🇮🇶 The best media for learning Kurdish

Rûdaw is the largest Kurdish news organisation and publishes separate Kurmanji and Sorani editions of the same newsroom. Reading the two against each other is the clearest possible demonstration of how far apart the varieties are — the same story, two scripts, substantially different words.

Rûdaw's Sorani edition, covering Iraqi Kurdistan most closely. Sorani has grammatical features Kurmanji lacks entirely, including definite marking on the noun, so this is not simply the other edition in a different alphabet.

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.

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.

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.