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Language learning in real-life situations is both important and effective.

But when I'm on holidays, I'm not into carrying bulky phrase books or dictionaries around all day. And I hate not having audio files for pronunciation. The solution? An audio and text dictionary on my mobile.

slovoed.com are a Russian software team who provide great mobile dictionaries in over 130 languages. I've been using Slovoed's French-English dictionary to:

1 pick a word and listen to an audio file for pronunciation guidance
2 read example phrases of the word being used in different contexts
3 create flash cards
4 review flash cards with a quiz
5 personalise the dictionary with your own vocab
6 explore hot links in every entry, so you can easily jump from word to word

That's just a list of the features I find useful - you can see a full list of OS-specific features here.

With slovoed mobile dictionaries, you can get a dictionary on your mobile from just $15 (price for the Simbian OS English-French dictionary - different language partners have different prices - the Spanish-Catalan dictionary is about $60).

I've been using various ipod packages for language learning, but haven't found anything that works. I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has found an effective way of learning a language on the go?

PS...My favourite French phrase on my slovoed dictionary is under Drink/Boire:

"Elle l'a fait boire pour qu'il avoue."

Translation

"She got him drunk so that he'd confess."

A useful phrase for a very specific situation...