One very nice resource that I have been using the past 6 months for German is Duden's schuelerlexikon.de. Duden is a top notch dictionary publisher for those unfamiliar with it. The site is oriented towards high school students, and one can read various school subjects including the English and German languages. I find it especially nice for science vocabulary. One annoying thing though is that when you open a part of a subject from the sidebar, it opens a new window in which my Firefox mouse-over tool no longer works. Still it is an excellent encyclopedia with a reasonable depth. Is anyone familiar with other such free online encyclopedias for various languages aimed at either high school or lower levels? As such they function as graded input on the path to learning a language, though primarily for factual knowledge as opposed to literature.
For French, Larousse has an online encyclopedia. I'm not sure if it's aimed at a specific level, but I would say that people with B2 comprehension and higher would have no problem reading the entries.
Since I plan to restart Spanish soon, I was looking again for an abridged encyclopedia, geared toward high school students, like the one for German above. I just want to get an overview of various thematic topics and sub-topics, but not deeper like a 20 volume traditional encyclopedia. There are many online for Spanish, but most are not comprehensive enough, as they rely on user generated content like Wikipedia. However I found a winner: Enciclonet.com. If someone wants to do it, perhaps it could be added to the Spanish resources thread as well.
