There are many places on the Internet to find genealogical terms in foreign languages. There are probably few Americans who won't at some point in their research, need to work in a language other than English. However, if you want to kick up a notch and not just memorize a few words like baptism, death, and widow, there is a place to learn a foreign language for free on the Internet.
LiveMocha offers courses of all the major languages I can think of. I was impressed that they had Slovak, an often forgotten language among the European languages. [No Rosetta Stone for Slovak for instance.] I'm in the middle of my first lesson. Here's a New York Times article about it. The web does have some real advantages insofar as the sound capabilities that now the Internet has. You click on a word and you hear it pronounced properly. I had a few false starts in lesson one trying to figure out what word was meant by the picture given (no English translation is provided), but I got the hang of it.
So, if you are planning a trip to the homeland of some ancestor and want to learn some of the language spoken there, I think this is certainly one affordable way to do so.
I've found LiveMocha to be a great resource. Particularly if you need to explore journal articles, etc., in a foreign language, you need to know a bit about grammar and the like to get the gist of an argument, especially since web translators often mangle genealogical material. I've been working on Dutch for a few months now at LiveMocha, and couldn't be more pleased with the site, and am truly surprised at how much easier it is to understand the stuff I'm working with, although it might help that I studied a related language (German) in high school and college.
Posted by: Dave Morehouse | 08/27/2010 at 11:58 AM