“He who is ignorant of other languages is ignorant of his own.” Good old Goethe was right. It is worthwile itself to learn a foreign language. You can find great resources on the Internet: audio books and podcast lessons. Do you want to improve your language skills? Do you want to learn English, French or German the easy way? Then this list with free resources is for you.

Learn English

English as a Second Language Podcast
ESLPod.com is run by a volunteer team of experienced English as a Second Language professors. The site provides a collection of free podcasts. They provide English at a slower speed and use everyday phrases and expressions and they explain what these expressions mean and how to use them.
Business English Podcast
Business English Pod delivers free weekly MP3 podcast lessons for intermediate and advanced business English learners. Each podcast is focused on a particular skill (meetings, presentations, telephoning etc) and language function (clarifying, disagreeing, questioning etc).
The Bob and Rob Show
The Bob and Rob Show with weekly English lessons from a Yankee and a Brit is a variety show for learning English. It’s aimed at intermediate to advanced learners of English. At present you can find 79 free mp3 files.
BBC Learning English
The site is intended to help you improve your learning of the English language. Throughout the site you will find short courses, quizzes, grammar, vocabulary, audio and video. On BBC Radio you can listen to world news or BBC bulletins.

Selection of Free Audio Book Podcasts from LibriVox:
Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein
Philosophy and Fun of Algebra by Mary Everest Boole
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Odyssey by Homer
Call of the Wild by Jack London
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Cosmic Computer by H. Beam Piper
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Frankenstein by Mally Wollstoncraft Shelley
Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Childhood by Leo Tolstoy
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Clue of the Twisted Candle by Edgar Wallace
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Learn French

French for Beginners
This is a site with 25 audio lessons and vocabulary sheets (pdf). It’s a great start for learning French the easy way.
The French Pod Class
Here you can find weekly podcasts with vocabulary, cultural points, knowledge, movies, musics and books from France or the French language.
Learn French by Podcast
Here you can find 54 audio podcasts for learners of French as a foreign language.
DailyFrenchPod
This site provides free daily audio lessons from native speakers.

A Free Audio Book Podcast from LibriVox:
Le tour du monde en quarte-vingts jours by Jules Verne
(Around the World in Eighty Days)

Learn German

Deutsche Welle
Slowly spoken news reports: Every day, you can find the 10:00 a.m. newscast from Deutsche Welle’s German Service here — read slowly and clearly articulated just for German learners. This Deutsche Welle online offer is available as an audio file (MP3) and as a text file. Deutsche Welle’s German courses are designed to help you improve your language skills on an individual basis. You can download the audio files and the accompanying booklet.
GerGermanGrammarPodcasts
Here you can find a huge podcast collection with grammar explanations.
MyDailyPhrase German
Learn German step by step, day by day, phrase by phrase. MyDailyPhrase provides a 20-week course with 5-minutes audio lessons.

Selection of Free Audio Book Podcasts from LibriVox:
Der Schimmelreiter by Theodor Storm
(The Dykemaster)
Die Leiden des jungen Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(The Sorrows of Young Werther)
Winnetou I by Karl May

The Mixxer: Find a Language Partner

You can find a language partner for a language exchange with the help of The Mixxer. It’s a free educational site. The language partner is someone who speaks the language you study as their native language and is studying your native language. The partners then meet online to help each other practice and learn a foreign language. The program most commonly used among Mixxer language partners is Skype. I’ve found this site today and I think it’s a great idea!

soZiety and xLingo
An interesting community is soZiety from Spain, a language-learning social network based on Skype. The blog for soZiety started on January 31st, 2007, so the project is very young. Another site with a similar concept is xLingo.