Language Transfer is a project that provides a set of free courses to learn a new language. It is a non-profit project without any sponsors or ads. As such it is run, maintained, and expanded entirely on donations. The project was started around 2011 by Mihalis Eleftheriou, a polyglot, who originally gave language lessons to pay for his music education but decided to make it free as his way of contributing to Activism and doing something meaningful in his life. The project since then has added several courses to allow an English speaker to learn French, Swahili, Italian, Greek, German, Turkish, and Arabic. It also has a course for native Spanish speakers to learn English.
The project is different from other language courses, aside from being free, in the methodology it uses. The term Language Transfer describes the process of applying linguistic features from one language to another. As such, the project heavily emphasizes remembering as opposed to memorizing. The format of the course is a series of ~10 minute audio clips wherein Mihalis will have a conversation with the student. Rather than giving the student words and phrases to memorize, he explains how the student can take words they already know in English to determine what the appropriate word is in the target language. For example, though English is a Germanic language, it also contains many Latin derived words; these can be used to figure out the word might be in Spanish (which Mihalis calls a dialect of Latin). Through this process, he builds up the student's vocabulary and then challenges them to translate phrases he provides.
Mihalis will always remind the student to be aware of Negative Language Transfer, which happens when one takes linguistic features from the native language and applies it incorrectly to the target language. For example, in some situations, Spanish requires object pronouns to be before the verb whereas in English that never happens; if one isn't careful, they may incorrectly place the object pronoun after the verb in Spanish because it is the more natural thing to do in English. On the other hand, he encourages Positive Language Transfer. For example, if a native Spanish speaker who is not fluent in English says something like "I have 45 years", one can probably guess how "I am 45 years old" is said in Spanish.
Throughout the course, one also gets a sense of the connectedness of languages, and how certain sounds get stressed or changed across the languages. For example, 'b' and 'v' seem to be very related, to the point where 'v' in Spanish is often pronounced as a soft 'b'. Furthermore, "saber" (meaning "to know") is related to "savvy", "boca" (meaning "mouth") is related to "vocal", and so on. Even if one isn't necessarily interested in linguistics, it provides the listener with extra context and information that helps make the experience more personal and interesting, which in turn makes it more likely the listener will actually practice.
This is a great resource for anyone trying to learn one of the languages they offer courses in. I personally never found something like Duolingo particularly useful because fundamental concepts are taught in a very academic nature which made it quite hard to understand. There are many concepts that I had never even known of in English because it's something so fundamental to the language that one simply internalizes the rules and it becomes a matter of "that doesn't sound right". However, without said internalization in a different language, one is forced lean heavily on the rules, which requires understanding and identifying all these various grammatical structures. This can very quickly lead to getting lost in abstraction. Because language transfer is a more natural way in which the brain learns, it feels like the hurdles one has to get over aren't as overwhelming. I definitely recommend giving Language Transfer a try; after all it's free and there's really nothing to lose.