Best Language Learning Programs

LingQ

Price: $7. 99 per month

LingQ is a web-based language learning system and offers lessons in 37 languages, including Spanish, Chinese and so on. You’ll have access to their apps, vocabulary features, one-on-one English conversations, group conversations, writing corrections and a huge variety of learning activities and quizzes. It has a community aspect that rewards you with a backpack for helping your peers (同伴).

Assimil

Price: $61 per month

A language learning program from France, Assimil has many foreign language products. The program offers 14 different languages, including a full e-course, CDs and downloadable or printed textbooks.

Alison

Price: Free

Do you need to learn a language for work or business at your own pace (步调)? Give Alison a try. Stick with a single language or learn several from nine options: Japanese, German, Spanish, French, Chinese, Irish, Arabic, English or Swedish. Access to its video lessons, with ads, is free—and you can take as many different courses as you’d like.

Rosetta Stone

Price: $7. 99 per month

Rosetta Stone includes online classes, games and mobile apps. This resource is recommended for long-term learners rather than those looking for quick phrase-building. The program promises to provide learners with 25 different languages, featuring well-rounded courses that deal with all aspects of a language.

When I first moved away from home to study, I started out living in student housing. We all had our own rooms, but every floor shared a kitchen and a common room. There was no supervision from family members, and we were expected to take care of ourselves. I had a neighbor who had, like most of us, just moved away from home. It was his first time on his own, and he felt unhappy.

We had to teach this poor boy EVERYTHING. It started with the mystery of why the plates in the cupboard were always greasy (有油渍的). It turned out that the boy didn’t know he had to use hot water to wash the dishes; he just washed them in cold water and put them back.

He spent the first six months complaining about how he was always running out of money. This was because he didn’t know how to cook. The rest of us lived on the usual student diet and treated ourselves to a pizza on weekends. However, he got fast food every single day. I could feed myself for a month on his weekly meal budget. Moreover, he had no idea how to wash clothes with a washing machine. I had to take him shopping for laundry detergent (洗衣粉) first because he didn’t know what it was. He thought he could just put ordinary soap in the washing machine.

To his credit, the boy was very grateful for the help and very depressed that no one had taught him how to do all these things before he moved out.

One day, the boy’s mother came to visit. He happily introduced all of us to his mother. After we graduated, I was invited to his wedding. He introduced me to his new wife as “the one who taught me how to be a man”.

As soon as Boran Bumovich Hignio’s bare feet touch the sand on the beach, he spreads his arms like a helicopter and happily says, “Let's go surfing!” The 7-year-old, wearing a black wetsuit, is followed by a dozen other kids who skip their way into the blue waves of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Peru's capital, Lima.

Boran gets help with his wetsuit from Diego Villarán, who founded the local surf school. This Peruvian surf school is part of a wave of community-based projects around the world that use a perhaps surprising method to help kids: surf therapy (疗法).

The idea is not only about catching waves to make use of the proven mental health benefits of physical exercise. The wider goal is to create a space for young children to express themselves freely, to help teach them how to process their emotions and to create positive social connections.

Lima's surf therapy project is run by Alto Peru, a local nonprofit named after the neighborhood in the south of the city where Villardn-its 41-year-old founder-and all of the trainee surfers come from. Many of the children in the Alto Peru program face challenging situations. Some parents are addicted to alcohol. One of the boys has even turned up for lessons with a black eye a couple of times.

Half of all mental health disorders begin before the age of 14 and up to a fifth of teenagers globally experience mental health conditions, according to the World Mental Health Survey Initiative, which conducted face-to-face interviews in 17 countries across Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe.

Surf therapy, which covers projects from Sierra Leone to California and Trinidad, is seen by advocates as a convincing solution to helping address mental health issues among young people. “It has changed my life,” says Omarion Butler, 19, who began surfing with Alto Peru two years ago. “When my parents put me down in the past, it was hard for me to express my feelings. But surfing makes me more confident. It helps me to take time for myself.”

A tiny crack (裂缝) grew in a very small piece of metal when placed under repetitive stretching. The experiment, designed to study crack growth, continued as predicted for a while. But then, something unexpected happened. The crack stopped growing and instead began to get shorter, effectively “healing (愈合)” itself. This incredible observation was made by a group of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories. The findings were recently published in the journal Nature.

It would be reasonable to think, prior to this discovery, that self-healing metal was something that could only be found in science fiction. However, Dr. Michael Demkowicz, a professor in Texas A&M University’s materials science and engineering department and co-author of the recent study, held no such assumptions.

Ten years ago, while an assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s materials science and engineering department, Demkowicz and his student predicted self-healing in metals. “We didn’t set out to find healing. My student, Guoxiang Xu, was doing experiments on fracture (断裂),” Demkowicz said. “We accidentally observed healing in one of his experiments and decided to follow up.” Then, just like now, the results in 2013 were surprising.

Both the 2013 models and the recent experiment used nanocrystalline (纳米晶体) metals, which make studying self-healing easier because their small grain size allows for more microstructural features that even small cracks can interact with. Demkowicz said that these features are common in many metals. One condition common to both the 2013 theory and the recent experiment is that both were conducted in vacuum environments without foreign matter. Such outside matter could influence crack surfaces’ ability to bond back together.

Even with this limitation, applications could still be possible for space faring technology or internal cracks that are not exposed to outside air. “The main impact of the current work is to move the original theoretical prediction off the drawing board and show that it occurs in reality,” Demkowicz said. Potential applications of this work could vary widely. Demkowicz suggests that self-healing could be possible in conventional metals with larger grain sizes, but future investigations will be needed.