http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYO5aw4wPHE I Stubledupon this very informative video a while back, bookmarked it and then recently came back to some of the links it recommended because I had time. It's a 5 minute video that explains about how you can learn new langauages online for free. I have so far done the BBC one and it was pleasantly surprised by the quality. Next I'm going to check out the FSI language courses because they sound in-depth and that's what I want. I hope they have audio. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoy. I know I will. Here are some of the links recommended in the video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/ http://fsi-language-courses.com/ http://www.livemocha.com/ http://www.jimmyr.com/free_education.php
Awesome. This site says that the Foreign Service Institute Chinese course comes on dozens of tapes and costs $1700, but from your link I see it's on the web for free!
For you younger Americans who haven't established a career yet... If you learn Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, or virtually any of the languages of the Middle East, you can get a good job with the federal government as a translator. Not an interpreter, who translates speech in real time while people are talking, but a translator who translates written documents. They've got a tremendous shortage in those languages, they're not popular in American universities, and for some odd reason they're a little reluctant to hire native speakers. Oh yeah, and the military fired a bunch of their best translators... because they were gay! During the Cold War they were all primed with translators for Russian, Chinese, Czech, Korean, etc., and they didn't take the Middle East seriously. Immediately after 9/11, one official said that for all he knew, there might be a PowerPoint presentation showing the details of the entire operation in complete detail, in Arabic, sitting at the bottom of his in-basket. He could have had it since 1996; their backlog of Arabic documents was that deep because they didn't have enough translators. From what I gather, they haven't made much progress since then. Six years later, they've steadily worked on their backlog so they now know that they didn't really have a plan for 9/11 at the bottom of anybody's in-basket (at least that's what they say Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!), but they're not really making any progress and the plan for the next attack could be down there.
