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by bbguitar 4819 days ago
Goodbye Livemocha. So RS have decided to try and remove some competition. Who's next in line?
2 comments

Isnt rosetta stone a paid service ? LM was free if i remember. what alternative is there as free service for learning languages ?
I built http://iijo.org. Its free and does Chinese flashcards and uses spaced repetition. You can build vocab lists from a built in dictionary. You can also directly search the dictionary: http://iijo.org/dictionary.

And the code is on github: https://github.com/kablamo/iijo.org

www.duolingo.com is utterly excellent, particularly if you know bits of a language already.
Also works offline and includes dictation exercises now. Great software.
thanks nodata, people should try us! we know that duolingo works for both beginners and more advanced students alike.
I found that duolingo is actually not that good for advanced students - everything I saw on there seemed to be focused on learning by translating phrases into English. Thats pretty distracting once you get past a certain level.
tsuan: I'm recommending you left, right and center :)

One request please: could you make your login form save the password?

nice ! i'll check it out. please dont hesitate, if you know other (cheap or free) language learning online services , share them ;)
http://noexcuselist.com/everything See the "Languages" section.

I've used duolingo for Spanish review; it's pretty good. Honestly the best thing about it is the UX: you get little bite-sized exercises you can go thru as fast or slow as you want, review, etc., so it's easy to squeeze into a 10-20min/day block. The main weaknesses are a) the examples are arithmetically generated so sometimes you get "My horse only eats milk" or something as an example sentence (it's usually pretty good tho), and b) you don't get a deep grammar review, it's just lots of little examples & practices. The latter point could be seen as a "pro" depending on your learning style.

Check out Quizlet - http://quizlet.com
verbling is a good idea, moving forward..
I've used Transparent recently and would recommend it. Not free but a lot cheaper than Rosetta Stone at $29 per month. They have a free offering called Byki as well which I haven't tried.
there is also this app with some kind of african name i cant remember , i've seen that on techcrunch but i cant find it again , if anyone knows ;)
Although not specific for languages, memrise.com has flashcards for a handfull of languages. It also remembers what you got wrong and reiterates accordingly.
Take a look at http://verbling.com
There's tonnes, but almost all are over promising and under delivering.