Public-domain US government language courses — the Peace Corps Bangla materials — as PDFs with the original tapes. The pedagogy is 1970s drill-and-substitute and the vocabulary shows its age, but the structure is thorough and the audio is by native speakers, which is more than most free Bengali material offers. Best used as a spine alongside something modern, not on its own.
Shusmita Shyama teaches Bengali to English speakers in ordered playlists: the alphabet and its pronunciation first, then numbered speaking lessons built around everyday situations. It is the closest thing Bengali has to a flagship learner channel, and the sequencing means you can treat it as a course rather than a pile of videos. Small channel, so uploads are irregular.
A teacher-run channel working through the Bengali alphabet in parts and then into verbs, with a side series reading Bengali from Marathi comics — which is more useful than it sounds for anyone who already reads another Indic script. Explanations are in English. Fewer than sixty videos, so it is a supplement rather than a curriculum.
Two hundred-plus lessons following the traditional bornoporichoy primer — letter formation, spelling rules, reading aloud — conducted entirely in Bengali for students in Indian schools. That makes it hard as a first resource and excellent as a second one: it is real classroom Bengali at learner pace, with the script drilled properly. Use it once you can read the alphabet.
Tagore, Bankim Chandra, Sarat Chandra and the rest of the Bengali canon, transcribed and openly licensed. This is where extensive reading in Bengali becomes free rather than expensive — but it is nineteenth and early twentieth century prose, so the vocabulary and sentence length are demanding and some of it is deliberately archaic. Read modern journalism first.
Greetings, pronouns and basic conversation taught for English speakers, in standard Bengali and in Sylheti side by side. That pairing is the point: most British Bangladeshis speak Sylheti at home, and standard-Bengali courses leave them stranded. Twelve videos and a few hundred subscribers, so treat it as a starting point on a gap nobody else covers rather than a course.
Ling is a gamified course app whose selling point is breadth — it covers languages the big apps skip, and Bengali is one of them, script included. Expect vocabulary, short dialogues and writing practice rather than deep grammar. The free tier is thin and the subscription is the real product; worth it mainly because the alternatives for structured beginner Bengali are so few.
Bidirectional English–Bangla lookup with example sentences, plus grammar notes and appendices. It is aimed at Bengali speakers learning English, which makes it unusually good in the direction learners of Bengali need least — but the Bangla-to-English side is quick and the coverage of common words is better than the academic dictionaries. The interface is dated and ad-supported.
Consonants, vowels, the vowel diacritics and the conjunct clusters, in tables you can print. Bengali romanisation is inconsistent across courses, so an hour here before you start any of them saves relearning words you first met spelled three different ways. It is static reference, not practice — pair it with handwriting.
The trick with Wikipedia as a learning tool is to read articles on subjects you know well in your own language, so context carries you through unfamiliar vocabulary. The Bengali edition is large enough that this works for most general topics. Register is formal and somewhat Sanskritised — good for reading, misleading as a model for speech.
A self-publishing platform with a very large Bengali library — short stories, serialised novels, poetry — in modern, plain, conversational prose. That register is the gap between a textbook and Tagore, and almost nothing else fills it. Quality varies enormously because anyone can publish; sort by popularity and abandon anything that bores you.
The Asiatic Society of Bangladesh's encyclopedia, published in parallel Bengali and English editions. The parallel structure is the useful part — read an entry in Bengali, check yourself against the English one. It is reference material about Bengal specifically, so it is where you learn the cultural and historical vocabulary that news articles assume you already have.
BBC's Bengali service writes in careful standard Bengali and its video reports are subtitled in Bengali, which makes it the gentlest authentic news for a learner — the register is deliberately neutral rather than literary. Read the article first and watch the report second and you will follow far more than you expect at B1. Bangladesh-focused, with regular India coverage.
The highest-circulation Bengali daily, and the natural next step after BBC Bangla: longer pieces, more idiom, less accommodation for a non-native reader. Its YouTube channel runs audio news bulletins, which are useful listening precisely because they are read at native speed. Expect a lot of Bangladeshi political vocabulary before you expect general fluency.
Hours a day of unmodified broadcast Bengali — bulletins, live talk shows, street reporting. There is no concession to a learner anywhere in it, which is exactly its value once subtitled learner content stops stretching you. Start with the fixed-format bulletins, where the structure carries you, before the talk shows, where three people interrupt each other.
Radio Mirchi's Bengali audio-story channel, 3.2 million subscribers and posting several times a day, best known for the Sunday Suspense adaptations of detective and horror fiction. Narrative audio sits in the register between the news bulletins and the literature on this list — full sentences, dialogue, and a plot to carry you when the vocabulary runs out — and almost nothing else offers it free at this volume. The speech is West Bengal's, and there are no subtitles or transcripts of any kind.
The largest-circulation Bengali newspaper in India, with the whole Kolkata and West Bengal news cycle that the Dhaka press does not carry. Reading it alongside Prothom Alo is the cheapest way to feel the difference between the two standards, which is mostly vocabulary and idiom rather than grammar and is very hard to learn from a course. Articles render without an account, though a premium tier is pushed hard and some pieces sit behind it.
Because The Daily Star publishes in both languages, you can often find the same story in English and Bengali and read them against each other — the cheapest parallel-text practice available for this language, and it costs nothing to set up. Coverage is national news and business.
A Kolkata streaming service carrying Bengali cinema and its own web series, from the Rituparno Ghosh back catalogue to Feluda and Eken Babu detective serials, with English subtitles on most of it. Until this the only moving pictures in Bengali on this list were news, and drama gives you conversational Bengali between people who are not addressing a camera. It is a paid subscription with no free tier worth the name, and the catalogue is overwhelmingly West Bengal rather than Bangladeshi.
DW's Bengali service covers Europe and global affairs for a South Asian audience, with video and long-form text. Useful mainly as a second news source: the subject matter differs from the Dhaka-centric dailies, so the vocabulary you pick up is different too. Written for adults, not for learners.
SBS produces Bengali news and features for Australia's Bangladeshi community, published as a daily podcast. Episodes are short and clearly spoken, and the mix of Australian and South Asian subject matter gives you vocabulary the Dhaka press will not. One of the few Bengali podcasts with a stable RSS feed rather than a YouTube-only presence.
News, culture and entertainment from one of Bangladesh's long-running TV channels. Less formal than Prothom Alo and heavier on arts and television coverage, which makes it a good source of the conversational register that political reporting never uses. No learner support of any kind.
The free Bengali typing tool nearly everyone in Bangladesh uses, with a phonetic mode that maps romanised input to Bengali script as you type. This matters more than it sounds: until you can type Bengali you cannot look words up, message anyone, or make flashcards, and the fixed keyboard layouts take weeks to learn. Windows desktop app; on phones the equivalent is the Gboard Bengali phonetic layout.
Sailendra Biswas's Samsad is the reference Bengali–English dictionary, digitised by the University of Chicago's Digital South Asia Library. Search in Bengali script or transliteration. It is a scholarly dictionary rather than a phrasebook, so definitions are precise and occasionally literary — for everyday usage a learner dictionary will feel friendlier, but nothing else has this coverage for free.
The main English-language forum for Bengali, and the practical place to ask the questions this language generates constantly: whether a word is used in Dhaka or Kolkata, why a spelling differs between sources, how a conjunct is written by hand. Native speakers from both Bangladesh and West Bengal answer, which is exactly the mix a learner needs and exactly what a single course cannot give you. It is a general Bengali community rather than a learners' one, so search before posting.
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.