TTMIK's ten-level curriculum is the most widely recommended structured path in Korean self-study, taught conversationally by native speakers with free audio lessons and paid PDFs, workbooks and printed books. The lessons are friendly and short, which makes them easy to keep up with, and the grammar sequencing is genuinely well thought out. The site has moved most content behind course subscriptions over the years, so less is free than long-time learners remember, and the early levels are light on practice — pair them with a workbook or a tutor.
Each lesson centres on a short native dialogue followed by a line-by-line breakdown, with PDF transcripts, vocabulary lists and cultural notes on paid plans. The volume means there is always something at your level, and the absolute-beginner series is good. The usual Innovative Language caveats apply: relentless discount emails, several confusing subscription tiers, uneven quality across older series, and a free tier that shrinks sharply after the trial.
The listening series TTMIK is best known for: two hosts chat naturally in Korean about a single topic for a few minutes, with no English at all. It is the standard bridge between graded lessons and real conversation. Free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and SoundCloud; transcripts and translations are sold separately by TTMIK. There is no beginner ramp — if you cannot follow at natural speed yet, start with TTMIK's slower series first.
Unit 0 teaches Hangul and the units after it run all the way to advanced grammar, with thousands of example sentences, audio recordings and vocabulary lists — all free, with no account required. The explanations are unusually thorough and are the go-to reference when TTMIK's short lessons leave you unsatisfied. The site design is dated, the lessons are walls of text with no gamification, and the sheer length means you need real discipline to work through it.
Billy Go has been publishing for over a decade and his beginner and intermediate playlists work as an actual sequential course rather than a pile of one-off videos. He is clear about pronunciation rules and sound changes, which most channels gloss over. All free on YouTube; he sells the Korean Made Simple books separately. Presentation is plain talking-head — no production polish, just a lot of accurate teaching.
Darakwon's series is the book almost every serious learner and Korean teacher ends up owning, organised grammar point by grammar point with real dialogues, illustrations and — crucially — side-by-side comparisons of patterns that mean almost the same thing. The Advanced volume covers everything on the TOPIK level 5–6 syllabus. It is a reference and workbook, not a course: there is no story, no listening programme, and you need something else to supply vocabulary and speaking practice.
Run by the King Sejong Institute Foundation, this is a full state-funded curriculum with structured online courses, downloadable Sejong Korean textbooks, and practice tools, free after registration. Because it is the official course used by King Sejong Institutes worldwide, it lines up with TOPIK and with classroom study abroad. The platform is clunky, sign-up can be fiddly, and the production values are institutional rather than slick — but the content quality and the price are unbeatable.
Comprehensible-input teaching applied to Korean: the speaker uses only Korean, supported by whiteboard sketches, props and repetition, starting from genuine zero. It builds listening intuition rather than explicit grammar knowledge, which is exactly what most textbook-taught learners are missing. Free on YouTube. The Korean CI catalogue is much smaller than Spanish or Japanese, so you will run out of level-appropriate material faster.
Simplified but natural Korean with on-screen Korean subtitles, which trains your reading and listening together and weans you off English translation. Good middle ground between beginner comprehensible input and full-speed native content. Free on YouTube, with no structured syllabus — pick episodes by topic.
One of the longest-running Korean teaching channels, with a full free beginner course and companion apps in several interface languages. Its distinguishing strength is drilling pronunciation and the sound-change rules explicitly, which most beginner courses skip. The style is old-school and slow-paced, and it thins out well before advanced material.
Strong on the conversational and cultural side — how people actually greet, joke and speak informally — rather than systematic grammar. Good for keeping motivation up and for picking up the expressions that make you sound less like a textbook. Free on YouTube, with paid courses sold separately. Do not use it as your grammar backbone; it is a supplement.
Vicky teaches like a classroom instructor — one point per video, worked examples, and repeated drilling — which suits people who want structure without buying a course. Coverage runs from Hangul into solid intermediate grammar. Free on YouTube. Videos are individually good but the playlists are less rigorously sequenced than GO! Billy Korean's.
Didi speaks entirely in Korean about substantive topics, slightly slower than native conversation but without the artificial simplification of beginner material — the right difficulty for the long intermediate plateau. Available as both video and podcast audio, free. There is no English support at all, so it only works once you can follow connected Korean speech.
Jonson Lee and guests discuss culture, identity and language, switching between Korean and English, with many episodes accompanied by free transcripts and translations on the website — that transcript support is what makes it usable as study material rather than just listening. Free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the site. The bilingual format means less pure Korean input per hour than an all-Korean podcast.
KBS's international service publishes free lesson series with audio, transcripts and vocabulary, including courses hung off Korean drama scenes, plus versions localised into many languages. Free with no account. The site navigation is dated and some series are archived rather than maintained, but the audio quality and the professional scripting are better than most free material.
Yeoni speaks slowly and simply in Korean about everyday subjects, in episodes short enough to relisten two or three times — which is how listening at this level actually improves. It sits at the level right after TTMIK's Iyagi and before anything made for natives. The catalogue is small and publishing is irregular, so treat it as a supplement rather than a backbone. Free, with no transcripts in the feed itself.
The long-running independent hub for TOPIK preparation, with free articles on exam structure and scoring, organised past papers, frequency vocabulary lists and level-by-level study advice; full mock tests and prep courses are paid. If you are taking TOPIK for a visa, university place or job, start here rather than on the official site. It is exam-focused by design, so it teaches you to pass a test rather than to hold a conversation.
Sol speaks entirely in Korean about daily life, culture and language, pitched just below native conversational speed rather than slowed to a crawl. That makes it a genuine bridge: harder than beginner learner podcasts, easier than any of the broadcast shows here, which is precisely the gap most Korean learners stall in. Free in the feed; transcripts and study material are paid. Not suitable as a first listening resource.
Designed specifically for solo study, with exercises, answer keys and free companion audio, at paperback prices well below the university textbook series. It pairs naturally with Billy's free YouTube lessons. It is lighter on volume and less rigorous than the university course books, so it works as a first pass rather than the whole journey.
The curriculum from Yonsei University's Korean Language Institute, covering levels 1 through 6 with textbooks, workbooks and audio, and mapping cleanly onto TOPIK levels. If you are heading toward university study or a language programme in Korea, this or the Sogang and Seoul National equivalents are what you will be handed. It is dense, classroom-oriented and assumes an instructor — self-studying it without a tutor is hard going.
Aimed at learners whose grammar is fine but who still sound like a textbook — it covers intonation, contractions, discourse markers and the register choices natives make without thinking. That is a genuinely underserved niche in Korean learning material. Free on YouTube, and not useful until you are past the beginner stage.
Min records conversational episodes in Korean with the difficulty labelled, so you can start at the level you can actually follow and climb. Having two speakers rather than a monologue matters — you hear the back-channelling and question forms that solo podcasts never produce. It is a small independent show, so the archive is modest and release timing varies. Free, no transcripts, and the audio is home-recorded rather than studio quality.
Korean–English and Korean–Korean entries with thousands of real example sentences pulled from news and books, native audio, conjugation info and Hanja. The mobile app is excellent and works offline for core entries. Free. The interface is Korean-first and the volume of results is overwhelming at first — expect to learn how to read the entry layout before it becomes fast.
Trained on Korean-heavy data, so it handles honorific levels, particles and everyday idiom better than Google Translate, and it does image, voice and website translation. Free on web and mobile. It is a crutch, not a study tool: use it to unstick yourself on a sentence you have already tried to parse, and never to produce Korean you are about to send to a person.
The closest thing Korean has to Yomitan: click any word in an imported ebook, article or subtitle file to get definitions, grammar-in-context, Hanja and one-click Anki cards, while it tracks which words you know and recommends content by how much of it you would understand. Browser extension plus Android and iOS apps. Subscription-based with a 7-day free trial and no credit card up front. It assumes you already have grammar basics — it makes native material accessible, it does not teach you the language.
Pulls articles from outlets such as Dong-A, Chosun and VOA Korean and wraps them in a reader with per-word dictionary lookup, adjustable audio, flashcards and level filtering — Korean's nearest answer to NHK News Web Easy, though it grades existing articles rather than rewriting them. Free with ads and an optional paid upgrade. Available on Android and iOS. News vocabulary is narrow, so it complements rather than replaces conversational study.
Ryan Estrada's famous free comic maps each Hangul letter to a picture that looks like its sound, and most people really can sound out Korean words by the end of it. It is the fastest possible on-ramp and costs nothing. It teaches shapes and sounds only — it will not give you correct pronunciation of the trickier consonants or any of the sound-change rules, so follow it with a proper Hangul course.
The government body that runs TOPIK publishes previous exam papers, answer keys and listening audio for free — the single most accurate way to gauge your level and to see exactly what the test asks. Registration and test dates are handled here too. The site is Korean-first and awkward to navigate, so most learners find the papers faster through TOPIK Guide.
Free official dictionary with definitions graded by learner level, grammar and usage notes on each entry, conjugation tables, and translations into a dozen languages. Because it is designed for learners rather than natives, definitions are simpler and the example sentences are chosen to teach. If you later want the full monolingual reference used by native speakers, the same institute runs the Standard Korean Language Dictionary at stdict.korean.go.kr.
The official monolingual dictionary of the National Institute of Korean Language — the final word on spelling, meaning, Hanja origin and standard usage. Switching to it is the point where you start defining Korean words in Korean, which sharpens nuance in a way bilingual entries cannot. Entirely in Korean with no learner scaffolding, so it is genuinely unusable below upper-intermediate.
Korean conjugation has irregular stems and multiple politeness levels that trip up every beginner; this free tool shows the full table at once and explains which irregular rule applied. It handles both 하다-type and irregular verbs correctly. It is a reference, not a drill — you still have to practise producing the forms yourself.
The public broadcaster's flagship international-news hour: correspondents and academics are brought on to explain one foreign story at a time, so each segment stays on a single subject long enough for context to carry you. Because you often already know the story from news in your own language, it is one of the more guessable native listens. It is still real broadcast Korean at full speed, thick with Sino-Korean political vocabulary and honorific interview register, and there are no transcripts.
Every episode adapts one contemporary Korean short story into a radio production with actors, narration and sound design. For a learner this is literary Korean delivered by professional voices — slower and more deliberate than news, but with the vocabulary and sentence length of written fiction, plus dialogue in several registers. Hard: no transcripts, and the prose is genuinely literary. Best paired with reading the original story where you can find it. Nearly 500 episodes in the feed.
KBS reads a full-length Korean novel across a month of short weekday episodes, one chapter-sized chunk at a time. Serialisation is what makes it work as study material: characters, setting and vocabulary carry over from day to day, so each instalment is easier than the last, and fifteen minutes a day is sustainable. The narration is clear and unhurried. It is still literary Korean without transcripts, so expect to lose the thread occasionally and keep going.
Park Myung-soo has hosted this KBS morning show for over a decade: listener stories, phone-ins, guests and a lot of interruption. It is the register learner material never covers — 반말 and 존댓말 switching mid-sentence, slang, ad-libs — and it is a good way to hear how Koreans actually joke rather than how they present. Correspondingly it is one of the hardest things you can put in your ears: fast, overlapping, culturally loaded, no transcripts. Save it for when news is already comfortable.
SBS posts its morning news programme as individual segments, so instead of a two-hour block you get a handful of five-to-fifteen minute pieces on the day's stories, each with a reporter or expert walking through one topic. Segment-sized episodes make it far more practical for daily listening than a full show, and the same headlines recur across the week. Native broadcast pace, heavy on politics and economics, no transcripts.
The audio of SBS's main midday bulletin, published daily. Anchor-read Korean is the clearest formal speech there is — measured, fully articulated, and using the same fixed news constructions every day, which is exactly why the pattern becomes learnable through repetition. Set against that, a headline bulletin jumps topic every ninety seconds, so there is no context to carry you and the Sino-Korean density is high. Best used alongside reading the same day's SBS headlines.
Son Suk-hee is the interviewer most Koreans picture when they think of a hard news interview, and this daily MBC Standard FM programme is him doing exactly that — long, pressing, one guest at a time. The interview format is unusually good listening practice because the question always frames what follows, and Son enunciates carefully even when pushing. Guests do not: expect unscripted, hedged, sometimes evasive answers at full speed, with no transcripts.
A weekday MBC Standard FM programme in which scientists come on to explain a topic to a presenter who asks the obvious questions on the listener's behalf. That built-in explain-it-simply loop makes technical Korean much more followable than the subject matter suggests, and science vocabulary is heavily Sino-Korean, so it often maps onto words you already half-recognise. Native speed and unscripted, with no transcripts, so still an upper-intermediate listen.
A calm weekly programme built around one book at a time: passages read aloud, a guest to discuss them, listener letters about reading. The reading segments are the draw — an actress reading prose slowly and deliberately is the closest thing Korean radio offers to a graded audiobook — while the discussion around them is ordinary native conversation. No transcripts, and the vocabulary is literary, so it suits someone already reading Korean books rather than a first native listen.
Short YTN Radio segments that take a word or concept currently in the news and explain what it actually means. For a learner this is close to ideal: the episode's whole purpose is defining vocabulary, the pieces run only a few minutes, and the words chosen are exactly the ones blocking you in news bulletins. Delivery is native-speed radio and there are no transcripts, but the explanatory format does a lot of the work.
Song Eun-i and Kim Sook take listener dilemmas, from trivial to genuinely awkward, and solve them badly on purpose. It has been running since 2016 with well over 500 episodes and is the show Koreans actually name when asked about podcasts, which makes it a real window into contemporary humour and speech. Nothing about it is adapted for learners: two comedians talking over each other in casual 반말 with constant reference to Korean celebrity culture. Advanced only, and no transcripts.
A weekday economics programme split into podcast-sized segments, each with a specialist talking through one story — property prices, exchange rates, a company's results. Business Korean is a self-contained vocabulary set that recurs constantly, so a few weeks of this pays off quickly if that is the register you need. Unscripted expert speech at full speed with numbers flying past, and no transcripts.
A weekly programme in which critics and journalists pick apart how the Korean press handled the week's stories. It is a step sideways from the news itself into commentary about it, which means opinion, disagreement and the connectives of argument rather than headline reading. Genuinely difficult: several speakers, unscripted, assuming you already know the stories being critiqued, no transcripts.
The most reliable free place to get a specific Korean question answered — nuance between two endings, whether a sentence you wrote sounds natural, which textbook to pick next. The wiki and pinned resource threads are a good sanity check on any study plan. Answers are crowd-sourced, so quality varies and confidently wrong replies do appear; weigh explanations that cite a source over ones that do not.
Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, with the monthly price falling steeply on longer plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 14 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.
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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.
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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.
A reading app built around finishing complete books: you pick a story at your level, tap a word or reveal a sentence's English translation when you get stuck, and it saves the words you looked up. There is one complete free book in every language and you can read a free chapter on the website without installing anything; the rest of the 1,100-book library is paid. The library is uneven: Ukrainian, Indonesian and French have dozens of stories, while Icelandic, Estonian and several Balkan languages have one or two. It is not the same as Storyglot's European Portuguese readers (storyglot.com), which are a separate project with the same name.
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 one-to-one partner matching rather than a social feed, which makes it noticeably less spammy in practice. Texting partners is free; calling them in the app is part of the paid Pro tier, 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.