Luis Von Ahn, the computer scientist who designs around crowdsourcing and developed CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon, is about to launch Duolingo, a free on-line program. The brilliant idea is to teach a foreign language as the student helps translate free material like Wikipedia and older books that cannot easily be read by digitizing computers. In a recent TED talk, Ahn explains the thinking that led to his design. Since 1.2 billion people are currently studying a foreign language and since over 500 million people paid for foreign-language software, there seems to be a gigantic audience for the program. Rosetta Stone costs several hundred dollars—and is obviously not available to the poor—but this one will be free because of the simultaneous translation function that is an integral part of the learning. You can sign up at www.Duolingo.com to be ‘first in line’ when the program is launched. Duolingo is beginning with Spanish and German and plans to add French, Italian and Chinese. Hopefully Japanese will come along shortly. I can’t wait.

Time to sell your stock in Rosetta Stone.

In a Linked in discussion on self-taught language-learning, Manuel Aicart offered these on-line language courses, but none of them is free:

“I’d like to share here some websites for independent language learning in case you find them useful. Maybe you’ve already tried them: www.busuu.com, www.livemocha.com, www.babbel.com, www.mangolanguages.com.”

I assume these are the best sites available, since I have been following Manuel for a while and have come to trust his thoughtfulness.