Google's Directory Provides a World of Languages

Because of an upcoming visit to Chile in early 2008, I am interested in finding Chilean media (written, audio, and video) to learn more about Chile and get used to the Spanish that is spoken in this string-bean shaped country in South America.

While searching the Web for information about Chile I came across Google's Web Directory, which is page-ranked version of the Open Directory Project (also known as dmoz), a directory of Web links owned by Netscape that is developed and maintained by volunteer editors.

Of particular interest to language learners is the World category of this directory, which as described by Google,

. . . includes directory content for languages other than English. For example, in World/Nederlands all the content is in Dutch and the directory descriptions are written in Dutch. The pages in this section of the directory are usually not translations of English language pages, but a whole section of the Internet exclusively in that language.

Entering the World category reveals a list of 75 languages. To find Chilean radio stations broadcasting online I selected Español -> Medios de comunicación -> Radios -> Chile where I found 44 radio stations ranked via Google's PageRank method. Newspapers, magazines, podcasts and a treasure of other information is also easily found by selecting one's language and area of interest.

So if you are interested in finding text and multimedia in a language from Afrikaans to Vietnamese, the World category in Google's Directory is a good place to start.