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.

If you're tackling some graphic design project or maybe even your wall decor, getting color hints from ready made color templates from professional designers can be useful. Below are 10 of the better sites to help you out on your design challenge.


ColorCombos - nice color palettes to choose from. If there's a particular website whose colors you want to snag, check out their "Grab Website Colors" engine. You just input the URL of the site you're reviewing and ColorCombos extracts the palette for you.



COLOURlovers - this is pretty close to color mecca. This post should actually be filed as a Timewaster because you can spend hours checking out the various palettes and patterns and rolling your own. The site is full of features such as create your own palette from a URL you're inspired by, join groups devoted to colors (srsly), shore up on the latest color trends, contribute your own content and vote on others.


ColorExplorer - another site that's feature rich and full of color goodies. Color import from images, palette export to most programs, convert any number of colors into a matching palette, 1 click palette filters and adjustments, plus no requirement for site registration.


Kuler - not surprisingly, Adobe has a fetching web app to help you generate color schemes and if you have Adobe's Creative Suite 4, Kuler is built in. Kuler has great tools such as color extractor from an image, theme creation from 1 to several colors, as well as a community you can join and give and receive comments on yours and other's creations.


ColorJack - very nice color site featuring several apps such as Color Sphere which allows you to choose the right color scheme supporting 18 formulas and 9 color blindness simulations. There's also Color Galaxy, an online color visualizer with colors from 27 libraries including everyone's favorite forever and ever, Crayola.

Keep reading for more...

Now that school is officially underway throughout most of the country, help your kids flex their brain muscles with these three terrific educational sites:

NickNews - Yes, that Nick. The folks at Nickelodeon have done a great job putting together a news Web site just for kids. It covers everything from the presidential election to poverty in America in a way that teens and pre-teens can grasp. Have your kids use it as a way to keep up on what's happening in the world, as well as a place to do research on current events.

Funbrain - This is the ultimate "education-disguised-as-fun" Web site. It helps teach important academic basics in ways that are nearly irresistible to kids: math skill builders are hidden in arcade games, reading enhancers are stashed in Web comics. It's as clever as it gets. As an nice added touch, there are even blogs targeted at different age groups.

EdHelper - This one's more for parents and teachers than kids. Use EdHelper to design worksheets, games, and other printables to give kids the extra practice they need in spelling, math, or reading. Total access to the site is available at various pricing levels, but the free area will be more than adequate for most families.

There are activities for every age and grade level from pre-k to high school. In one area of the site, you can enter your child's spelling list for the week and up pops a crossword puzzle using all the words. Another section offers SAT vocabulary word lessons for 9 - 12 graders, and yet another section contains writing prompts and critical thinking exercises. What the site lacks in visual pizzaz, it more than makes up for in educational value.

Stay tuned later this week when we explore ways to find educational software that you can download right to your computer. For even more educational Web site ideas, see this post.

Here's a question for all our elderly readers: Do any of you remember the primitive era affectionately called 1995, and hearing your college professors speak hopefully (or possibly lament) that soon all the information and media ever created would be up on this web thing and easily accessible and available free of charge? Do you remember how many people went out and bought those state of the art 486s and bleeding edge Pentium I computers, and signed on with AOL or Compuserve or Mindspring to fire up Netscape, stumble on to Yahoo! only to discover the truth.

Even back then, there was a lot of stuff online that was technically information or visual/audible media. It was free, much of it, anyway, as well. I spent way too many hours watching an oddity called a webcam update at shockingly fast one minute intervals, as it delivered grainy black and white stlll images of some forgotten webmaster's painted turtle in California to my desktop in Northern Virginia.

As far as exotic, fine art work or rare, priceless tomes of great knowledge went -- it wasn't all accessible online, or necessarly free if it happened to be available. But for a good portion of the '90s, people who hadn't been online much, or were in denial, insisted it was out there.

There dawns the new century, and the myth of "it's all there, free" started to fade away with the old beige Pentium I and II computers. Things went the other way, though. Every day there was more information on the internet from all sorts of sources, and some of it (shock, awe) was free, or at least accessible to some degree. Is it irony or karma? Who knows? Many people are floored, now, to discover how much useful, cool, credible information is available online free of charge.

So just in time to go back to school (or to impress your friends with your innate intelligence), I've found a few sites and tricks for getting really great information online without additional tuition fees.

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!).

Australian researchers have found that the human brain doesn't do a very good job of processing audio and visual information at the same time. But in pretty much every business meeting or school lecture you've been to in the last few years, you've probably found yourself struggling to listen to a speaker at the same time as bullet points flashed across a PowerPoint presentation.

Rather than driving the point home, the PowerPoint slides might be distracting you from what the speaker is saying. It's possible that the speaker is also distracting you from what's on the slides, but given the choice between paying attention to some bullet points or a human being, we're guessing you'll get more out of the lecture.

This won a Webby a few years ago, and I'm surprised it hasn't come up before, but Soda Constuctor is a favorite of mine. Designed as a teaching tool, Soda Constructor is a Java toy for designing little robots, made of strings and connections. These automotons can be animated, on their own, and try to walk around an environment you control (things like gravity are adjustable). Lots of fun tinkering around, but even more fun to really try and build something stable an interesting. Thanks to Mark for sending this in!

I'm not sure why this game is called Knuckles in China Land, but it's a learning game for practicing your Japanese characters--Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji--or your Japanese, Indonesian, or German vocabulary. The game stars Knuckles from the Sonic the Hedgehog games (unlicensed, I'm sure) and takes the form of a traditional RPG, except that instead of fighting battles with monsters, you must master characters and vocabulary words. It comes with libraries which include thousands of characters and words, but if you want more it also has a Vocabulary Editor to add your own.