🇺🇸 The best American English websites

News, science and culture stories written with a limited word list and read at about two-thirds of normal speed, each with the full text alongside the audio, plus long-running series like Everyday Grammar and Words and Their Stories. It remains free with no registration and the site was still publishing daily in August 2026. The register is deliberately simplified American English, so it builds comprehension rather than natural idiom, and its YouTube channel has been dormant since 2025 — go to the website rather than the video feed.

An adaptive quiz engine that keeps testing you on words in varied contexts until they stick, backed by dictionary entries written as short essays about how a word is really used rather than terse definitions. Building lists from a book or article you are reading and drilling those words is the strongest way to use it. It is aimed largely at American students preparing for standardised tests, so vocabulary skews academic and away from spoken idiom, and serious use of the learner and classroom features needs a subscription.

Randall Davis has been recording scripted but natural dialogues — booking a hotel, a doctor's appointment, a job interview — with pre-listening vocabulary, comprehension quizzes and full scripts, organised into easy, medium and difficult tiers. It is the most practical free resource for the specific skill of understanding functional spoken English, and everything is free. The recordings are dated in places and the interface is plain, but the pedagogy is solid and the quizzes give you honest feedback on whether you actually understood.

For every English consonant and vowel you get an animation of the tongue, lips and vocal folds, a written description of the articulation and video of a speaker producing it — the visual explanation that finally fixes sounds like /θ/, /ɹ/ and the vowel pairs no amount of listening had corrected. Free, from the University of Iowa, no account needed. It is a phonetics reference rather than a practice tool: there is no recording, feedback or drilling, and it covers American English (with separate Spanish and German sections).