Language Sampler

This is a terrific site if you're like me and you go "language shopping" every once in a while looking for something new and exotic to play with:

http://linguistics.online.uni-marburg.de

You do have to sign up but it's all FREE and I promise they don't harass you with a bunch of e-mails. I think I get maybe 5 total a year if I'm lucky. It's part of a University in Germany.

Anyway, once you get all signed in go to the "VLC Tool Box" and then the "VLC Language Index." You will find practically every language you can think of. Now what makes this particularly cool is when you click on the language you want you get a small summary about its origins, some grammar info. and then a sound sample (with transliterated text) spoken by a native speaker. Some of the samples are really quite long so it isn't the typical stupid "Hi my name is Kim" sort of garbage. You get a real feel for what it sounds like. Then it goes on to analyze some sentences grammatically so you can see just how complex the language gets. Really a pretty neat thing to play with.

This university also has totally online linguistics courses (not for free unfortunately) but I do believe they have an Undergrad degree totally online now for around 8.000 Euros or so which considering what degrees cost these days isn't too terribly bad.