english

Learning any language can be a tough endeavor, but reading words and hearing their pronunciations can help make the new language stick. English Reading combines classic literature with an audio feature. The app is pretty bare bones, but what it offers will appeal to those learning English and those who are looking for a few free reads.

English Reading's interface certainly won't win any design awards. It features two menu options: News and Books. The News option offers headlines from "Time," Reuters, NBC News, "USA Today," and "The Washington Post" (though it'… Read more

Stonehenge has long been one of the world's most mysterious monuments. The massive rock circle has given up a few of its secrets to a digital scanning project led by historical-preservation organization English Heritage with an assist from the York Archaeological Trust. The 3D laser-scanning data collected last year has unveiled 72 hidden ax-head carvings in the surface of the stone.

Stonehenge was given a complete 3D-scanning treatment, generating 850 gigabytes of data. Archeologists put software from Bentley Systems to work to analyze the data. The resulting data crunching showed 72 carvings depicting Bronze Age tools that had been hiding from the naked eye for thousands of years. Almost all show ax heads, but one is likely a dagger.… Read more

There are more than 190 countries in the world and every one of them has a flag. Most people would be hard-pressed to recognize 10 percent of those flags, but with English Words Country - Flag Quiz, you can change that. Designed to quiz you on all 196 flags in its database, the app offers multiple ways to test your knowledge and hear how those country's names are pronounced.

When you start the app, you'll be given three difficulty options: easy, medium, and hard. Easy simply asks you to match one of four countries provided with the flag … Read more

The Web's preferred translation app, Google Translate, doesn't seem to be the best fit for smartphones. It can push you over your phone's data cap if you use it too regularly. English Hindi Dictionary Free isn't as powerful or accurate as Google's service, but it does everything offline. That makes it easier to turn your smartphone into a pocket translator.

English Hindi Dictionary Free stores its entire dictionary on your gadget, so downloading the whole thing takes a little while. You have the choice of stashing words on your SD card or your phone's … Read more

Once upon a time, printed reference works kept useful knowledge trapped in libraries, but computers and the Internet changed all that. Now smartphones are doing to desktop PCs what they did to paper books by making that information even more useful by making it even more accessible. One example is Sachith Dassanayake's Sinhala Tamil English Dictionary. This free Android app not only offers an excellent English-to-Sinhala/Sinhala-to English Dictionary and Thesaurus, but it also now supports English-to-Tamil and Tamil-to-English translations. Sinhala (sometimes spelled Sinhalese or Singhalese) is one of Sri Lanka's official languages; Tamil is another. For travelers, … Read more

For those of you not in the know (and we're including ourselves in this), Tamil is a language spoken in South India and Northeast Sri-Lanka. English to Tamil Dictionary, as one might expect, aims to bridge the language divide by translating English words into their appropriate Tamil word or phrase. While we can't speak to its accuracy from the Tamil side, from an English-speaking standpoint, we found it to be a mixed bag in terms of its helpfulness.

English to Tamil Dictionary offers a pretty simple interface. It opens with a search bar and a list of "… Read more

Gomigo is a software application that works as a desktop assistant, working to help you open and access files, programs, and documents faster and more easily. It can make your day-to-day computer use work more for you.

This program is very simple to use because it is rather simple in design. On the other hand, this makes it more complicated in other ways. There is no Help section and the Tutorial that is available is very brief. For the most part, the inner workings of this application are easy to figure out though. Once it's open, you can access … Read more

One of the hardest things about mastering a foreign language is learning how to properly conjugate verbs. Coniuno offers conjugation practice for verbs in German, English, Spanish, Italian, French, Latin, and Portuguese. It's not the most intuitive program we've seen, and it might not be the best choice for language learners who are really new to the concept of conjugating verbs. For users who have some foreign language experience and a familiarity with conjugating, however, it's definitely a good way to hone your skills.

Coniuno's interface makes use of a couple of toolbars across the top … Read more

Google Translate for Android is a simple, versatile tool that supports more than 60 languages, offers an SMS translator, and even speaks some of your translations aloud.

The best thing about Google Translate is its simplicity. The app is decked out with a sleek, ICS-flavored Holo theme, complete with Android 4.0's signature action bar and drop-down menu. Altogether, the new skin is a marked improvement over the slightly clunkier interface developed for Android Gingerbread.

To use Google Translate, just select your input and output languages, then type in your text. For even faster results, you can set the … Read more