The Grammar-Translation Method

Nicholas Brown's course has been the self-teacher's standby for decades because the explanations are unusually clear and jargon-free, with generous examples and revision exercises. It's cheap and covers a lot of ground. The catch is that there is no audio in the book, the vocabulary lists are long, and the presentation is austere — pair it with a listening resource, and don't start here if you need encouragement to keep going.

Martin Durrell's Hammer is what university German departments use: exhaustive, precise, with attested examples and explicit notes on register and regional variation. It answers the edge cases every learner grammar waves away. It is a reference, not a course — dense, expensive, and useless for practice, so buy it only once you're past B1 and the shallow explanations have started failing you.

Raymond Murphy's blue book has taught grammar to tens of millions of learners with a simple format — explanation and examples on the left page, exercises on the right — covering everything an intermediate learner needs, with an answer key that makes it genuinely self-study. The fifth edition adds an interactive ebook with audio. Companion volumes exist for elementary (red) and advanced (green) levels, so buy the one that matches you; and it is a practice book, not a course, with nothing on listening, speaking or vocabulary building.

CLE International's series is what most serious French courses actually use, split into débutant (A1), intermédiaire (A2/B1), avancé (B1/B2) and perfectionnement (B2/C2) volumes. The rigid left-explains/right-drills layout makes it genuinely usable for self-study, and answer keys are sold separately (buy them). Entirely in French, so a true beginner may want a bilingual grammar alongside the A1 volume.

Two-way Gaelic–English with inflection, gender, and Dwelly's historical dictionary folded in. Gaelic initial mutations mean a word rarely appears in text in its dictionary form; this handles that, which is the whole reason it is the one learners use.

Icelandic nouns have four cases in two numbers with definite and indefinite forms, and verbs are worse. BÍN gives you the complete table for any word instantly. It is the single most-used tool among Icelandic learners for a reason: you will look things up here several times a day for years.

Defined in Galician, from the body that sets the standard. Use it to settle what is correct Galician rather than what is a Castilian calque, which is the commonest error for anyone who speaks Spanish first — and almost every Galician speaker does.

Elhuyar's dictionaries are what Basque speakers and translators actually use, with example sentences and technical vocabulary. Free online, and covering the direction most learners need most: into Basque, where the choice between near-synonyms is where you go wrong.

The ZRC SAZU portal searching the standard dictionary, the orthography, dialect dictionaries and terminology banks together, with full inflection. Slovene's dual and its six cases mean the paradigm tables are what you actually came for.

The essential Zulu tool. Zulu builds words with concord prefixes, so a word you meet in a sentence often does not appear in a dictionary in that form — this one analyses the prefixes and finds the stem anyway. Without that, looking anything up is guesswork.

Publicly funded and free: a beginners' course with video, a full dictionary with audio in several dialects, grammar guides, and an archive of Gaelic television. It is the single place to start and the place you keep coming back to. Nothing here is trying to sell you anything.

Structured courses at several levels, a complete grammar reference, dictionaries and a community forum — all free and all volunteer-built. It has been the default starting point for Esperanto learners for two decades. Its advantage over an app is depth: when the grammar surprises you, the explanation is one click away rather than absent.

Three levels of structured lessons with audio, exercises and grammar tables, plus a bilingual dictionary, available in a dozen interface languages and entirely free. It came out of an EU language project, which is why it exists at all — Slovak has very little commercial learner material.

From the Institute of the Estonian Language: definitions, translations into a dozen languages, recorded pronunciation, and the complete declension for any word. There is a learner mode that hides the scholarly apparatus. In a fourteen-case language you will open this constantly.

The single most useful Irish site there is: Ó Dónaill's dictionary, complete grammatical inflection for every word, and recordings of each headword by speakers from Ulster, Connacht and Munster. Those three recordings matter more in Irish than in most languages — the dialects differ enough that learners routinely fail to recognise a word they know. Free, from Foras na Gaeilge.

Over 400,000 entries from the University of Latvia, with full declension and conjugation for each. Latvian has seven cases, two genders and six noun declensions, so the tables are the point — a word you meet in text will rarely be in the form the dictionary lists.

'Le Bescherelle' is the reference French natives themselves reach for on conjugation, organised by verb model so you can classify any verb you meet. The books are cheap and the brand now covers orthography and grammar too. The website has some free exercises but the value is in the printed volume; as a pure reference it teaches nothing on its own.

With around 1.6 million subscribers, this is the channel most beginners land on, and it deserves the reach: Ana explains one grammar point or vocabulary set per video, in English early on and increasingly in Mexican Spanish later. Uploads have slowed to roughly one every month or two, but the back catalogue is a complete beginner grammar course in itself. Best used as targeted explanation when something confuses you, not as a curriculum to work through in order.

The reference work for the language, describing spoken Hong Kong Cantonese systematically: classifiers, aspect markers, the sentence-final particles that carry so much of the meaning, comparative and relative structures, and code-mixing with English, all with jyutping and translations. If you have ever wondered why a particle changes the whole tone of a sentence, the answer is in here. It is a linguist's description with no exercises and no audio, and it costs reference-book money — buy it when courses stop answering your questions.

Definitions in Portuguese with synonyms, antonyms, example sentences, full conjugation tables and etymology, using Brazilian spelling throughout. Free with no account. Being monolingual it is a step up from a translation dictionary, and worth switching to as soon as you can read a simple definition — looking a word up in Portuguese is itself practice. Ad-supported.

The normative dictionary of Catalan — what the language academy says a word means and how it inflects. Monolingual, so it is a step up from a bilingual dictionary and worth making that step early: Catalan's closeness to Spanish and French makes a monolingual definition unusually easy to parse.

A practical bilingual companion to the Academy's monolingual dictionary — faster when you are reading and want a gloss rather than a definition.

The Institute of the Lithuanian Language's portal, gathering the standard dictionaries, term banks and grammatical databases in one search. Authoritative, institutional and not aimed at learners — but it is where the answer is when a form makes no sense.

The academy that created Euskara Batua, the unified standard, and publishes the dictionary and grammar that define it. Consult it when you need to know what is correct rather than what is common. Batua is a twentieth-century construction and the dialects it standardises are still spoken, which this site is honest about.

Purpose-built for people writing Irish rather than reading it, with generous example sentences showing which of several translations you actually want. Complements Teanglann, which is stronger going the other way. Also free from Foras na Gaeilge.

Ciara makes videos in Irish about Irish: grammar points, idioms, conversations with other speakers, and everyday vlogs. Because the explanations are themselves in Irish, this is where a learner crosses from studying the language to using it. Fifty thousand subscribers is remarkable for Irish and says something about the appetite.

Definitions in Croatian, etymology, and — the part you will actually use daily — the complete declension or conjugation table for any headword. In a language with seven cases and two verb aspects, that table is the resource.

Daniel Clarke's site explains Hungarian grammar for English speakers as an interlocking system — vowel harmony, the case suffixes, possession, definite versus indefinite conjugation — rather than as a list of rules to memorise, which is exactly what most learners need when Hungarian first looks impossible. It also covers the alphabet and pronunciation, so it works from day one. Completely free with no account. It is a reference, not a course: no exercises, no audio programme, and you will need input material alongside it.

Structured lessons taking Basque's ergative case and verb agreement seriously rather than skipping them, which most introductory material does because they are genuinely strange. Basque is a language isolate — nothing transfers from anything — so an explained course beats a phrasebook by more than usual here.

Maintained by the Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences, this is the authority Czechs themselves consult. Search any word to get its complete declension or conjugation table, and the accompanying articles settle spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and word-formation questions. For a language whose difficulty is concentrated in case endings, having the full paradigm one search away is the highest-value free tool there is. Everything is in Czech, and the explanatory articles assume you already read Czech comfortably.

A hundred lessons each taking one structure — possession, "would", objects that are people — and building sentences with it. Genuinely grammatical rather than phrasebook, which is rare for Gujarati and is what makes the language generative rather than memorised.

A DITALS-certified teacher who has been publishing since 2013 and now has one of the largest Italian-learning channels. The strength is her diction: she speaks slowly and precisely in Italian with subtitles, so the vlogs double as listening practice while the lesson videos untangle things like ci/ne and the congiuntivo. Best for A2–B1 learners who want structured grammar without leaving Italian. YouTube is free; her courses and ebooks are paid.

The most systematic free Marathi course, working through the tense system, cases and everyday conversation, with live sessions. Marathi has three genders and an ergative past tense that surprises Hindi speakers — a channel that teaches grammar rather than phrases is what you need here.

Chicago's aggregator searches Lewis & Short, Elementary Lewis, DuCange and several modern dictionaries simultaneously, with frequency data and collocations alongside. The frequency figures are quietly the most useful part: they tell you whether a word is worth learning or a hapax you will never meet again.

An open-source dictionary project that does what older Igbo references do not: marks tone properly, records audio, and flags dialectal variants instead of pretending Standard Igbo is universal. Igbo is tonal and diacritics are routinely dropped online, so a reference that keeps them is the foundation everything else sits on.

Bidirectional lookup with a large open dataset behind it, and quick enough to use while reading. Malayalam agglutinates heavily, so a word in a text often carries three suffixes — expect to strip them yourself before the dictionary recognises the stem.

The Generalitat's language consultation service: a combined search across dictionaries, grammars and a large bank of resolved usage questions. When you are unsure whether a construction is correct Catalan or a Spanish calque — the commonest error for anyone who learned Spanish first — this is where the answer is.

Tufts's classics library, where every word of every text is linked to a morphological analysis and a dictionary. For reading unadapted Latin this is the difference between fifteen minutes a sentence and two — you look words up without losing the thread. The interface is twenty years old and it does not matter.

The PIV is Esperanto's reference dictionary, defining every word in Esperanto rather than translating it. That monolingual habit is worth forming early in a language this regular: once you can read a definition, you can look up anything without a bilingual crutch. Dense and scholarly.

Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka's reference portal, searching the Kamus Dewan and dozens of specialist glossaries at once. It is the authority on standard Malay, which means it is exactly right for writing and formal reading and no help at all with how anyone talks.

Every entry gives the word in Urdu, Devanagari and roman script with an English gloss, pronunciation audio, and — the part nothing else has — couplets showing the word in real literary use. That triple-script display solves a specific problem: most learners can say more Urdu than they can read, and this lets you look a word up from whichever form you met it in.

Magdalena Petrović Jelić's school covers Serbian from the alphabets up through the case system, with courses, a blog full of free grammar articles, and live classes. Serbian's seven cases are where self-teaching collapses, and the free written explanations here are better than most textbooks. Both Cyrillic and Latin script are taught, which is not optional in Serbian.

The Ľudovít Štúr Institute's portal queries the standard monolingual dictionaries, the orthographic rules and the historical dictionaries together. It is the authority on what is correct Slovak, which matters in a language whose standard is closely codified.

Explains the language on its own terms — the copula, the real function of は versus が, plain form before polite form — instead of forcing it into English grammar categories. Completely free online, and available as a cheap ebook or app. It is dense and dry, uses casual forms early (which surprises people used to textbooks), and the last update was years ago, but as a grammar reference it has aged well.

Free blog and grammar reference from the team behind WaniKani, covering everything from particle nuance to honest reviews of other learning resources. Its resource-review database is genuinely useful when you are deciding what to buy. It is reference reading rather than a curriculum, so it works best alongside a structured course.

Inge's site is the reference English speakers actually use for Finnish grammar: consonant gradation, all six verb types, the case system and endless vocabulary lists, each explained patiently with examples. The interactive exercises that used to sit behind a points system are now free for everyone. It is a reference rather than a curriculum, so you need a course or teacher to tell you what order to learn things in.

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.

This is where the rules actually come from: spelling conventions for writing without niqqud, decisions on new terminology, grammar explanations and a searchable archive of language questions answered by the Academy's linguists. Everything is free and there is a steady stream of short, readable articles on why a word is the way it is. The whole site is in Hebrew and pitched at educated native speakers, so it only becomes usable at a solid B2 — but at that point it is the best free Hebrew resource on the internet.