🇵🇭 The best websites for learning Filipino

A free blog that explains the hard parts of Tagalog properly — verb focus and affixes, the ang/ng distinction, ligatures, aspect — at more length and with better examples than most video lessons manage. It is a useful second opinion when one explanation has not clicked. The accompanying podcast stopped after ten episodes in 2020 and new articles are infrequent, so treat the site as a reference archive.

A self-study course sold for a single lifetime fee instead of a subscription, built around recorded conversations in the Filipino people actually speak rather than formal textbook Tagalog. It is one of the few complete paid alternatives to FilipinoPod101. Most of the enthusiastic reviews online come from sites affiliated with the product, and free preview material is limited, so work through the samples before paying.

This is the hub of the Tagalog learning world: a dictionary of roughly 85,000 words with 66,000 native audio clips and 20,000 example sentences showing syllable stress and word-by-word breakdowns, alongside a text reader with click lookups, a daily-updated library of YouTube videos with transcripts, spaced-repetition decks including the well-known 2k frequency deck, and an active learner forum. If you use one Tagalog site, use this one. Much is free with an account, but the deepest dictionary and reader features sit behind a subscription, and the interface is dense rather than elegant.

One of the oldest Tagalog sites still standing, with short explanations of words, phrases, pronunciation and grammar points alongside pages on Filipino food, music, literature and idioms. Its stated aim is helping foreigners talk to ordinary Filipinos, so it covers the Taglish and slang that formal courses skip. It is a browsable reference rather than a course — there is no sequencing, and some pages have not been touched in years.

Worth knowing what this is NOT: everyday Filipino is heavily code-switched with English, and Wikipedia deliberately is not. You will meet coined Tagalog terms nobody says aloud. That makes it excellent reading practice and a bad model for conversation — the same gap the news channels show.

A free Filipino-to-Filipino dictionary, which is the tool you want once English glosses stop being precise enough and you need to know what a word means in its own language. Working monolingually is also the fastest way to stop translating in your head. Because everything is defined in Filipino it is unusable below roughly B1, and coverage of slang and regional words is thinner than Tagalog.com's bilingual data.

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.