 |
| Pimsleur learning courses | |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
Audible.com is still offering 3 FREE audiobooks just for trying out their service. Listen to your Pimsleur lessons online or anywhere! You can download Pimsleur audio courses directly from the Internet. Then it's up to you whether you burn your own CD or use your MP3 player. Before you purchase your Pimsleur audio course, you can listen to a sample. As an Audible customer you can get up to three Pimsleur courses for FREE. In addition you can buy your own iPod or MP3 converter software.
Pimsleur for English Speakers
Pimsleur English for
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Albanian language |
The Albanian language is the only surviving member of its branch of the Indo-European language family.
Albanian was proved to be an Indo-European language in the 1850s. The Albanian language is on its own branch of the Indo-European language family. Some suggest that Albanian may be the survival of an Illyrian language once spoken in the southwestern Balkans. Others suggest Albanian may be related more to the ancient Dacian language once spoken in Moesia and Dacia. It is unclear whether Dacian and Illyrian were on different branches of the Indo-European family, but most scholars consider that they were.
Albanian is spoken by more than 6 million people who live in Albania, Serbia and Montenegro, Republic of Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, Italy, and other countries.
 |
Arabic language |
Arabic is a Semitic language, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. It is spoken throughout the Arab world and is widely known throughout the Islamic world. Arabic has been a literary language since at least the 6th century, and is the liturgical language of Islam.
Quite a few English words are ultimately derived from Arabic, often through other European languages, among them every-day vocabulary like sugar, cotton or magazine. More recognizable are words like algorithm, algebra, alchemy, alcohol, azimuth, nadir, and zenith (See List of English words of Arabic origin). The Maltese language is the only surviving European language to derive primarily from Arabic, though it contains a large number of Italian and English borrowings.
Arabic is the official language in the following countries:
Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian National Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen.
In many other countries Arabic is spoken as a minority language. There about 225 people who speak Arabic as their mother tongue or a second language.
 |
Armenian language |
Armenian is an Indo-European language spoken in the Caucasus mountains (particularly in the Armenian Republic) and also used by the Armenian Diaspora.
Armenian is an Indo-European language spoken in the Caucasus mountains (particularly in the Armenian Republic) and also used by the Armenian Diaspora. It is its own independent branch of the family of the Indo-European languages, with no living close relatives. Many now believe that Armenian is a close relative of the extinct Phrygian language. From the modern languages Greek seems to be the most closely related to Armenian. Armenian also contains many loanwords from Persian, which is also an Indo-European language.
While it contains many Indo-European roots, its phonology has been influenced by neighboring Caucasian languages, so that it shares a three-way distinction between voiceless, voiced, and ejective stops and fricatives.
Armenian is spoken in Armenia, Russia, France, and 27 other countries by about 9 million people in total.
The Chinese language is a tonal language and a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although Chinese is often regarded for cultural reasons as a single language, its range of regional variation is comparable to that of the Romance languages. However, all of the users of spoken varieties of Chinese have always used a common formal written language, which has since the beginning of the twentieth century been Vernacular Chinese (based on Mandarin), written using a nearly identical set of Chinese characters.
About one-fifth of the world speaks some form of Chinese as their native language, making it the language with the most native speakers. The Chinese language, spoken in the form of Standard Mandarin, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore, and one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spoken in the form of Standard Cantonese, Chinese is one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese).
Among Chinese diaspora, a wide variety of forms have been spoken, particularly Mandarin, Cantonese, Min Nan and Hakka. Mandarin gained prominence in the second half of the 20th century and is often used as a lingua franca to communicate between different populations of overseas Chinese.
 |
Cantonese language |
Cantonese (Guangdong dialect) is one of the major dialect groups or languages of the Chinese language or language family. It is mainly spoken in the south-eastern part of Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, by the Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia and by many overseas Chinese of Cantonese origin worldwide. Its name is derived from Canton, the former French romanisation used as the colonial English name for Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong Province. It is a tonal language.
Cantones is spoken in Hong Kong, Macau, PRC, Malaysia, Singapore, Canada, United States, Australia, New Zealand and other countries where Cantonese migrants have settled.
There are about 66 million people who speak Cantonese.
|
Mandarin language |
Standard Mandarin refers to the official Chinese spoken language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China on Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore.
Standard Mandarin is officially known in mainland China as Putonghua, in Taiwan and Hong Kong as Guoyu (literally "national language"), and in Malaysia and Singapore as Huayu (literally "the Chinese language"). All three terms are used interchangeably in Chinese communities around the world where different groups have come into contact.
 |
Creole language |
A Creole is a language descended from a pidgin that has become the native language of a group of people. The majority of creole languages are based on English, Portuguese, French, Spanish and other languages (their superstrate language), with local or immigrant languages as substrate languages.
Pidgins are rudimentary languages improvised by non-native speakers; when pidgins creolize, however, they develop fully-formed and stable grammar structures, usually as a result of the pidgin being natively learned by children (see Nicaraguan Sign Language). In some cases the group of people who speak such a language are called Creoles.
 |
Croatian language |
The Croatian language is a language of the western group of South Slavic languages which is used primarily by the Croats. It is one of the standard versions of the Central-South Slavic diasystem, formerly (and still frequently) called Serbo-Croatian.
The modern Croatian standard language is a continuous outgrowth of more than nine hundred years of literature written in a mixture of Croatian Church Slavonic and the vernacular language. If we narrow out the subject, Croatian Church Slavonic had been abandoned by the mid-1400s, and Croatian "purely" vernacular literature has been in existence for more than five centuries — a story of remarkable linguistic continuity with only a few shock points.
Croatian is spoken in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, and other countries.
 |
Czech language |
The Czech language is one of the West Slavic languages, along with Slovak, Polish, Pomeranian, and Sorbian. It is spoken by most people in the Czech Republic and by Czechs all over the world (about 12 million native speakers in total). Czech is very close to Slovak and Polish; Czech and Slovak speakers are usually able to understand each other.
Because of its complexity, Czech is said to be a difficult language to learn.
 |
Danish language |
Danish is spoken by about 6 million people. It is the official language of Denmark, one of two official languages of Greenland (the other is Greenlandic), and one of two official languages of the Faeroes (the other is Faeroese). In addition, there is a small community of Danish speakers in Schleswig, the portion of Germany bordering Denmark, where it is an officially recognized and protected regional language.
The closest relatives of Danish are the other North Germanic languages of Scandinavia: Norwegian and Swedish. Written Danish and Norwegian (Norwegian Bokm?l) are particularly close, though the pronunciation of all three languages differs significantly. Proficient speakers of any of the three languages can understand the others. The similarities between the three languages are so large that some linguists classify them as dialects of one single language.
 |
Dutch language |
Dutch (Nederlands Sound listen?) is a West Germanic, Low German language spoken worldwide by around 24 million people (this number comes to 32 million if the speakers of Afrikaans are counted as well, a language that split off from Dutch during the last few hundred years and is still mutually understandable). The varieties of Dutch spoken in Belgium are also informally called Flemish.
Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands, the northern half of Belgium (Flanders, including Belgium's capital Brussels), the northernmost part of France, the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, Suriname and amongst certain groups in Indonesia. The last two are former Dutch colonies.
Dutch is an official language of the Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname, Aruba, and the Netherlands Antilles. The Dutch, Flemish and Surinamese governments coordinate their language activities in the Dutch Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie).
 |
English language |
The English language is a West Germanic language that originated in England from Old English (Anglo-Saxon), which in turn developed from languages brought by settlers from northern Germany. It is the second most common first language, with around 340 million native speakers worldwide. English has lingua franca (diplomatic language) status in many parts of the world, due to the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the United Kingdom in the 18th and 19th centuries and the United States beginning in the 20th century. It is the most widely learned second language, largely due to the former extent of the British Empire, which mandated English as the official language. Today, its importance is also greatly due to the influence the United States exerts through radio, television, cinema, scientific publications and the Internet.
English is the primary language in Australia (Australian English), the Bahamas, Barbados (Caribbean English), Bermuda, Dominica, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guyana, Ireland, Jamaica (Jamaican English), New Zealand (New Zealand English), Antigua and Barbuda, St. Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom (British English) and the United States of America (American English).
English is also one of the primary languages of Belize (with Spanish), Canada (with French), India (with Hindi and 21 other state languages), Singapore (with Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and other Asian languages) and South Africa (along with Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, and Northern Sotho).
There are about 340 million people who speak English as their mother tongue and about 600 million peole who speak it as a second language.
 |
Farsi language |
Persian (local name in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan: F?rsi), P?rsi (older local name, but still used by some speakers), Tajik (a Central Asian dialect) or Dari (Another local name in Tajikistan, Afghanistan), is a language spoken in Iran,Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Bahrain. Persian has official-language status in some of those countries. There are over 75 million native speakers of the Persian language.
Persian is a member of the Indo-European family of languages, and within that family it belongs to the Indo-Iranian (Aryan) branch. Scholars believe the Iranian subbranch consists of the following chronological linguistic path: Old Persian (Avestan and Achaemenid Persian) Middle Persian (Pahlavi, Parthian, and Sassanids Persian), Modern Persian (Dari, c. 900 to present Persian).
 |
French language |
French is the third of the Romance languages in terms of number of speakers, after Spanish and Portuguese. In 1999 French was the 11th most spoken language in the world, being spoken by about 77 million people (called Francophones) as a mother tongue, and by 128 million altogether including second language speakers.
French is the official language in the following countries: France, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Canada, Madagascar, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Belgium, Rwanda, Haiti, Switzerland, Burundi, Togo, Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Comoros, Djibouti, Luxembourg, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mauritius, Vanuatu, Seychelles, Monaco. Also, there are some French speakers in Lebanon, Cambodia, Egypt, India (Pondicherry), Italy (Aosta Valley), Laos, Mauritania, United Kingdom (Channel Islands), United States of America (mainly Louisiana and the New England region) and Vietnam, Russia, and the Czech Republic.
La Francophonie is an international organization of French-speaking countries and governments.
 |
German language |
German (called Deutsch in German; in German the term germanisch is equivalent to English Germanic), is a member of the western group of Germanic languages and is one of the world's major languages. It is the language with the most native speakers in the European Union. It is spoken primarily in Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, in two-thirds of Switzerland, in two-thirds of the South Tyrol province of Italy (in German, S?dtirol), in the small East Cantons of Belgium, and in some border villages of the South Jutland County (Nordschleswig) of Denmark.
German is the main language of 96.75 million people in Europe (as of 2004), or 13.3% of all Europeans, being the second most spoken language in Europe, behind Russian (somewhere around 150 million speakers in Europe), and above French (66.5 million speakers in Europe in 2004) and English (64.2 million speakers in Europe in 2004). German is the third most taught foreign language in the EU (after English and French) and in the USA (after Spanish and French). It is one of the official languages of the European Union.
 |
Greek language |
Greek is its own independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient languages which were probably most closely related to it, Ancient Macedonian language (perhaps even a dialect of Greek) and Phrygian, are not well enough documented to permit detailed comparison. Among living languages, Armenian seems to be the most closely related to it.
Greek is spoken by about 12 million people mainly in Greece and Cyprus but also in many other countries where Greeks have settled, including Albania, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Egypt, France, Georgia, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the USA.
Greek is the official language of the Hellenic Republic (Greece) where it is spoken by about 98.5% of the population. It is also, alongside Turkish, the official language of the Republic of Cyprus.
|
Haitian Creole language |
Haitian Creole (Kreyòl ayisyen) is a creole language based on the French language. It is spoken in Haiti by about 7.5 million people (as of 1998), which is nearly the whole population. Via immigration, several hundred thousand speakers live in other countries, including Canada, the United States and France, as well as many Caribbean nations, especially the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas.
There are about 8 million people who speak Haitian Creole and they live in Haiti, the Bahamas, Canada, the Cayman Islands, the Dominican Republic, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico and the United States.
 |
Hebrew language |
The Modern Hebrew language is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Hebrew was revitalized as a spoken language during the late 19th and early 20th century as Modern Hebrew, replacing a host of languages spoken by the Jews at that time, such as Arabic, Judezmo (also called Ladino), Yiddish, Russian, and other languages of the Jewish diaspora as the spoken language of the majority of the Jewish people living in Israel.
Modern Hebrew became an official language in British Palestine in 1921, and the primary official language of the State of Israel, (Arabic maintained its official language status). The Hebrew name for the language is Ivrit (pronounced like "eev-REET", or /iv.'rit/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet).
Modern Hebrew shows influences from Russian (for example, the Russian suffix -acia is used in nouns where English has the suffix -ation); German (particularly in combination words like "tapuakh-adama," meaning potato (German Erdapfel , earth-apple) or "dme-shtia," meaning tip (German Trinkgeld , drink-money). English has been a very strong influence, both from British influence during the period of the Mandate and American influence in the present day. Finally, Arabic, being the language of numerous Mizrahic and Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Arab countries as well as of the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, has also had an important influence on Hebrew, especially in slang (for example, "sababa", meaning "excellent", or "y'alla", meaning "come on.")
 |
Hindi language |
Hindi is a language spoken in most states in northern and central India. It is an Indo-European language, of the Indo-Aryan subfamily.
Hindi, along with Urdu, is the second most-spoken language in the world, after Chinese. (This ranking comes from estimates from the CIA World Factbook for the year 2000; other language rankings differ.) About 500 million people speak Hindi, in India and abroad, and the total number of people who can understand the language may be 800 million. A 1997 survey found that 66% of all Indians can speak Hindi, and 77% of the Indians regard Hindi as "one language across the nation". More than 180 million people in India regard Hindi as their mother tongue. Another 300 million use it as second language. Outside of India, Hindi speakers are 100,000 in the USA; 685,170 in Mauritius; 890,292 in South Africa; 232,760 in Yemen; 147,000 in Uganda; 5,000 in Singapore; 20,000 in New Zealand; 30,000 in Germany. Urdu, the official language of Pakistan, is spoken by about 41 million in Pakistan and other countries. Hindi became one of the official languages of India on January 26, 1965 and it is a minority language in a number of countries, including Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and United Arab Emirates.
There are about 180-480 million people who speak Hindi as their mother tongue or their second language.
 |
Indonesian language |
Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) is the official language of Indonesia and a remarkable language in several ways. To begin with, only a tiny fraction of the inhabitants of Indonesia speak it as a mother tongue; for most people it is a second language.
Indonesian is part of the Western Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian languages. According to the Ethnologue, Indonesian is modeled after the Riau Malay spoken in northeast Sumatra.
Indonesian is spoken throughout Indonesia, although it is used most extensively in urban areas, and less so in the rural parts of Indonesia.
There are about 30 million people who speak Indonesian as their mother tongue and about 110 million speak it as a second language.
Countries in which Indonesian is spoken are Indonesia, East Timor and Malaysia.
 |
Irish language |
Irish (Gaeilge in Irish) is a Goidelic language spoken in Ireland and constitutionally recognised as the first official language of the Republic of Ireland. On 13 June 2005, EU foreign ministers unanimously decided to make Irish an official working language of the European Union. The new arrangements will come into effect on 1 January 2007.
The language is sometimes referred to in English as Gaelic, or Irish Gaelic, but is more generally referred to in Ireland as the Irish language or simply Irish. Use of the term Irish also avoids confusion with Scottish Gaelic (G?idhlig na h-Alba), the closely related language spoken in Scotland and often referred to in English as simply Gaelic. The archaic term Erse, originally a Scots form of the word Irish, is no longer used and in most contexts is considered derogatory.
 |
Italian language |
Italian (italiano) is a Romance language spoken by about 70 million people, most of whom live in Italy. Standard Italian is based on Tuscan dialects and is somewhat intermediate between the languages of Southern Italy and the Gallo-Romance languages of the North. The long-established Tuscan standard has, over the last few decades, been slightly influenced by the variety of Italian spoken in Milan, the economic center of Italy. Italian has double (or long) consonants, like Latin (but unlike most modern Romance languages, e.g., French and Spanish). As in most Romance languages (with the notable exception of French), stress is distinctive.
Italian is the official language of Italy and San Marino, and is an official language in Ticino and Grigioni cantons of Switzerland. It is also the second official language in Vatican City and in some areas of Istria in Slovenia and Croatia with an Italian minority. It is widely used by immigrant groups in Luxembourg, Germany, Belgium, the United States, Canada, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, and Australia, and is also spoken in neighbouring Albania. It is spoken, to a much lesser extent, in parts of Africa formerly under Italian rule such as Somalia, Libya and Eritrea. It is also widely known and taught in Monaco and in the neighbouring island of Malta and served as an official language of the country until English was enshrined in the 1934 Constitution.
 |
Japanese language |
Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been and is still sometimes spoken in countries besides Japan. When Japan occupied Korea, Taiwan, parts of China, and various Pacific islands, locals in those countries were forced to learn Japanese in empire-building programmes. As a result, there are still many people in these countries who speak Japanese instead of or as well as the local languages. In addition, emigrants from Japan, the majority of whom are found in the United States (notably California and Hawaii), and Brazil also frequently speak Japanese. There is also a small community in Davao, Philippines. Their descendants (known as nikkei, literally Japanese descendants), however, rarely speak Japanese fluently. There are estimated to be several million non-Japanese studying the language as well.
 |
Korean language |
The Korean language is the most widely used language in Korea, and is the official language of both North and South Korea. The language is also spoken widely in neighbouring Yanbian, China. Worldwide, there are around 78 million Korean speakers, including large groups in the former Soviet Union, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Japan, and more recently the Philippines. The language is strongly associated with the Korean people.
Korean classification is often debated, but most Korean and Western linguists recognize Korean's kinship to the Altaic languages. Others consider it as being a separate language in a family of its own (a language isolate). On the other hand, many linguists believe that Japanese and Korean are related.
 |
Lithuanian language |
The Lithuanian language still retains much of the original sound system and morphological peculiarities of the prototypal Indo-European language and therefore is fascinating for linguistic study. Some reconstructions have even concluded that Lithuanian is the modern language which is most closely related to Proto-Indo-European (the speech of a Lithuanian peasant, for example, is probably the closest semblance you can get to the tongue spoken by the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European people). Some evidence suggests that the Baltic language group has existed, distinct from other Indo-European languages, since perhaps the 10th century BC. While the possession of many archaic features is undeniable, the exact manner by which the Baltic languages have developed from the Proto-Indo-European language is disputed.
Lithuanian has been the official language of Lithuania since 1918. During the Soviet period, it was used in official affairs alongside Russian which, as the official language of the USSR, took precedence over Lithuanian.
 |
Norwegian language |
Norwegian is a Germanic language spoken in Norway. Norwegian is closely related to, and generally mutually intelligible with Swedish and Danish. Together with these two languages, Norwegian belongs to the Northern, or Scandinavian group of the Germanic languages. Proficient speakers of any of the three languages can understand the others.
The languages now spoken in Scandinavia developed from the Old Norse language, which did not differ greatly between what are now Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish areas. In fact, Viking traders spread the language across Europe and into Russia, making Old Norse one of the most widespread languages for a time. According to tradition, King Harald Fairhair united Norway in 872.
 |
Ojibwe language |
Ojibwe, Ojibwa, Chippewa or Anishinaabemowin is the third most commonly spoken Native language in Canada (after Cree and Inuktitut). It also has numerous speakers in the United States.
Ojibwe is an Algonquian language that is closely related to Cree, Potawatomi, Odawa, and Algonkin, and is spoken by the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe) people.
Ojibwe is spoken by around 10,000 people in the United States and by as many as 45,000 in Canada, making it one of the largest Algic languages by speakers. The various dialects are spoken from spoken in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan in the US, and north into Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec in Canada.
 |
Polish language |
Polish (polski, je;zyk polski, polszczyzna) is the official language of Poland. Polish is the main representative of the Lekhitic branch of the Western Slavic languages. It originated in the areas of present-day Poland from several local Western Slavic dialects, most notably those spoken in Greater Poland and Lesser Poland.
Throughout the ages, Polish has gained lingua franca status in many parts of Central and Eastern Europe, mostly due to the political, cultural, scientific and military influence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Although not that popular any more, it is still widely spoken in Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania as a second language.
Polish is spoken in Poland by about 38 million people, but there are also about 6 million speakers in the USA, Lithuania, Belarus, France, Germany, Ukraine and other countries.
Portuguese (português) is a Romance language predominantly spoken in Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea Bissau, Macau (China), Mozambique, Portugal, and S?o Tom? and Pr?ncipe. Many linguists consider that Galician, the native language of Galicia, is actually a variety of Portuguese, strongly influenced by the Spanish language. With more than 200 million native speakers, Portuguese is one of the few languages spoken in such widely-distributed parts of the world, and is the fifth or sixth most-spoken first language in the world. Because Brazil, with 184 million inhabitants, constitutes about 51% of South America's population, Portuguese is the most widely spoken language in South America and it is also one of the key languages in Africa.
There are also various Portuguese Creole languages spread all over the world. It is an important minority language in Andorra, Luxembourg, Namibia, and Paraguay. Large Portuguese-speaking immigrant communities exist in many cities around the world, including Montreal, Toronto in Canada, Paris in France and Boston, New Bedford, Cape Cod and Newark in the United States.
 |
Romanian language |
Romanian (limba româna) is the official language of Romania, and is identical to the Moldovan language (limba moldoveneasca(), its official name in Moldova. It is an Eastern Romance language, spoken natively by about 26 million people, most of them in Romania, Moldova and Vojvodina, the three places where it is an official language.
Romanian is spoken mostly in Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia and Montenegro, Bulgaria, but there are also Romanian language speakers in countries like Canada, United States, Germany, Israel, Australia and New Zealand, mainly due to immigration after World War II.. There are about 26 million speakers of the Romanian language in total.
Romanian is the official language of Romania and Moldova (where for political reasons it tends to be called the "Moldovan language"). In Vojvodina it is established as equal in rights to the official languages, but in fact its status is inferior to that of Serbian.
In other parts of Serbia and in Ukraine, Romanian communities have very few rights regarding the use and preservation of their language in schools, press, administration and institutions.
Romanian is one of the five languages in which religious services are performed in the autonomous monastic state of Mount Athos, spoken in the sketae of Prodromos and Lacu (a sketa being a community of monks; sketae is plural).
 |
Russian language |
Russian is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages.
Russian belongs to the group of Indo-European languages, and is therefore related to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, as well as the modern Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages, including English, French, and Irish. Written examples are attested from the 10th century onwards.
While it preserves much of its ancient synthetic-inflexional structure and a Common Slavonic word base, modern Russian shares a large stock of the international vocabulary for politics, science, and technology. A language of political importance in the twentieth century, Russian is one of the official languages of the United Nations.
In the twentieth century it was widely taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR, especially in Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. However, younger generations are usually not fluent in it, because Russian is no longer mandatory in the school system.
Russian is also spoken in Israel by at least 750,000 ethnic Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union (1999 census). The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian.
Sizeable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America (especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada such as New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Miami, and Chicago). In the first two of them, Russian-speaking groups total over half a million: they issue their own newspapers, live in their self-sufficient neighborhoods (especially the first generation immigrants who started arriving in the early sixties). It's important to note, however, that only about a quarter of them are ethnic Russians. The overwhelming majority are Russian-speaking Jews, Ukrainians, Armenians, etc.
Significant Russian-speaking groups also exist in Western Europe. These have been fed by several waves of immigrants since the beginning of the twentieth century, each with its own flavour of language. Germany, Britain, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Greece have significant Russian-speaking communities totaling, in the case of Germany, 2 million people.
Two thirds of them are actually Russian-speaking descendants of Germans, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, or Ukrainians who either repatriated after the USSR collapsed or are just looking for employment.
 |
Spanish language |
Spanish or Castilian is an Iberian Romance language, and the second most spoken language in the world. It is spoken as a first language by about 352 million people, or by 417 million including non-native speakers (according to 1999 estimates).
Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union and the African Union. The majority of its speakers are confined to the Western Hemisphere, Europe and the Spanish territories in Africa (Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla).
With approximately 106 million first-language and second-language speakers, Mexico boasts the largest population of Spanish-speakers in the world. The four next largest populations reside in Colombia (44 million), Spain (c. 44 million), Argentina (39 million) and the United States of America (c. 30 million).
Spanish is the official and most important language in 20 countries: Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymará), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea (co-official French), Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní), Peru (co-official Quechua, and Aymara), Spain (co-official Catalan/Valencian, Galician, and Basque), Uruguay and Venezuela.
 |
Swahili language |
Swahili (also called Kiswahili; see below for a discussion of the nomenclature) is a Bantu language widely spoken in East Africa. Swahili is the mother tongue of the Swahili people who inhabit a 1500 km stretch of the East African coast from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique. There are approximately five million first-language speakers and fifty million second-language speakers. Swahili has become a lingua franca for East Africa and surrounding areas.
The name Swahili comes from the Arabic word meaning "coast language" (suahel = coast, the "-i" suffix being the equivalent of the "-ish" suffix in English).
Swahili is spoken in Spoken in Tanzania, Burundi, Kenya, Mayotte, Mozambique, Somalia, South Africa and Uganda.
 |
Swedish language |
Swedish (svenska) is a North Germanic language spoken predominantly in Sweden, in part of Finland, and on the autonomous ?land islands, by more than nine million people. It is mutually intelligible with the other Scandinavian languages, Danish and Norwegian. Standard Swedish is the national language that evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in the 19th century and was well-established by the beginning of the 20th century. While distinct regional varieties descended from the older rural dialects still exist, the spoken and written language is uniform and standardized, with a 99% literacy rate among adults. Some of the genuine dialects differ considerably from the standard language in grammar and vocabulary and are not always mutually intelligible with Standard Swedish.
Swedish is the national language of Sweden, the first language for the overwhelming majority of roughly eight million Sweden-born inhabitants and acquired by one million immigrants. In mainland Finland Swedish is spoken as a first language by a relatively small minority of about 5.5% or about 300,000 people. The Finland-Swedish minority is concentrated to the coastal areas and archipelagos of southern and western Finland. In these areas, Swedish is often the dominating language. In the municipalities of Korsn?s (97% Swedish speakers), N?rpes and Larsmo, Swedish is the sole administrative language. There is considerable migration between the Nordic countries, but due to the similarity between the languages and cultures, expatriates generally assimilate quickly and do not stand out as a group. According to the 2004 US census some 67,000 people age five and over were reported as Swedish speakers, though without any information on actual language proficiency.
 |
Thai language |
The Thai language is the official language of Thailand. The Thai name for the language is phasa thai, meaning "the language of Thais". Thai is part of the Tai languages group of the Tai-Kadai language family. The Tai-Kadai languages are thought to have originated in southern China, and some linguists have proposed links to the Austroasiatic, Austronesian, or Sino-Tibetan language families.
Standard Thai, also known as Central Thai or Siamese, is the official language of Thailand, spoken by about 25 million people (1990) including speakers of Bangkok Thai (although the latter is sometimes considered as a separate dialect). Khorat Thai is spoken by about 400,000 (1984) in Nakhon Ratchasima; it occupies a linguistic position somewhere between Central Thai and Isan, and may be considered a dialect of either.
 |
Turkish language |
Turkish is a member of the Turkish family of languages, which includes Balkan Gagauz Turkish, Gagauz, and Khorasani Turkish in addition to Turkish. The Turkish family is a subgroup of the Southern Turkic languages, themselves a subgroup of the Turkic languages, which some linguists believe to be member of the disputed Altaic language family (which is considered part of the even more disputed Ural-Altaic language family.)
Turkish is spoken in Turkey and by minorities in 35 other countries and has got about 100 speakers in total. The Turkish used in countries such as Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Cyprus, and Uzbekistan is also called Osmanli.
 |
Twi language |
Twi (pronounced 'chwee') is a language spoken in Ghana by about 6 million people. It is a dialect of the Akan language, which in turn belongs to the Kwa language family.
There are many divisions of the Twi languages, but they are all mutually intelligible. The Akan people are noted for their decorative stools and ornaments, and their Kente cloth, which has become a sign of not just Ghanaian but African pride. They also have many symbols, the most well known being the "gye nyame" symbol, meaning except God.
 |
Ukrainian language |
Ukrainian (ukrayins’ka mova) is an East Slavic language, one of three members of this language group, the other two being Russian and Belarusian. Written Ukrainian bears resemblances to these two languages, but with several notable differences. Historically, Belarusian and Ukrainian diverged from Old or Middle Ruthenian language. Spoken literary Ukrainian, however finds a closer similarity for native speakers with Slovak. Spoken Ukrainian also exhibits marked similarities to Polish vocabulary, which some attribute, in part, to an influence of Polish upon Ruthenian and Ukrainian.
Ukrainian is spoken in the Ukraine, Poland and the Slovakia by about 41 million total speakers.
 |
Vietnamese language |
Vietnamese, formerly known as Annamite (see Annam), is the national and official language of the country Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of the Vietnamese people, who constitute between 78% and 86% of Vietnam's population and of about two million overseas Vietnamese, including a significant number of individuals of Vietnamese heritage in the United States, as well as elsewhere. It is also spoken as a second language by some ethnic minorities of Vietnam.
According to the Ethnologue, Vietnamese is also spoken in Australia, Cambodia, Canada, China, C?te d'Ivoire, Finland, France, Germany, Laos, Martinique, Netherlands, New Caledonia, Norway, Philippines, Senegal, Thailand, United Kingdom, USA, and Vanuatu.
There are about 80 million people who speak Vietnamese as their mother tongue or a second language.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia, the free-content encyclopedia. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Rosetta Stone language software program provides language instruction in 28 different languages. The program is used by Fortune 500 companies, NASA, the US State Department, over 10,000 schools, and more than 5 million people worldwide. Our Dynamic Immersion method of instruction teaches language through thousands of real-life pictures and the voices of native speakers to instruct the user in the areas of language comprehension, reading, writing and speaking. |
| More than 25 Million Pimsleur Courses have been sold since 1980 |
| |
  |
|
copyright © 2003—2008 www.english-test.net
