Every one of these 4 resources explains English in Portuguese, all of them free, so you can start before your English is good enough for English-only material. The standouts are English in Brazil by Carina Fragozo, Teacher Elza and Professor Kenny. As everywhere on How to Learn, each one was checked by hand, what teaches you is listed first, and there are no affiliate links.
19 of these are written for another variety of English, and say so on the card. Most of a course is simply the language, so the vocabulary and grammar carry over — pronunciation and some everyday usage do not.
Carina Fragozo holds a PhD in linguistics from USP and has taught English for 20 years; about 2.2 million subscribers. Recent work includes a Slow English podcast for beginners and easy-to-follow conversation vlogs from London, framed and explained in Portuguese. Taught for Portuguese (Brazilian) speakers.
About 1.6 million subscribers, weekly videos in 2026: shadowing practice with film scenes, complete slow-English stories, level tests and the words that do not mean what Brazilians expect. Clear explanations in Portuguese with plenty of listening in English.
Kenny is a native English speaker from Canada who has taught Brazilians for years and explains in Portuguese; about 2.6 million subscribers. Lessons cover silent letters, everyday vocabulary and the uses of common verbs. Uploads have slowed to about one a month in 2026; the back catalogue is the value.
About 3.5 million subscribers and over 1,200 videos, each unpacking one word or expression (render, solely, snap) with examples, explained in Portuguese. He has posted almost nothing new since March 2025, so treat it as a searchable library: look up the word you are stuck on.
Decades of programmes organised into courses by level, plus daily news-based vocabulary, pronunciation videos covering every English phoneme, grammar explainers and drama series, all with transcripts and all free with no account required. It is the single most reliable free starting point for a learner of British English and it was still publishing new material in August 2026. The volume is its weakness as well as its strength — the site is a sprawl of overlapping series, so pick one course and follow it rather than browsing at random, and note the model is British throughout.
Two presenters discuss a topic — sleep science, AI, urban foxes — at a controlled pace, teaching six pieces of vocabulary along the way, with a full transcript and PDF for every episode. Short enough to do daily on a commute and consistent enough that it becomes a habit, which is why it is the most widely recommended English podcast for learners. The conversational format is scripted rather than spontaneous, so it will not prepare you for fast native speech on its own, and below about B1 the pace is still demanding.
Every activity is labelled by level and skill — reading texts, listening clips, grammar explanations, writing models for emails and essays — with comprehension exercises attached, and all of it is free without an account. Its structure by CEFR level makes it far easier to navigate than most free sites, and there is a free level test to place yourself. The material is exam-and-classroom flavoured rather than entertaining, and the British Council's genuinely paid products (English Online courses, IELTS prep) are marketed alongside it, so check what you are clicking.
Lucy Bella Earl covers Received Pronunciation, British idioms, confusable words and grammar traps in well-produced videos aimed at intermediate learners, and the channel was still posting weekly in August 2026 to an audience in the millions. It is the most accessible entry point for learners specifically targeting British English. The free videos are broad rather than systematic and increasingly funnel towards the paid courses and study packs, so treat them as supplements to a structured programme rather than the programme itself.
Over a thousand free videos analysing American English at the level of individual sounds, linking, stress and the reductions ('gonna', 'wanna', swallowed T's) that make natives hard to understand, often using slow-motion mouth close-ups and clips from films. Still publishing in August 2026. Free on YouTube and the site; the Academy membership is the paid product. It is exclusively American English and technique-heavy — hugely effective if you want to sound American, largely irrelevant if you do not.
Vanessa films long, warm lessons on real-life situations — small talk, phone calls, understanding fast speech — speaking clearly enough for lower-intermediate learners while still using natural phrasing, and she was still uploading in August 2026. The generous free PDFs that accompany many lessons make it more structured than most YouTube teaching. Paid courses are the business model and are heavily promoted, the pacing is slow if you are already advanced, and the English taught is thoroughly American.
Luke Thompson is a teacher and stand-up comedian, and his podcast reached episode 1,000 in August 2026 with a back catalogue of rambling conversations, comedy, interviews and language analysis in natural British English. It is the best free source of long-form authentic listening for learners who are past the graded-material stage and want volume. Episodes often run over an hour and the speech is genuinely fast and idiomatic, which is the point but makes it unusable below B1; structured vocabulary and grammar episodes sit behind the LEP Premium subscription.
Lindsay and Michelle release episodes every weekday — it was still publishing daily in August 2026 — focusing on natural conversational American English, idioms and the social side of speaking, with a deliberately upbeat 'connection not perfection' stance. The daily cadence makes it a genuinely sustainable listening habit. Episodes are chatty and low-density, so you get less language per minute than from a scripted show, ads are frequent, and transcripts and the IELTS-specific material require paid membership.
Shana, an ESL teacher from California, builds each episode around something American — a holiday, a piece of history, a set of slang — and speaks deliberately slowly, which is what makes it usable well before you can follow native-speed radio. The episodes are free; transcripts, quizzes and the Academy course material are paid. It is the clearest single source for American English in this list, and the cultural framing means you also learn what people are referring to, not just how they say it.
Alastair Budge has been publishing since the end of 2019, twice a week, on whatever he finds interesting — Victorian workhouses, the history of fire, a dictator's rise — in measured British English written to be followed by a learner. Listening is free; the interactive transcripts, subtitles and vocabulary are a paid membership, and most of the back catalogue is member-only. Pick it when you want subject matter that would hold your attention in your own language, rather than lessons about English.
You read prompts aloud and ELSA marks which individual phonemes were off, showing what to do differently, plus AI role-plays for conversation practice — the closest thing to a pronunciation coach that runs on your phone at any hour. Most useful if you have a specific accent problem you already know about and want targeted, repeatable drilling. The free tier is limited and the app pushes hard towards Pro; scoring is calibrated to American English and can be harsh or plain wrong on perfectly intelligible non-standard pronunciation, so do not let it grind down your confidence.
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.
Seonaid Beckwith explains one grammar point per page in plain language with example sentences and several free practice exercises, covering tenses, conditionals, reported speech, articles and the rest of the usual trouble spots. When you need a fast, trustworthy answer to 'when do I use the present perfect', this is quicker than any video. Explanations are British-oriented and deliberately simplified, so advanced learners chasing nuance will outgrow it and should move to a full reference grammar; some downloadable packs are paid.
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).
Definitions are constrained to a controlled defining vocabulary, so you never need a second dictionary to understand the first one, and each headword carries a CEFR tag telling you whether it is worth learning yet, alongside British and American audio, grammar patterns and collocations. The free site covers the full Advanced Learner's Dictionary. It is monolingual by design, which is right for intermediate learners and off-putting for absolute beginners, and the ads and app upsells on the free site are noticeable.
This is the former Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary under Britannica's roof (learnersdictionary.com now redirects here), and its distinguishing feature is volume of examples — most entries show the word in many real sentences, which teaches usage far better than a definition does. Best for learners of American English who keep producing grammatically correct but unnatural sentences. It is American-only in spelling and idiom, the site is ad-supported, and the rebrand means older bookmarks and links point at the wrong place.
The Corpus of Contemporary American English lets you ask which words actually collocate with which, whether a phrasing is common in academic writing but rare in speech, and how usage has shifted over decades — evidence rather than opinion, which is exactly what advanced writers need. Free after a quick registration, with sister corpora for British English, news and academic text. The interface is academic and unfriendly, free accounts hit query limits, and it assumes you can interpret concordance lines, so it is genuinely a C-level tool.