German Course

This is an oldie but it's still a really good course put out by Deutsche Welle. You can subscribe to it on iTunes and print the scripts off their website. At about 15 minutes each its not too painful for those wanting to review their German or learn it from scratch.

http://www.dw-world.de/germancourses/warumnicht?maca=en-DKpodcast_dwn1_en-2257-xml-mrss

Cyrano De Bergerac In Russian

I have been looking for a recording of Cyrano de Bergerac in Russian for years and I am just excited beyond words that I have finally found it!!!!!

http://www.mp3-slovo.ru/rs/rostan-sirano.htm

Enjoy!

Tartar Blog

This looks interesting:

http://theperemechlounge.blogspot.com/

A blog about Tartars - looks like mainly focused on modern day Kazan in Russia but there are lots of really neat historical related pics etc. as well. A very interesting group of people that you don't hear much about these days.

Arabic Music Lyric Translations

I've found 2 great sites for Arabic lyrics translations:

http://www.arabicmusictranslation.com/

and

http://www.shawshara.com/wiki/Main_Page

I practically grew up listening to Najwa Karam and Majida El Roumi who are 2 of my all time favs so it's fun to see what in the world they were talking about. Great singers if you're interested in checking them out I believe both ladies have CDs on amazon.com and on iTunes.

Persian Resources

Here's some great links for those of you interested in learning Farsi

http://zinsmeister.wordpress.com/farsi/

1001 Arabian Nights Arabic Audio

Most people are familiar with 1001 Arabian Nights a classic of Arabic literature. I found audio files of the stories in Arabic:

http://www.archive.org/details/ArabianNights_Radio_Of_Cairo

Really interesting - it's neat to hear the tales in the original language. I've also found some of the Arabic texts from the book as well:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/134730/-05 (has the whole thing - you do have to sign up for an account but it's free so not really a big deal)

Obviously you need to be pretty advanced in Arabic to follow it all but it's fun to play around with if you're curious.

Igor's Campaign

If you're an opera fan.....come on now I know EVERYONE is right?!! OK I'm kidding but actually Borodin's Prince Igor is not one of the worst. I found the original poem it was based on here:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/tai/index.htm

and here's the audio - I won't torture you with registering on the Ukrainian site that has it. Hopefully the link will be good for a while at least.

http://rs318.rapidshare.com/files/110094532/Slovo.rar

and the beautiful thing about it is not only does it have the english translation but also the original Slavic language it was written in (Pre-Russian if you will). Very interesting and a classic. Check out the site too looks like they have a ton of really interesting resources for classic literature.

Pushkin Collection

For anyone studying Russian you know perfectly well that Pushkin is regarded as pretty much the next thing to God and rightfully so. Here's a great page that seems to have all of his collected works all in one place:

http://www.rvb.ru/pushkin/toc.htm

It is all in Russian but for those of you whose Russian is not good enough to read the original I encourage you to use a translation program like Babel Fish (it's free just type it in a search engine) and copy over little bits at a time for an English translation. Of course the translations aren't perfect but they at least give you a start and with a good grammar book by your side you can usually come pretty close to working out what it all means. I've been doing this with Evgeny Onegin. While it's a ton of work I can tell you it is a great feeling to look back on a passage in the original Russian and actually know what it all means. It also gives you an appreciation for how truly bad many translations really are!!