Get your foreign-language writing corrected online for free

When you're learning how to write in a language, there's nothing quite like getting your writing corrected. And when you're getting it corrected, there's nothing quite like getting it corrected totally for free. And when you're getting it corrected totally for free, there's nothing quite like getting it corrected for free and quickly.

Sound like something you'd be interested in? A comparison of the websites on which you can do just that, after the jump.

Read more... The first two sites below—Lang-8 and CorrectMyText—are focused primarily on textual corrections. The rest—Livemocha, Busuu, and LingQ—include textual corrections as one among many features.

One note before diving in... the comparisons below are only looking at what these websites do in terms of text corrections. All of these sites can of course do other things, but I'm leaving those features aside for now (although feel free to highlight your favorite features in the comments below).

Lang-8

• Overview. Lang-8, based in Tokyo, is a two-person project by Yangyang Xi, CEO, and Kazuki Matsumoto, CTO, that focuses letting language learners get their texts corrected.


• Content. Lang-8 is set up as a journal or a blog, but you're free to post whatever text you feel like posting. Although many people do post journal-like entries, I typically post all sorts of things in there. In addition to texts to get corrected, this mainly consists of language-related questions. Just as people are happy to correct your text, they're also happy to answer questions about whatever confusing point of the language you've come across.


• Making corrections. Lang-8 first breaks the text down into sentences, separating them based on punctuation (this results in the occasional weird break-up when you have something like "12.1" in the sentence; Lang-8 interprets the decimal point in that number as the end of a sentence and breaks it up accordingly). Then correctors can edit sentence by sentence. The system flags uncorrected sentences so subsequent correctors can focus their efforts where most needed.
  
  Correctors edit each sentence in a little window. The one annoying thing about the editing process is that, if you want to add formatting to the text, you've gotta deal with tags tossed into the text in that little window, such as [BLUE][/BLUE] or [BOLD][/BOLD]. It can get pretty jumbled up.


• Speed of corrections. Although none of these sites are slow in getting corrections back to you, the corrections come extremely rapidly on Lang-8; I rarely wait an hour, but I think the most I've ever waited is something like a day. In fact, one day I put up a whole bunch of posts on Lang-8 and, by the time I was done adding all the posts, most of them had already been corrected.


• Correction presentation. It is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through formatting: bold, strike-thru, red, and blue text. Your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.


• Languages. You can post in any language you want, and native speakers of all major languages are well represented on the site. I make most use of Japanese, unsurprisingly, but I've also made use of Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and French thus far. I'd wager that it'd take longer to get corrections for less frequently studied languages, but I've not tested that hypothesis.


• Interface. Lang-8's interface is alright; it's nothing to rave about, but it gets the job done. I'd like them to make it even easier to view edits, but it's decent as is.


• Bottom line. I find Lang-8 to be the best of the bunch, and I recommend it highly.

CorrectMyText.com

• Overview. CorrectMyText, based in Russia, is the project of Dmitry Lopatin. It's a new entry to the free online text-correction market; as far as I can tell, it was launched all of seven days ago. As such, it's still got a lot of squeaky wheels that need some grease, but the functionality you need to get text corrected is already there.


• Content. You can put any kind of textual content into CorrectMyText.com.


• Making corrections. CorrectMyText first breaks the text down into paragraphs, separating them based on line breaks. The corrector can then edit each paragraph's text direcly.


• Speed of corrections. Given how new CorrectMyText is, and thus the limited number of users it has compared to the other sites in this list, the corrections don't come quite as quickly. Nevertheless, if my limited experience is representative, you'll still get them within a day or two.


• Correction presentation. The corrector cannot apply any formatting. CorrectMyText.com will automatically create side-by-side before-and-after versions of the text. The before version will show the edited text highlighted in red and struck through. The after version will show the edited text highlighted in yellow. The learner then has to compare correction by correction to see the changes.


• Languages. Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.


• Interface. This is still a bit rough. It's sometimes hard to figure out what you need to press to move on, and I found myself pressing the wrong thing more than once. It remains very basic, as you'd expect from a newly launched website.


• Bottom line. As a new entrant to the market, it still needs some work before it'll be a viable contender against Lang-8, but it's definitely a site to keep an eye on.

Livemocha

• Overview. Livemocha's main product is it's Rosetta Stone-like language-learning courses, but the coolest thing it does is connect you with tons of native speakers, including through text corrections (see my complete review of Livemocha here).


• Content. The textual submissions on Livemocha are at least nominally supposed to be based on prompts connected to lessons, e.g., "Describe the locations of a set of people and objects". However, there's nothing to stop you from writing about whatever you care to write about, and indeed that's what I've often done. In fact, Livemocha may soon be considering implementing freestyle writing. That'll be more than a nod to reality than an actual change, but I'd be happy to see the addition.


• Making corrections. Correctors simply get a comment field in which they can make comments and variously format the comment text.


• Speed of corrections. Livemocha has a very large user base, so corrections come back very quickly, certainly comparable with Lang-8.


• Correction presentation. Like Lang-8, it is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through the various formatting options that are available. Again, your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.


• Languages. Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu.


• Interface. As far as text correcting goes, I've got no major complaints. The interface allows you to get the job done.


• Bottom line. Not a bad back-up to Lang-8 for text corrections, but as Lang-8 specializes in this feature and it's just another feature at Livemocha—and Livemocha's still not made for freestyle writing—I'm going to stick with the specialist Lang-8 and hope that Livemocha gives this feature some TLC.

Busuu

• Overview. Busuu is a direct competitor of Livemocha, using a similar picture-based learning method, but it also connects you with lots of native speakers, including, again, through text corrections.


• Content. Just like Livemocha, the textual submissions are at least nominally supposed to be based on prompts connected to lessons, e.g., "Describe a real person in your life", but, again, there's nothing to stop you from writing about whatever you care to write about.


• Making corrections. Correctors simply get a comment field in which they can make comments and variously format the comment text, mirroring Livemocha. It does have one convenient feature that Livemocha lacks: a button to automatically copy and paste the unedited text into the comment field.


• Speed of corrections. Although I don't have any numbers to back up my supposition, it seems to me that Busuu has less users than Livemocha, and accordingly will take a little longer. That said, corrections still come back within a day or so.


• Correction presentation. Like Lang-8 and Livemocha, it is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through the various formatting options that are available. Again, your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.


• Languages. English, French, German, and Spanish. One of the largest differences with Livemocha is that Busuu covers fewer languages.


• Interface. Busuu's interface is probably the nicest of the bunch, and it's just fine for getting texts corrected.


• Bottom line. Given how similar it is to Livemocha, the bottom line for both is essentially the same; not a bad back-up to Lang-8, but until Busuu puts some more focus into textual corrections, I'll be sticking with Lang-8.

LingQ

• Overview. LingQ's focus is on audio and textual content (especially audio with the accompanying textual content), and, among other things, it has a feature that allows you to get your text submissions corrected. LingQ's text correction feature, however, is not free (it's not terribly expensive though, basically coming down to $0.033 per word, although the pricing is a bit more complex than that). I've broken the free-stuff-only rule and included it here because it has some very interesting features that the completely free ones do not yet match.


• Content. You can put any kind of textual content into LingQ.


• Making corrections. You highlight the text you want to correct, and click a button. Up pops a window with the text you selected, and you can then edit it. Thus far, that pretty much makes it like all the rest. But then you then get the option to select what kind of error it is—spelling, word order, verb form, etc.—and that data will be used when presenting corrections.


• Speed of corrections. Corrections are generally done by a learner's selected tutor, and you might have to wait a little bit before your tutor has a chance to correct your text. That said, tutors seem to reply relatively quickly. I'm a tutor on the site, and I typically try to do my corrections as soon as I'm notified they're there. My slowest response time thus far has been a single day.


• Correction presentation. Just like CorrectMyText, LingQ will automatically create side-by-side before-and-after versions of the text. The before version will show the edited text highlighted in yellow, the after version in green. The learner then has to compare correction by correction to see the changes. Alternatively, the same corrections are listed out below the side-by-side versions in a table that also lists correction-specific notes and the type of each correction.
  
  And then here's where LingQ lays down some awesome. Using the type of errors that the corrector marked down, you get an analysis of your mistakes.
  
  
  Just. Fricking. Awesome. Getting this level of analysis is far better than just seeing your mistakes, because it can help you focus your efforts on where to improve. Although Steve at LingQ is not a big fan of focusing on grammar, this lets you do just that. If you see that you're struggling in a particular place, you can do a read-through of the section in your grammar on that topic, or take other steps to figure out why you keep messing up. Great feature.


• Languages. Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish.


• Interface. LingQ recently made some system-wide improvements to the site, which included some interface improvements. The site before was fine, and the improvements made it better. Overall, a very usable interface.


• Bottom line. They've built in some very clever features into LingQ's textual correction system, but I just can't justify the cost for text corrections when Lang-8 and all the above are available completely free of charge.

So do you know of any other places where we can get our foreign-language writing corrected? If so, drop a line in the comments!

Top 10,000 words in Dutch, English, French, and German

This page has lists of the top 10,000 words in each of Dutch, English, French, and German. As the page is in German, I've put together a little table to take you directly to the lists. The lists unfortunately do not have translations.

After the jump, the table and a another word frequency list for French.

Read more...

Dutch	Top 100	Top 1,000	Top 10,000
English	Top 100	Top 1,000	Top 10,000
French	Top 100	Top 1,000	Top 10,000
German	Top 100	Top 1,000	Top 10,000

About.com has a top-100 word frequency list for French here. In contrast to the lists above, About.com's does have English translations.

About me

As you may know, this blog is the companion site to a book I'm currently working called—you guessed it—Street-Smart Language Learning. The following is an except from the current draft of the manuscript. As I've yet to properly introduce myself on this blog, I've selected this excerpt from the book's introduction, which seeks to dispel with my story quickly so as to get readers to what they're really there for: how to learn languages.


When you tell someone that you speak eight languages, they are quick to label you as some kind of linguistic genius. And when you disagree with them, they assume you are just being modest. But as just such a person, I can tell you that I am no linguistic genius and I am not being modest when I disagree. Learning multiple languages hardly requires genius; our brains are all hard-wired to suck up languages, if only we approach language learning in the right way. Yes, that includes even you doubters out there who right now are saying, “Not me, I’m just not good a languages.” Yes, even you. With the right approach and a little bit of time, anyone can learn a foreign language. This book will help you formulate that approach and learn the foreign language(s) of your choice.

The rules that I’ve laid out for you in the subsequent parts of this book aren’t the result of any “survey of the literature” or the like. I’ve got no degree to make me an official linguist. In fact, I would say that my relationship to a linguist is the same as that of a criminal to a criminologist; they’ve got the data, the literature, and so on, while I’ve got the gritty experiences and the street smarts. These rules were developed over years, and to my own detriment even I didn’t always follow them, but to extent you can put these rules into practice you’ll be able to learn languages better and more quickly.

Before I arm you with all the tools you need to learn a language, let me first tell you a bit about myself and how I came to speak so many languages.

Read more...I was raised in an English-speaking Italian-American family just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I lived with my mother, father, grandmother, and sister. My parents and grandmother could speak Italian and initially tried to teach it to my sister and me. Unfortunately, after a few initial “I don’t wanna speak Italian!” tantrums from us, they gave up on it (and how I regret that now). They did, however, use it on occasion when they didn’t want us to understand, resulting in us picking up only certain choice exclamations (in addition to the stereotypical “Mamma mia!”, the not-so-vanilla “Vaffanculo!” comes to mind). This, and various relatives speaking in heavily accented English (including one who to this day swears that Italy under Mussolini was great), did result in me having a pretty good Italian accent when I ultimately did get back to studying it, but I definitely did not know enough to be considered anything other than monolingual.

My linguistic knowledge remained limited to English and handful of Italian phrases until middle school. Our school district kicked off language learning with a pretty worthless French/German/Spanish sampler in seventh grade. Based on your experience in that, you were supposed to pick which language you wanted to learn in eighth grade, and I went with Spanish. My choice was based less on what happened in that sampler than the fact that it was the closest of the three to Italian, so if I were ever to get to studying Italian I’d have an easier time, and that it was the de facto second language in the States. In class, I didn’t do poorly but there was nothing in particular that set me apart from any of the other students. However, Spanish was one of the subjects I liked and, knowing that languages are actually something that could be useful beyond primary school, I became eager to learn more.

I would finally get this chance as an upperclassman in high school after clearing out some of my other core graduation requirements. In eleventh grade, I added French. Thanks to its similarities with Spanish and a cooperative teacher, I was permitted to basically go at my own pace and managed to cover three years of our high school’s curriculum in one year. I followed up the summer after eleventh grade by taking a French course at nearby Chestnut Hill College, and in twelfth grade I found myself in the fifth – and highest – year of both Spanish and French.

That same year, I really wanted to take it up a notch. In addition to Spanish and French, I enrolled in a German class at high school, did an independent study in Italian with an Italian-speaking Spanish teacher, took a Japanese class at Beaver College (now Arcadia University), and started studying Russian for free under the tutelage of my kind French teacher from Chestnut Hill College, Sister Kashuba.

The results from that year were mixed. Spanish continued along well and by the end of high school I could hold rudimentary conversations with a friend of mine who, although born in Mexico and having spent the first few years of his life there, had previously lost all his Spanish and at that point was at basically the same level as me. Although I abortively tried to read Camus’ The Stranger on my own in French and continued to do other things on my own as well, my French teacher preferred to spend time talking about his designer shoes (in English, no less) than give us a period of French a day. My French only improved to the extent I could push it forward alone with my nose buried in a book.

My German teacher begrudgingly let me knock off the first year of German with a placement test, but, unlike my French teacher the previous year, she decided that I had to stay with the class, which was excruciatingly slow and seriously limited the progress I made. On the other hand, going at my own pace in Italian, its similarities with Spanish and French, and the fun of finally learning that when my relatives described things like putting ketchup on pasta condescendingly as “midigan” they were actually saying americano in dialect, or that pastafazul meant (duh!) pasta and beans (again in a dialect), resulted in decent progress in Italian.
I had assumed that a college-level language course would be challenging, but my Japanese teacher was frustratingly of the opinion that Japanese is difficult for us poor Westerners and that we should go slow—real slow. We were supposed to cover two textbooks over two semesters, but we got through the first only after skipping a bunch of stuff and only managed to do a chapter or two in the second. Needless to say, I didn’t learn much Japanese. In Russian I made good progress, but with all the other things going on that year, and since I wasn’t getting graded, I didn’t have the incentive or ability to put the time into it that I would have liked to. Unfortunately, I have yet to return to Russian and that remains as far as I’ve gotten in the language.

Besides two off-the-cuff road trips to Quebec from my home outside of Philadelphia, where I did put some French to use in a very limited way, my first venture out of English-speaking domains was a three-week senior trip to Germany. A German exchange student I met while he was in the States offered to host a friend and me for three weeks. While in Germany, we naturally studied German but also took numerous day trips around Germany. While it was a good initial outing (and certainly a better use of the money than renting a beach house at the Jersey shore, as most of my high-school classmates did), it was limited in utility for language learning by its short duration and the fact that I was with another native-English speaker most of the time.

A month or two later would lead to a trip that would result in the first language I would become proficient at: Japanese. Sometime during my senior year of high school, a friend of mine had told me about an announcement for a scholarship to study abroad with Rotary that I had somehow missed, but, as soon as I heard about it, I knew it was right up my alley. I ended up getting the scholarship (which, as I understand it, is quite a bit easier for Americans than non-Americans to get due to a big demand to come here; some other popular destinations seem to be France and Spain). I put Japan down as my first choice simply because, among the languages I had studied, it was the most different from English and would require more time on the ground to get the language down. As I was the only one in my group to choose a non-Western destination as my first choice, I got it. I left for Japan in August 1997.

Unlike some of the other exchange students in Japan, I had already graduated high school so my year in Japan didn’t really count towards any diploma or degree, leaving me free to focus solely on learning Japanese. While there, I began to crystallize a lot of the language-learning methods I had begun working on back in the States. I’ll get into the details of those in the rules below, but suffice to say that I was able to learn a great deal in what would turn out to be some ideal language-learning environments.
Returning to the States to start college in the fall semester of 1998, I began studying intensive Chinese at George Washington University. But the broader picture was a language-learning plan that I had begun working on while in Japan and finalized during my freshman and sophomore years at college. The basic plan was that I would spend every single college break (i.e., based on the typical U.S. college schedule, about a month in winter and three months in summer) studying languages abroad, plus another year in Japan (to get my Japanese beyond high-school level), a year in China, and a semester in Spain (due to university requirements, I needed to be back on campus; as we had a campus in Spain that counted as “on campus”, I opted for that rather than heading back to DC). Since I was able to stay at the homes of various friends I had made among other exchange students, all I typically ended up paying for was plane tickets, and tuition abroad was usually cheaper than tuition on campus, so all of this was a surprisingly affordable thing to do.

The plan worked well. Winter 1998 was in Mexico, summer 1999 in Brazil, winter 1999 in Costa Rica, summer 2000 in Germany, academic year 2000-2001 in Japan, academic year 2001-2002 in China, summer 2002 in Taiwan and Italy, fall semester 2002 in Spain, winter 2002 in Italy, and summer 2003 in France. In 2003, I started law school at the University of Pennsylvania with a similar plan in law school, except that it was focused on Chinese alone, so winter 2003, summer 2004, winter 2004, and part of summer 2005 were all spent in China. After a month-long stop-off in Japan in January 2006, I spent the rest of calendar year 2006 in China to obtain a master’s degree in Chinese law from Tsinghua University. The program was primarily in English—a big downer for language-learning purposes—but I was able to take a couple courses in Chinese (and somehow struggle through them).

I met my Japanese wife while in Japan in 2000. We initially spoke English (at the time, I was trying to get her to break up with her then-boyfriend, and I compromised on my language-learning rules in order to claim the linguistic home turf while trying to woo her away from him), but then went to Japanese for a while. We are now back speaking English (as we live in the States, her English proficiency is more important than my Japanese proficiency), but she speaks Japanese to our children and we also typically have a Chinese nanny or Chinese babysitters in order to teach our kids Chinese. English, Japanese, and Chinese are in constant use around the house, and, from time to time, I use Italian with my mom and French with my wife when we don’t want the kids and/or my mom to understand what we’re saying.

And that’s basically where I am. In sum, I can speak English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German, and that’s roughly in order from strongest to weakest. I wouldn’t go so far as to describe myself as native-level or fluent in any of these languages, although I might be able to fool native speakers over the phone for a few minutes. For at least Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, I would describe myself as proficient, meaning that I can function reasonably effectively in a business setting in fields that I am familiar with. In all of these, however, I can easily do the basic “get around” stuff and hold social conversations, and I think if needed I could get them all up to proficiency in short order. Moreover, in my work as a lawyer, I have so far had to review contracts or conduct other business in all of those languages, and, with the help of an online dictionary or two, it hasn’t been a problem at all. (As an odd little aside, I’ve even had to do a preliminary review of a document in Dutch (i.e., just to determine who should be reviewing it), and I was able to do that thanks to an online dictionary and its similarities with German.)

Related: What is this blog about?

Best online dictionaries for Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish

After the jump,Below you'll find a list of my favorite free online dictionaries for each of the languages I speak. There are numerous other dictionaries out there that you need to pay for, but I'm interested in doing this without shelling out a dime because, well, because you can, so why shell out that dime? Moreover, some of these websites have a lot more than just language-learning dictionaries, but here I'm just looking at their dictionaries.

If you'd like to just cut to the chase and get to a list of dictionaries by language, click here. Otherwise, read on for a brief description of each dictionary.

Read more...

• WordReference.com: This is one of my favorite online dictionaries and my start-off point for Italian and Spanish. It has generally great word coverage. For Chinese and Japanese, my big complaint is that they don't tell you how the characters are pronounced.
  
  Languages: English to and from French, Italian, German, Russian, and Spanish. In beta, English to and from Chinese, Czech, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Turkish.


• Reverso: This is my start-off point for Portuguese and a great back-up for the others. I generally prefer WordReference to this because I've found their coverage to be a bit better, especially for phrases, but it's a close call. The specialized dictionaries are also a welcome addition.
  
  Languages: English to and from Chinese, French, French business terms, French computer terms, French medical terms, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Spanish computer terms.


• ALC: This is my start-off point for Japanese and my favorite dictionary of them all. From what I gather, in addition to having a standard dictionary, this dictionary trolls the net for examples on the net where the phrase in question is in both Japanese and English and then adds that to their database. Even if there's no specific dictionary entry, you'll be able to get the third-party translation. I've been able to find difficult legal terms here that I was unable to find anywhere else. My only complaint is that, as it's made for Japanese users, it doesn't tell you how kanji words are pronounced. Which is why I still make frequent use of the next one...
  
  Languages: English to and from Japanese.


• Goo: Goo's dictionary is a more standard dictionary than ALC that has good coverage and provides the pronunciation for kanji words.
  
  Languages: English to and from Japanese.


• Jeffrey's: While pretty rough in appearance, this serves as a valuable back-up Japanese dictionary and is the only one I use that is aimed at Japanese learners rather than Japanese speakers.
  
  Languages: English to and from Japanese.


• MDGB: My first stop in Chinese. Geared toward English speakers, they have great word and phrase coverage and also provide the pronunciation and audio recordings of pronunciations.
  
  Languages: English to and from Chinese.


• Dict.cn: This is an excellent dictionary that takes a page from ALC and gets samples from the net. It is another of my favorites, although it doesn't provide you with the pronunciation of characters as MDGB does.
  
  Languages: English to and from Chinese.


• Iciba: Another solid Chinese dictionary, similar to Dict.cn.
  
  Languages: English to and from Chinese.


• Lexilogos: This site is great because it lets you look up your word into all the other major dictionaries, including my mainstays of WordReference and Reverso, all from a single page. It makes for a one-stop-shop in French.
  
  French to and from English and many, many other languages.


• LEO: This dictionary beats WordReference in terms of the number of phrases it generates for each word, and hence has become my first stop when looking up German words. It is one of several very good English-German dictionaries.
  
  Languages: English to and from German.


• BEOLINGUS: Another solid entry in the German category, with results similar to LEO.
  
  Languages: English to and from German. German to and from Portuguese and Spanish.


• English Grammar Online: Yet another solid entry in the German category, again with results similar to LEO.
  
  Languages: English to and from German.


• SpanishDict: This is another very solid Spanish dictionary that I turn to from time to time. They claim to be the largest Spanish-English dictionary on the net.
  
  Languages: English to and from Spanish.


• Merriam-Webster: Yet another solid Spanish dictionary.
  
  Languages: English to and from Spanish.


• Woxicon: This one gives very short, typically one-word translations between multiple languages at the same time. While it does not have lot of depth, I've found it particularly useful for figuring out, say, whether the way something is expressed in one Romance language is the same in another.
  
  Languages: To and from Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.


• LookWAYup: This one limits what you get in the free version to entice you to purchase an upgrade version. I use it primarily as a back-up when one of my mainstays turns up blank.
  
  Languages: English to and from Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.


• Ultralingua: Ultralingua makes high-quality dictionaries for download or for subscribers. The free dictionaries they host on their website allow unlimited access to their dictionaries but a limited number of searches per day. While this means they cannot be your mainstay dictionary, they are a great back-up dictionary to try out when other ones aren't given you the word you're looking for.
  
  Languages: English to and from Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish. French to and from German, Italian, and Spanish. Portuguese to and from Spanish.

Beyond the above dictionaries, if you can't find the word you're looking for try plain old Google. The trick is to write the phrase in the target language and then write another phrase in English that you think would be in a translation of it. Doing this, you can typically find a text that contains the word and is translated into English (which is exactly what ALC does and is why I love it so much), and then all you need to do is figure out how they match up. You may need a native-speaker tutor for a bit of help in that regard (if they can't just tell you what it means to begin with).

Here are my favorite dictionaries for each of my languages in the order I typically turn to them.

Chinese

1. MDGB
2. Dict.cn
3. Iciba

French

1. Lexilogos

German

1. LEO
2. BEOLINGUS
3. English Grammar Online

Italian

1. WordReference.com
2. Reverso

Japanese

1. ALC
2. Goo
3. Jeffrey's

Portuguese

1. Reverso
2. LookWAYup

Spanish

1. WordReference.com
2. Reverso
3. SpanishDict

The (roughly) top 20 languages by GDP

There are many reasons to pick a particular language to learn. If there is a de facto second language of importance in your country (Spanish in the States, French in Canada, etc.), it probably makes a lot of sense to choose that language, particularly if you don't see any globe trotting in your future. If your relatives or spouse speak another language, it's not a bad idea to learn that language. And many still choose a language because they like the way it sounds (français, anyone?).

My preferred method of choosing which language to learn is based on its economic utility. As I do tend to be a bit of the globe-trotting type, I've never really limited myself to any region or the like. Without such limitations, it makes a lot of sense to choose the languages you learn based on the percentage of world GDP represented by speakers of those languages.

Read more...And that was roughly how I chose the languages I've studied: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, and Italian. I knew which countries had the largest economies and I put their languages on a checklist, so it's hardly a coincidence that the languages I speak coincide with those at the top of the top-20 list below.

Rank	Language	Percentage of world GDP
1	English	29.3%
2	Chinese	12.5%
3	Japanese	7%
4	Spanish	6.5%
5	German	5.5%
6	French	4.6%
7	Portuguese	3.3%
8	Italian	3.2%
9	Russian	2.6%
10	Arabic	2.5%
11	Hindi	2.3%
12	Korean	1.7%
13	Indonesian	1.4%
14	Dutch	1.3%
15	Bengali	1%
16	Turkish	0.9%
17	Thai	0.9%
18	Polish	0.9%
N/A	Other	12.5%

This list was put together by Unicode.org and the data covered by the list runs from 1975-2002, although projections through 2010 for the most part retain the same order. One interesting thing to note about the projections is that the "other" group declines to only 10%, meaning the relative importance of the top 18 languages increases. It's also worth noting, if unsurprisingly, that internet use by language largely corresponds with this list, according to data collected on Wikipedia.

There are two things that this data leaves me wanting. First is the obvious update of the data to cover through 2008, as well as longer projections going forward. Second, I'd love to see a chart based on the actual number of speakers of a all languages, rather than on the number of native speakers. For example, estimates for the number of English speakers vary from around half a billion to a billion, depending on the skill level at which you count someone as a "speaker". This would result in counting multilingual people multiple times, which might make it trickier to slice and dice the data to get a GDP figure, but I'm sure some enterprising statistician somewhere could get something we could work with.

Given the large percentage of GDP controlled by English speakers, it seems to be quite a rational choice that, if you don't already speak English, you learn it. I imagine that English's role as a global lingua franca would push it even higher if that enterprising statistician I mentioned above came along to give us the data.

I came across one memorable instance of seeing English function as the global lingua franca while interning during college in the Japanese Diet (Japan's legislature) in the office of Yuriko Koike, whose background includes a degree from Egypt and having literally written the book on speaking Arabic in Japanese. During one visit with some Arab dignitaries of some sort, they lamented that neither side was learning the other's language, but rather using English as a medium for communication. They suggested increasing learning on both sides, but somehow I doubt much ever came of it.