Dimitris and Marilena's weekly podcast passed 280 episodes and was still publishing in August 2026, alongside a YouTube channel that films real people answering questions on the street — both subtitled in Greek and English. It is the best available bridge from textbook Greek to how Greeks actually talk, including slang and swallowed syllables. Episodes and videos are free; transcripts, vocabulary lists and the interactive transcript player come with membership. Genuinely hard below B1.
Innovative Language's Greek arm: dialogue-based audio and video lessons grouped into level pathways, each with a PDF transcript, line-by-line breakdown and an SRS flashcard deck. For Modern Greek, where structured audio courses are thin on the ground, the sheer volume is the point. A free lifetime account unlocks only part of the library, most of it needs a subscription, and the marketing emails are relentless. The public podcast feed was still updating in August 2026.
A comprehensible-input channel that teaches through short stories in Greek — a character goes to the market, has a difficult conversation — repeated and paraphrased so that meaning comes from context rather than translation. This is the closest Modern Greek has to the story-based input channels that exist for Spanish. Free, though uploads come in seasons and the most recent run ended in mid-2026, so treat it as a strong archive rather than a weekly habit.
Dimitris and Artemis speak slowly and stick to a restricted vocabulary so that beginners can follow whole episodes in Greek without translation — the missing rung below the main Easy Greek show. Around 90 episodes and still running in August 2026. Free to listen; transcripts and vocabulary support come with the same membership as the main podcast. Because it is by design repetitive and narrow, it stops being useful once you are comfortably A2.
Omilo runs residential Greek language-and-culture courses in Athens, Nafplion, Syros, Lefkada and Naxos, plus private and online lessons — the option when you want to spend a couple of weeks inside the language. Its free side is genuinely worth having on its own: the 'Easy Greek Stories' podcast reads each story at slow and native pace with a downloadable notebook containing transcript, translation, exercises and answer key. New stories appear only about every two months, and the courses themselves are a significant expense.
The definitive English-language description of Modern Greek, covering the whole verb system, clitics, mood and aspect, and register variation, with copious real examples. It is what you consult when a course book's rule doesn't account for what you're reading. Strictly a reference — organised by structure, not sequenced for study — and priced accordingly. Most learners should start with the same authors' shorter 'Greek: An Essential Grammar' and only graduate to this one.
Built by ILSP (the Institute for Language and Speech Processing) as public-funded courseware, Filoglossia teaches beginner Greek through dialogues with audio, vocabulary and exercises, entirely free with no registration. It is still one of very few complete free beginner courses for Modern Greek. The catch is its age — the material dates from 2001–2009 and the frame-based interface looks and behaves accordingly — but the content itself remains sound.
A teacher working through explicitly level-tagged lesson series (B1 lesson 11 on family and relationships, B2 lesson 4 on the συν- prefix), which makes this one of the few free channels you can follow sequentially at upper-intermediate. Still publishing in August 2026. Uploads are irregular — sometimes months apart — and the presentation is plain, but the level targeting is unusually honest and useful.
Katerina publishes weekly, mixing longer explainers (B2 prepositions in twenty minutes) with short 'don't conjugate this verb wrong again' clips on high-frequency irregulars like λέω and κάθομαι. The targeting is good: she picks the specific mistakes learners repeat rather than covering grammar in textbook order. Free on YouTube, with paid lessons advertised. The shorts-heavy format means the archive is fragmented rather than sequential.
Reveka does slow, clearly enunciated Greek for people starting from zero — short stories, vocabulary challenges, and 'listen to slow Greek' conversations deliberately published without subtitles so you have to work at comprehension. Active through August 2026. It is a small channel with a mix of full videos and shorts and no fixed curriculum, so use it as listening practice alongside a structured course rather than in place of one.
Efi Asvesti teaches adults online with a deliberately low-pressure method — vocabulary-first, minimal homework, writing added only at advanced level — and publishes a free 'slow Greek' podcast that reached around 75 episodes by early 2026, together with free articles and a small library. The free podcast alone is worth subscribing to for graded listening. The classes are paid and pricing is not published, so you have to enquire; it is a single teacher, so availability is limited.
An e-learning platform aimed at children of the Greek diaspora: interactive games, animated videos, quizzes and speech-recognition pronunciation practice, sequenced by age and level and aligned with Greek Ministry of Education material, with optional live classes and parent progress tracking. It is the strongest option if you are raising children with Greek rather than studying it yourself. Subscription-based with a free trial; adult learners will find the framing and pace unsuitable.
The same team's condensed grammar, written for learners rather than linguists: short chapters, plain explanations and the essential paradigms, without the exhaustive coverage that makes the comprehensive volume slow to search. This is the reference to buy alongside whatever course you use, from around A2 onward. It deliberately omits edge cases and gives no exercises, so it complements a course rather than replacing one.
A state-backed portal hosting the Triantafyllidis Dictionary of Standard Modern Greek — the reference monolingual dictionary — together with modern Greek grammars, searchable text corpora, dialect lexicons and teaching material for Greek as a foreign language, including distance-learning courses at A1–B1. Everything is free and ad-free. It is a scholarly site in Greek, laid out for researchers rather than learners, so expect to navigate it rather than be guided through it.
The Centre for the Greek Language runs the state Certificate of Attainment in Modern Greek, the qualification recognised for Greek universities and public-sector posts. The site publishes past exam papers and audio for every level plus a searchable bank of texts graded by level, which is useful for self-assessment even if you never sit the exam. The material is free; only the exam itself costs money, and the site is almost entirely in Greek.
ERT's streaming platform carries its drama series, documentaries, children's programming and archive material at no cost, which makes it the obvious source of long-form native Greek once subtitled learner content stops stretching you. Registration is free. Two caveats: availability of individual titles varies by country, so check what actually plays from where you are, and Greek subtitles are inconsistent across the catalogue — plan on listening without a safety net.
SBS broadcasts news in Greek for Australia's Greek community and publishes it as short daily podcast episodes plus articles — clearly-read, standard Greek in bite-sized items, which makes it far more approachable than a full Greek news broadcast. Completely free with no account, and available in any podcast app. There is no learner scaffolding and a good share of the coverage is Australian domestic news, which may not be what you want to be reading about.
The default place to check a translation, ask why a verb takes the form it does, or get resource recommendations vetted by people who have actually used them, with native speakers answering regularly. Especially handy for the register questions — καθαρεύουσα leftovers, slang, formality — that grammars handle badly. Threads sometimes drift into Ancient Greek and etymology, and reply quality varies with who happens to be around.
A free morphological analyser: give it an inflected form you met in a text and it tells you the dictionary headword and the grammatical analysis — the fastest way out of the common beginner problem of not knowing which word to look up. Useful for reading authentic Greek where endings obscure the stem. It is a single-purpose tool with a spartan, Greek-only interface, and it analyses rather than translates.
Enter a Greek verb and get the full paradigm — tenses, aspects, moods and persons — with an English gloss beside each form, which makes the aorist/imperfective distinction much easier to see than a textbook table does. Free and needs no account. It is a lookup tool only: it will not explain why Greek splits aspect the way it does, so pair it with a grammar when the pattern rather than the form is what's confusing you.
Lexigram's inflectional dictionary covers tens of thousands of lemmas and millions of inflected forms, and will conjugate a verb through tense and mood or decline a noun and adjective for you — exactly the lookup Greek learners need most, given how much of the grammar sits in endings. A synonyms-and-definitions dictionary sits alongside it. The interface is in Greek, aimed largely at Greek schoolchildren, and some sections push you toward an account.
Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, typically $10–15/month with big discounts on annual plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 13 languages and effectively stops around B1, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination.
Covers 14 languages along an explicit CEFR path, and its best feature is the community exchange: you submit short writing or speaking exercises and real native speakers correct them, free of charge, in exchange for you correcting theirs. The free tier is limited to core lessons; Premium unlocks grammar, offline and the full path. A solid Babbel alternative if you specifically want writing practice with human feedback.
A franchise of local producers filming unscripted street interviews, each episode subtitled in the target language and English, which is the closest free thing to hearing how people genuinely speak. All YouTube episodes are free; membership adds transcripts, vocabulary lists and exercises. Real-speed unscripted speech is hard early on — start with the slower 'Super Easy' episodes if you are below B1.
One-on-one video lessons from roughly $5–30/hr depending on the language and the teacher's credentials. It is the single fastest way to get real speaking practice, and the reason most self-study plans stall is that they skip this step. Community tutors are cheap conversation partners; professional teachers are worth it if you want structure, homework and error correction.
Thirty-minute audio lessons force you to produce sentences out loud before you see anything written, which builds unusually good accent and recall. Subscriptions run about $15–21/month (all-access covers 50+ languages), and older courses are often available through public libraries. It is slow and vocabulary-light by design, so pair it with reading — but for commute or walking time it is the best use of otherwise dead hours.
100,000+ tutors across 120+ subjects, with a free replacement if your first tutor is a bad fit. The main structural difference from italki is that Preply pushes weekly lesson subscriptions and takes a large commission from tutors, which some learners consider a reason to prefer italki. Worth comparing side by side for your language — prices, availability and tutor quality differ per market rather than per platform.
Mihalis Eleftheriou records real lessons with a real student and walks you through constructing the language yourself using cognates and logic — Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Swahili are covered. Completely free, no ads, no sign-up, funded by donations. The Spanish course in particular is one of the most recommended free resources anywhere; the trade-off is small vocabulary and no reading or writing practice.
Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.
Mark Pentleton teaches a genuine student while you listen in, across French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese and Gaelic. The podcast seasons are free on any podcast app and are structured as a real curriculum rather than scattered episodes; the Academy sells premium lesson notes, video and bonus audio. Ideal commuting material for beginners through B1, and the Spanish and French series are the strongest.
Lessons build outward from real conversations with colour-coded literal translations and cultural notes, and the catalogue includes endangered and indigenous languages nobody else covers. Retail pricing starts around $10/month, but a very large number of public libraries and universities give patrons free access — check yours before paying. Content depth per language is modest, so it suits travellers and early learners more than people pushing toward B2.
Each course is ~100 short bilingual dialogues with native audio: you passively absorb for months, then start an 'active wave' translating back into the target language. Books run around €30 (e-courses ~€50) across 70+ languages, and the method is a long-standing favourite among polyglots for reaching real reading fluency. Caveats: many courses are only published from French, the humour is dated, and it demands daily discipline with no gamification to carry you.
The 'Complete' books are proper structured courses with dialogues, graded exercises and downloadable audio, and the range covers languages no app touches. Quality varies noticeably by title and author, so check reviews for your specific language before buying rather than trusting the series name. Their graded readers and 'Script Hacking' alphabet guides are also worth knowing about for non-Latin scripts.
You sit in on a recorded lesson with two students and build sentences aloud alongside them, with no writing, homework or memorisation; 19 languages are available. It is remarkably good at making the core grammar of Romance languages click in a few hours. Vocabulary coverage is small, the recordings are old, and the courses after Michel Thomas's death are taught by other teachers with mixed results — treat it as a fast on-ramp, not a course of study.
Over 70 languages, each a step-by-step beginner course written by an experienced teacher, and crucially all the audio is free to download from the companion site even if you find the book secondhand. Slightly more academic and grammar-forward than Teach Yourself, which some learners prefer. Like any book series the individual titles differ in quality; the less common languages are often the only decent course in existence.
You listen to and repeat thousands of native-recorded sentences on a spaced schedule, which builds fluent output patterns without explicit grammar study. It covers 60+ languages and keeps nine minority languages (Catalan, Welsh, Taiwanese, Kurdish and others) permanently free as a preservation effort. It is expensive at roughly $20–40/month, and the repetition is monotonous — most reviewers call it effective but overpriced, so try the 7-day trial first.
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 free tier is genuinely usable (ads plus a limited 'hearts' system); Super removes both for about $96/yr. Its real value is streak-driven consistency for absolute beginners, and the smaller courses are thin machine-assisted content rather than the polished Spanish or French trees. Treat it as a warm-up habit, not a curriculum — nobody reaches conversational fluency on Duolingo alone.
The 'learn with locals' video clips are the distinguishing feature — you hear real people at real speed rather than TTS. Be aware that Memrise moved user-created community courses off the main app in 2024 onto a separate site, which gutted what many long-time users valued most, and the app has leaned hard into AI chat features since. Fine as a phrase-and-vocabulary app for major languages; if you came for the community decks, use Anki instead.
Built-in correction tools let partners fix your messages inline, and the social 'moments' feed gets you corrections from strangers without arranging a call. Free for the core exchange; VIP adds more translations and simultaneous target languages. The persistent caveat is that a fair share of users treat it as a dating app, and exchange partners are unreliable — it works best once you already have some output to correct.
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.
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.
Same idea as HelloTalk but with vetted profiles and a cleaner focus on actual voice and video calls, which makes it noticeably less spammy in practice. Free to use; Pro adds unlimited partner search and extra languages, and the app also sells paid tutors. Both apps live or die on finding one or two committed partners, so expect to message a lot of people before anything sticks.
Unlike most apps it is built around producing speech: you repeat, roleplay and converse with an AI tutor that gives pronunciation and phrasing feedback in real time. Covers Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Italian and Chinese for English speakers, with a 7-day trial then a subscription (roughly $20/month or $99/yr). Good for overcoming the fear of speaking before your first human lesson, but an AI will not push back or drift off-script the way a real conversation partner does.
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.
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.
A streaming service where every show has clickable dual subtitles and saved words become flashcards, covering 15 languages with apps on phone, Roku and TV. It solves the 'what do I watch' problem for languages where Netflix's catalogue is thin. The library is much smaller than a mainstream streamer and it is subscription-only — if you already pay for Netflix, Language Reactor's free tier does most of the same job.
Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.
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.
A detailed staged roadmap for acquiring a language through massive comprehensible input — what to do at each stage, when to start output, how to mine sentences — with a free tracker, starter courses and an active Discord. The roadmap and community are free; vocabulary decks, advanced courses and coaching are paid. It is opinionated to the point of dogma about avoiding early output and translation, so take the framework and ignore the purity rules if they do not fit your goals.
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.
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.
Thousands of public-domain books recorded by volunteers, downloadable as MP3 or M4B with no account. Pairing a LibriVox recording with the matching free Project Gutenberg text gives you a full audiobook-plus-ebook study set for nothing. Two caveats: recordings are volunteer-quality and vary a lot reader to reader, and everything is out of copyright, so the language is often a century old — great for literature, poor for modern slang.
The default place to ask 'is X app worth it' or 'what should I do at B1' and get answers from people who have actually done it, plus per-language subreddits (r/Spanish, r/LearnJapanese, r/French) with far better resource lists. The wiki and FAQ head off most beginner questions. Expect strong ideological camps — comprehensible-input purists versus textbook people — so read a few threads before taking any single answer as settled.
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.
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.