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poebae
January 10th, 2007, 09:14 AM
I'm trying to learn Italian, and I was wondering if there is any language learning software for Ubuntu.

It doesn't have to be specifically Italian, but that'd be nice ;)

adamkane
January 29th, 2007, 08:11 PM
kvoctrain
flashcardexchange.com

needhelpplease
February 27th, 2008, 03:23 AM
Anything else? I have the Eurotalk TalkNow but it doesn't run with Wine. Does anyone know if any of the major commercial options run on Linux or can run with Wine? This is a gaping hole in Linux right now.

machoo02
February 27th, 2008, 03:52 AM
I've had some success with getting Rosetta Stone working with Wine (the only problem I was really having was with non-Latin character display such as cyrillic...not a problem with italian), and Rosetta Stone/Eurotalk would definitely work in a virtual environment (provided you have a copy of windows to virtualize). Also, there is an online language trainer called Mango (http://www.mangolanguages.com/) that might be of interest.

needhelpplease
February 27th, 2008, 04:44 AM
Apparently Rosetta Stone 2.x works fine with Wine now, but 3.x is now with Safedisk, and Safedisk is not yet supported in Wine. A bunch of things use Safedisk so they are actively working on it.

HELLO ROSETTA STONE, you just lost a sale due to Safedisk! Now I will find something else and perhaps become a loyal customer of some company that doesn't use Safedisk.

I've never tried virtualization. What do I need to do that? I do have quite a few XP licenses around here that I'm not using. I also have Win 98 I believe, if that gives me more options. Does Ubuntu now come with some kind of virtualization built-in, like this Xen thing? Can that let me run XP?

I'm going to try Mango to see how that is.

needhelpplease
February 27th, 2008, 04:51 AM
Just looked at Mango. That's a good way to go at this point. It's certainly more expensive than buying software, which usually is $30 to $100 to have it as much as you want, vs. Mango which will cost between $120 and $240 / year. But at least Mango works on Linux, or anything else, and it seems like it's well-done. It uses Flash as the interface.

machoo02
February 27th, 2008, 05:54 PM
In addition, the nice thing about Mango is that there is a free subscription (limited to ~50 lessons) that one could sign up for to try out their system.

For virtualization, you would need to install virtualization software such as Virtualbox (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox), VMWare (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VMware), Qemu (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/QemuEmulator), or others. There is also a Virtualization subforum (http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=308) here that you can check out for tips/tricks/solutions to problems, and has a sticky link to get started.

chaibanu
April 4th, 2008, 12:21 PM
Hey!

Thanks for sharing this information. I think one can learn know about more about language learning softwares through the internet.

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www.languagelearning-hub.com

D.N.Angel_1993
April 11th, 2008, 03:53 AM
Try using
www.BYKI.com
not sure if it works i havent tested it myself but my friend says it works.
and its free

UbuWu
April 13th, 2008, 05:21 PM
I just started using Livemocha (http://www.livemocha.com/) and it is great! Free and a lot of interaction with people from different countries. I don't think they offer italian courses yet though, but it is certainly possible to practice your italian on the chat.

ctrlf5
April 18th, 2008, 03:13 PM
Doing the Livemocha things and just registered on Babbel (http://www.babbel.com). Livemocha is good, but quite limited in its current iteration. For example, I can only request 4 friends to review my work, and they are predetermined by the system. The community tools (chat, forum, etc) are absent.

UbuWu
April 20th, 2008, 08:09 PM
So how does babbel compare?