🇬🇧 Best English tools for advanced learners

Free on desktop, Android and web; the iOS app is a one-off paid purchase that funds the project. The interface is dated and the options are overwhelming at first, but nothing beats it for retaining vocabulary over years. Most effective when you stop grinding premade decks and start mining sentences from things you actually read or watch.

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.

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).

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

Type a word or phrase and it plays back real YouTube clips of people saying it in context, across 25 languages plus sign languages, so you get natural intonation and regional variation rather than an isolated dictionary recording. Free, donation-supported, no account needed. Complements Forvo: Forvo for single words, YouGlish for phrases and prosody.

Modern assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) will roleplay a scenario at your level, correct your writing with explanations, generate graded reading, and hold voice conversations — endlessly patient and available at 2am, which no tutor is. Free tiers are enough for text practice; voice modes generally need a subscription. The caveats are real: models are noticeably weaker and more error-prone in lower-resource languages, they tend to produce bland textbook register rather than how people actually speak, and they will not correct you unless you explicitly ask them to.

Built on Tatoeba sentences, it drills words in context by frequency band across 50+ languages and 170+ language pairings, with a genuinely generous free tier. It explicitly starts where beginner apps end, so it is the natural 'what now?' answer for someone who finished a Duolingo tree. Sentences are crowd-sourced and occasionally awkward or oddly specific, and it teaches nothing about grammar explicitly.

Around 6 million words recorded by native speakers across 400+ languages, usually with several accents per word so you can hear regional variation. Free to search on the site; the paid tiers are aimed at API users and bulk audio downloads. Indispensable for names, place names and anything a TTS voice would mangle — many learners wire it directly into Anki for card audio.

A Chrome extension that shows target-language and native subtitles simultaneously, lets you click any word for a definition, replay a line, and save phrases for review. The free tier already covers dual subs, dictionary lookups and the CEFR-graded video catalogue; Pro (about $6/month) adds machine translation, speech recognition and better AI lookups. It transforms passive Netflix time into study time, but you need enough of a base — roughly B1 — for subtitle mining to beat just watching.

Import podcasts, articles or ebooks, tap unknown words for definitions, and LingQ tracks your known-word count over time. The free tier caps how many saved words you can keep, so serious use means paying (~$13/month or less annually). The interface is clunky and the built-in SRS is weaker than Anki, but the reading-plus-audio workflow with 50+ languages is hard to replicate elsewhere.

Type a phrase you are unsure about and Ludwig shows you real sentences from newspapers, journals and books that use it, so you can see whether native writers actually say 'discuss about' or 'make a research'. It answers the question a dictionary cannot — not what a word means but whether your combination of words exists. The free tier limits daily searches and holds back some features, results skew towards formal written English rather than speech, and it will confirm a phrasing exists without telling you whether it fits your context.

A browser extension plus web reader covering 100+ languages: click a word or drag across a phrase, get an inline translation, and it becomes a flashcard automatically. The free tier gives unlimited single-word translations but caps phrases and AI explanations at 10 a day; Premium is $6/month. Simpler and cheaper than LingQ or Migaku if all you want is frictionless reading of articles and ebooks.

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.

Cambridge's own automated marking tool: write to one of hundreds of prompts, and within seconds you get an estimated CEFR level plus sentence-by-sentence highlights of what needs fixing, then resubmit and watch the score move. For a self-studying learner with no teacher, this closes the biggest gap in solo English study — nobody to correct your writing. The feedback is automated, so it flags problems more reliably than it explains them, and richer features and exam-style tasks sit behind the paid tier.

The heavyweight immersion toolkit: one-click sentence mining with audio, screenshot and definitions, plus its own SRS and known-word tracking, for 11 languages including Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and the major European ones. A 10-day free trial then a subscription (roughly $10/month). Overkill unless you are committed to a sentence-mining routine — if that describes you it saves hours a week, otherwise Language Reactor's free tier is enough.