Foreign Language Resources – St. Thomas Libraries Blog
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Foreign Language Resources

I spent the weekend with a large group of people from different Scandinavian countries.  To a person they all spoke perfect English.  We wowed them right back with our awesome foreign language skills (i.e. “I need a taxi to the airport please” in Swedish or “how much does this cost” in stilted Norwegian.   We were not an impressive lot – Good thing all the guests were).  Which brings me to library resources in foreign languages.  Just to highlight a few…

  • Artfl-Frantext – not only does it have one of the BEST names, it’s also got nearly 3000 classics of French writing – classics, non-fiction, poetry.
  • National Film Board of Canada –  You can search for films in French or English and nearly half the films are in French.
  • Oxford Language Dictionaries –  translate from English to French or French to English. Or sign up for the word of the day.  Today’s word is perron which means flight of steps.  And cuz Oxford’s middle name is Fun, there are quizzes, games and puzzles.

 

  • Oxford Language Dictionaries –  translate from English to Spanish or Spanish to English. .  Today’s word is matadero which means slaughterhouse. Oh, and check this out – here’s how they chose to use it in a sentence:  “los soldados sabían que iban al matadero = the soldiers knew that they were going to their deaths”  Wow.  Dark much?
  • Fuente Academica has full-text articles from journals in Spanish.  It’s multidisciplinary, so lots of different topics to search.  Why not give it a search and read an article in Spanish just to keep your skills sharp?

 
Sadly we don’t have any Swedish language e-resources at this library.  I’ll find those at my public library and practice my Swedish so that next year I’ll have something more interesting to say than “the hen is brown” and “the girl wears a red dress.”   Ahhh, you gotta love phrasebooks.

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