Whether you’re brushing up for your holiday or just want to broaden your horizons the web can help you learn a language. A host of websites offer “multimedia experience” by combining text, video, animation and audio.

Some of these also incorporate speech recognition software so you can assess your pronunciation; and you can have one-to-one tuition with teachers from around the world via webcam or using voice-over-internet (Voip) telephony services.

Add to this a choice of online language dictionaries, phrase books, and the sheer number of different languages you can learn – from Mandarin to Swahili – and it’s fair to say that the world is your huitre (oyster to nonFrench speakers).

ALL-ROUNDERS

Rosetta Stone (www.rosettastone. co.uk) provides excellent learning software for 30 languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Arabic and Latin. It uses a combination of images, text and voice to teach, and voice recognition technology will rate pronunciation. A three-month online subscription is £70; six months is £100.

If those prices seem steep, try the superb, well-resourced BBC Languages website (www.bbc.co.uk/languages) instead, with its video clips, audio magazines and grammar tips. There are vocabulary quizzes to assess your standard and some basic phrases to download onto your MP3 player.

And if you fancy some human interaction, go to VerbalPlanet (www.verbalplanet.com) and find a language tutor to chat to anywhere in the world using Skype, the internet telephony service. Lesson costs range from £6 to £16 per 45 minutes. Choose a tutor based on their qualifications and positive feedback from students, then arrange a mutually convenient time to have your lessons.

LINGO ON A BUDGET

There are also plenty of free online resources. Word2Word (www.word2word.com) is an excellent directory offering links to online dictionaries, free online language courses and language chat sites. Be prepared to dig around a bit, as the quality can vary.

Next, head to www.yourdictionary.com/languages.html for links to dictionaries and grammars for a staggering 300 languages, including Vulcan for all those Star Trek nerds. Smartphrase’s (www.smartphrase.com) online phrase book would be improved further with audio pronunciations, but it is useful nonetheless.

And BYKI (www.byki.com) offers free downloadable software for 58 languages. Using a flash-card system you see the word, the thing it represents, hear how it is pronounced, and test yourself. The catch is you get only a limited number of word and phrase lists free. Downloading BYKI Deluxe gives you more than 75 lists, plus audio files and pronunciation assessment software, all for £28.18.

LANGUAGE ON THE GO

Traditional foreign language phrase books can’t show you how the words should be pronounced, but the web can. As well as language services that offer MP3 audio files for download, there are also dedicated programs designed for mobile gadgets that provide spoken translations on the go.

LandWare (www.landware.com/smalltalk) offers two-way translation software in five European languages for handhelds using the Palm operating system. Simply tap in the relevant phrase in English and hear the translation. It costs £9.87 for the download. At the luxury end of the market is the Ectaco (www.ectaco.co.uk) iTravl NTL-9C multilingual language communicator (£296.78), which uses speech recognition software that enables you to speak a phrase into the machine and hear the translation spoken back to you in a native voice. The phrase book recognises and speaks 14,000 travel-related phrases per language and contains other useful documents, such as maps and Fodor travel guides.

ALTERNATIVE LANGUAGES

Learning a new language doesn’t always have to be geared towards ordering a beer and chatting up the locals. About 50,000 deaf and hard-of-hearing people use British sign language. Teaching it remotely has always been tricky as gestures are difficult to convey in 2-D diagrams. Now remote learning is much easier.

The RNID (www.rnid.org.uk) site offers free clips from its Start to Sign! CD-Rom (£20), and Waterfall Rainbows (www.british-sign.co.uk) offers a seven-week online course for just £15. Students can learn more than 400 BSL signs. And if you want to test your linguistic skills why not have a crack at that doomed attempt at a lingua franca, Esperanto (www.lernu.net), or brush up on your Latin at www.cambridgescp.com.