🇬🇧 Best English tools for beginners

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit: you shadow native audio, record your own version, and a real human coach returns feedback — 10 free submissions a month, unlimited for about $20/month, with full scholarships for anyone who needs one. Covers French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and English. It only fixes pronunciation and delivery, so it complements rather than replaces conversation practice.

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.