Season's Greetings!

To everyone out there in Internet Land wishing you all a very Happy Chanukah, Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa and to everyone else not already covered in the above greetings - a 2009 filled with happiness, multi-lingual bliss, beautiful music and great literature!

Love, Kim

Hebrew Songs

I found this podcast:

http://www.ahuvabatz.com/Site/My_Podcast/My_Podcast.html

It's a collection of Shabbat Songs and Prayers sung in Hebrew of course. She has a very pretty voice so for all of you musicians and budding Hebrew linguists I thought you might enjoy it.

Princeton Poetry - Arabic, Russian French, Italian and Spanish

I'm a big fan of a lot of stuff that Princeton as done in terms of language education. Couldn't afford to go there in a million years - but must be nice they seem to have some great teachers.

Anyway here's a site of theirs that I ran across:

http://www.princeton.edu/online-poetry/

No worries it's FREE. A nice little collection of poetry read by native speakers in Arabic, Russian, French, Italian and Spanish.

Check it out.

Avestan Language

So I ran across this site today:

http://www.avesta.org/

which has all sorts of religious texts from the Zoroastrian's in both English and Avesta - the language the texts are written in. This is not a language used in everyday communication - but of these religious texts only. What I find particularly neat about it is that it has a lovely fancy little script.

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.

Varlam Shalamov Club

If you're a fan of Russian writer Varlam Shalamov who wrote among many things Kolyma tales then here's a site for you:

http://shalamov.com/

it's a FREE online club where you can meet other Shalamov enthusiasts.

Great Russian Course

Here's a very good online FREE Russian course

http://www.russianforeveryone.com/

It has audio, grammar explanations - the works. Very well put together and great for either complete beginners or those needing a refresher.