A Bit of Learning in Honor of the Olympics

Love of sport, life, & learning

All hail the Olympics! As you watch your favorite athletes strive, consider the exciting competitions an opportune time to brush up on a little basic knowledge about countries of the world:

*Review flags of the world here, courtesy of the CIA World Factbook. The site also includes maps and “information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities.”

*While you’re browsing snapshots of world countries, why not virtually visit the Olympians’ homelands? Some ideas for armchair traveling are listed here.

*Talk the talk of international athletes: see here for seven good foreign language help sites.

Finally, you might stop by the official website of the Olympic Games. Go to the “Olympism” tab and scroll down to “Educators.” Although this material is prepared for grade schoolers, it’s still interesting to see the colorful e-brochure “resources” from the Olympic Museum and learn, for instance, about the history of the ancient and modern Olympic Games.

Image via mrg. bz / sideshowmom

Related on this site:
It’s always a good time to study geography.
A good place to start studying world religions.

 Related from around the web:

• History of the Olympic Games from ancient Greece to London 2012 (itv.com)
• Classical music: The 2012 Summer Olympic Games officially open in London today – and here is guide to all you need to know about music and the Olympics. (welltempered.wordpress.com)
• Olympic Games Fast Facts (slideshare.net)
• Honoring The Games, And The Past, With Poetry (npr.org)

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Lost in Translation? Try These Foreign Language Resources

Image via eatatmarks at flickr

If you’re like many folks, in learning a foreign language you’ll welcome all the help you can get.

I’m thinking particularly of students who are enrolled in language courses and who would benefit from supplements to their study materials, but the resources below also would assist the curious independent learner. (If DIY learning foreign languages seems a particularly formidable task, hey — remember Benjamin Franklin did it, and without the internet.)

So browse around on these sites; they include links to resources that will help you with your Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Latin, Spanish, French, and more.

http://www.coerll.utexas.edu/coerll/materials
A page of exciting language links from The Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) at the University of Texas at Austin.

http://calper.la.psu.edu/resources.php?page=mats
Links from the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER) at The Pennsylvania State University.

http://libguides.mit.edu/flnewspapers
Foreign Language News and Newspapers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries.

http://www.yourdictionary.com/
YourDictionary.com features an impressive array of foreign language dictionaries for quick reference. Click “Other Dictionaries” and then “Foreign Language Online Dictionaries.”

http://www.studyspanish.com/
A help site for studying Spanish with some free resources.

http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/
The UCLA Language Materials Project: “Teaching Resources for Less Commonly Taught Languages.”  Browse those languages by using their drop-down menu; you can also search by region on their world map.

http://www.indiana.edu/~celcar/index.html
The Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region at Indiana University addresses uncommonly taught languages such as Mongolian, Pashto, and Uzbek. Check out “Language Materials.”

Related articles

• A Fast Foreign Language Dictionary That Searches Five Languages at Once (prweb.com)
• Top 3 Useful Foreign Languages for Business Excludes Spanish(abcnews.go.com)