# Free and public domain language courses


One incredibly progressive feature of the American constitution, is that
it provides that everything produced by the government immediately
enters public domain. I think this makes complete sense, and there is a
slow movement among other countries to follow up, but it is something
that should have happened a long time ago. Due to this rule, an immense
amount of positive material that has been produced by all manners of
government departments have been released. However of course, having
something in the public domain does not mean that you have to make it
available for free, and so many government agencies have been reluctant
with putting material online. Carl Malamud from
[Public.Resource.org](http://public.resource.org/) has done great work
buying or negotiating access to government works and putting them
online.

Today I came across [another great
site](http://fsi-language-courses.com), that has been acquiring and
digitizing Foreign Service language courses. They have a number of PDFs
of scanned books, and many mp3’s (the digitized cassets) for everything
from Arabic and Hindi to Amharic and Hausa.
[FreeLanguageCourses.com](http://freelanguagecourses.com) also has a
number of Public Domain, Creative Commons and otherwise freely available
language material. Right now I am download a [1.4GB complete course in
Russian](http://www.freelanguagecourses.com/category/language/russian/).
With all these resources, and the freemium programs, like the very high
quality [ChinesePod](http://chinesepod.com) and
[SpanishPod](http://spanishpod.com) that offer mp3’s for free, but
charge for premium services… *and* all the added possibilities to find
original content - through Youtube, online streaming radio and
television, p2p sharing of videos, books being digitized… *and* all the
new ways of interacting online - Skype, chat, email, webcam… There has
never been a better time to learn a language, and learning a new
language has never given you access to so many new resources and people,
no matter where you live in the world.

Go learn a language!

Stian