Whoa. The world shrinks again. BBC has opened a new free service to learn languages. Courses in German, French, Spanish (yay!), Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Portugese and Greek are on line, as well as little intros and snapshots on a whole bunch of other languages, such as cymrw.. uh, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic, Japanese and Urdu.

And no, i didn’t know even what Urdu is before i looked.  Anyway, this would have been a nifty service two years ago in Timor :).  Learn Portugese to speak with many locals and Urdu for, uh, fun?  Feed your head at no extra cost.

Thanks: PSFK (who took it from Lifehacker, which i also read, but on my phone).