely used, versatile, or powerful it is either. All I need to tell you is that 5.2 is out. This release is mostly bug fixes, some new enhancements, just in case you were wondering or hadn't heard yet. PHP is my favorite web scripting language, and I jump all over it when new versions of my favorite software comes out. Via the PHP.net website, these are the new features of PHP 5.2.0:

• New memory manager for the Zend Engine with improved performance and a more accurate memory usage tracking.
• Input filtering extension was added and enabled by default.
• JSON extension was added and enabled by default.
• ZIP extension for creating and editing zip files was introduced.
• Hooks for tracking file upload progress were introduced.
• Introduced E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR error mode.
• Introduced DateTime and DateTimeZone objects with methods to manipulate date/time information.
• Upgraded bundled SQLite, PCRE libraries.
• Upgraded OpenSSL, MySQL and PostgreSQL client libraries for Windows installations.
• Many performance improvements.
• Over 200 bug fixes.

And this is the list of security features:

• Made PostgreSQL escaping functions in PostgreSQL and PDO extension keep track of character set encoding whenever possible.
• Added allow_url_include, set to Off by default to disallow use of URLs for include and require.
• Disable realpath cache when open_basedir and safe_mode are being used.
• Improved safe_mode enforcement for error_log() function.
• Fixed a possible buffer overflow in the underlying code responsible for htmlspecialchars() and htmlentities() functions.
• Added missing safe_mode and open_basedir checks for the cURL extension.
• Fixed overflow is str_repeat() & wordwrap() functions on 64bit machines.
• Fixed handling of long paths inside the tempnam() function.
• Fixed safe_mode/open_basedir checks for session.save_path, allowing them to account for extra parameters.
• Fixed ini setting overload in the ini_restore() function.

So, apparently the PHP guys have been busy bees, and they are doing it all for the good of the common developer like you and me. It brings a tear to my eye...okay not really.

Amidst the bad waffle jokes comes a new entry into the foray of AJAX delights. Flapjax is an entire AJAX "language" built on top of Javascript that leverages AJAX capabilities. Many of the demos are almost entertaining, and could be labelled a time waster in my book. It looks like you can do a lot with Flapjax, though I haven't become a guru at it yet. The code seems a little more difficult than your usual code, but that is to be expected with some things. Flapjax makes writing AJAX code easier (they claim), though I don't know if I agree yet, it doesn't look easier than what I already use today for my AJAX, but is worth the look. There are some similarities with PHP or ASP in that the Flapjax code can be embedded inside existing HTML.

Here are the major benefits Flapjax offers:

• Optional templating syntax
• Event-driven, reactive evaluation
• Persistent data saved on a data store we provide
• Convenient data sharing
• Access-control for shared data
• Interfaces to external Web services

Go check out the tutorial, the demos, documentation, and the other sections of the site, and you'll get a good picture of what Flapjax, it looks as though it could be a contender in the AJAX arena.

I just about laughed my butt off reading this. I'll warn you by saying that you need to be a programmer to even "get" the list of language jokes on this page. Of course you will identify with several different languages than I did most likely, but it is a very funny, very enjoyable site to peruse. My non-programmer wife even enjoyed a few of them because some of them are just funny to read aloud. Don't know what I'm talking about? That's why you have to visit the site, you'll get it. A bit of well-placed programming humor, don't you think?