Shadowing

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 hundred lessons on vocabulary, grammar and — unavoidably — the three click consonants, which are the first thing that stops an outsider and the thing most written material cannot teach. A hundred videos of a native speaker making them slowly is the resource.

The largest spoken-Latin channel there is, covering reconstructed Roman pronunciation, readings, and conversation. Ranieri is the reference for how classical Latin actually sounded, which matters more than it seems — most people's internal Latin voice is their own language's phonology wearing a toga. Note the channel now splits its time with Ancient Greek.

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.

Built by the Rekhta Foundation, this walks through the Urdu alphabet and Nastaliq letterforms in sequence, with audio and writing practice, and then into words and sentences. It is the single most useful free resource for the thing that stops most learners: Urdu in Nastaliq looks nothing like the isolated letters in a chart. Script and basic vocabulary only — you will need something else for grammar.

Short lessons with audio by native speakers, pronunciation guidance and a members' community for practice. It is aimed squarely at the diaspora learner starting from nothing, and it is honest that Irish has dialects rather than pretending there is one standard spoken form. Free YouTube channel; the course itself is a subscription.

Nearly three hundred videos covering pronunciation, vocabulary and the proverbs that carry a great deal of Yoruba's meaning. The attention to vowel sounds and tone is the important part: Yoruba is a tonal language written with tone marks that most learners ignore, and ignoring them produces words you did not intend.

Lucy Bella Earl covers Received Pronunciation, British idioms, confusable words and grammar traps in well-produced videos aimed at intermediate learners, and the channel was still posting weekly in August 2026 to an audience in the millions. It is the most accessible entry point for learners specifically targeting British English. The free videos are broad rather than systematic and increasingly funnel towards the paid courses and study packs, so treat them as supplements to a structured programme rather than the programme itself.

Beginner lessons on adjectives, feelings, place names and the untranslatable discourse particles Maltese runs on. Maltese is a Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet with heavy Italian and English borrowing, so pronunciation rules that look familiar are not — the town-names video earns its place.

The largest free Igbo teaching catalogue, including live drill sessions and detailed work on the digraphs — gb, kw, nw, ọ and the rest — that English speakers consistently mispronounce. Volume plus a native speaker in Nigeria rather than the diaspora.

Volume zero of the Al-Kitaab programme, taking you from no Arabic at all to reading and handwriting the alphabet, with video drills for the sounds English speakers struggle with (ع، ح، ق، ط) and a companion website of exercises. Uniquely for a script book, it introduces Egyptian and Levantine pronunciation alongside formal Arabic from the start. It is a paid textbook whose online access code is tied to the purchase, and used copies often have that code already redeemed.

Icelandic pronunciation is not guessable from the spelling if you come from English, and this channel spends real time on it before moving to vocabulary and phrases. Fewer than sixty videos, so use it to start and move to Speak Viking or Icelandic Online for depth.

Stuart Jay Raj's 63-lesson course explains why Thai works the way it does: the Indic logic behind the script, how consonant classes and tone marks interact, and physical techniques for producing sounds English speakers mangle. At $9.99 a month or $29.99 for a three-month bundle (the print book is around $39) it is cheap for the insight density. It is idiosyncratic and theory-heavy — brilliant for analytical learners, frustrating if you just want phrases.

The free YouTube channel is mostly comedy skits about Japanese life, but Dogen's paid phonetics series is the most systematic treatment of pitch accent and pronunciation available in English, and pitch accent is the thing almost every self-taught learner ignores until it is a hard habit to fix. The full course lives on Patreon (roughly $10/month) rather than YouTube. Only worth it once your grammar and vocabulary are solid enough that accent is your bottleneck.

You read prompts aloud and ELSA marks which individual phonemes were off, showing what to do differently, plus AI role-plays for conversation practice — the closest thing to a pronunciation coach that runs on your phone at any hour. Most useful if you have a specific accent problem you already know about and want targeted, repeatable drilling. The free tier is limited and the app pushes hard towards Pro; scoring is calibrated to American English and can be harsh or plain wrong on perfectly intelligible non-standard pronunciation, so do not let it grind down your confidence.

A dedicated free site for the LSHK jyutping scheme — what each initial, final and tone number means, how to learn the system in one sitting, and which input methods let you type Cantonese by sound. Getting jyutping straight early is the single highest-leverage hour in Cantonese, because every good dictionary and course assumes it. The site is written mainly in Cantonese with only partial English, so pair it with a jyutping chart in English if you are starting from zero.

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 small set of well-made introductory videos covering the alphabet, greetings and core vocabulary. Twenty-five videos, so it is an on-ramp rather than a course — but Croatian has few of these and the pronunciation work is worth the time.

Short lessons on greetings, pronunciation and basic grammar, tied to a paid course elsewhere. Small but carefully made; the pronunciation work matters because Latvian's long vowels and its pitch accent are written but easy to ignore.

Annie's long-running channel and site teach Southern Vietnamese from real materials — songs, adverts, street speech — with explicit comparisons of Northern and Southern pronunciation so you know which form you are hearing. She is unusually good at the vowel and consonant differences learners get wrong. YouTube and the podcast are free while structured courses on the site are paid; upload pace has slowed, so treat the archive as the main value.

Covers the written system before the vocabulary, which is the right order for Yoruba: the diacritics are not decoration, and a learner who skips them ends up unable to read anything written properly. Around ninety videos.

Nearly a hundred lessons pitched at people starting from nothing, including the clicks and the noun-class system that governs everything else in the grammar. Slow and clear — the right first stop before the dialogue channels.

Geneviève's whole channel answers one question — why you understood your Paris textbook and cannot understand anyone in Montreal — through the vowels, the contractions, the tu-question particle and the words France does not use. Around 275 videos and 95k subscribers, free on YouTube, with paid courses and a members' area on the site. It is the best single entry point to Québécois for someone who already has school French.

Emma teaches word patterns, prepositions, and imitation-based speaking practice where you repeat after her to work on rhythm and connected speech, aimed squarely at intermediate learners who understand a lot but freeze when speaking. Her free videos and sample lessons are substantial, and the imitation lessons in particular are a format few other channels do well. Courses are paid and hosted off-site, the accent model is Australian, and beginners will find the assumed baseline too high.

Short lessons on the gap between textbook Portuguese and what comes out of a Brazilian's mouth: swallowed syllables, diminutives, expressions that resist translation. Explanations are in English with Portuguese examples, which makes it usable from day one and a poor choice once you want immersion. Free, over six hundred videos, publishing weekly. Good alongside a course rather than instead of one.

NIU's Southeast Asian studies archive includes twenty lessons in spoken Vietnamese, an interactive pronunciation guide covering every consonant, vowel and tone with audio, flashcards, matching exercises and culture pages. The pronunciation guide in particular is still one of the clearest free explanations of the Vietnamese sound system. The site is visibly an early-2000s artefact — frames, font notes, occasional broken media — so use it for the audio reference, not as a modern course.

An old-school site with a full grammar tutorial, a 50-lesson pronunciation tutorial and verb drills, all free and all with tests you can record grades on with a free account. The design is dated and there is nothing gamified about it, which is exactly why it is still useful — you can look up ser vs estar or the subjunctive and get a straight answer. The paid audio course is optional and not the reason to come here.

A well-sequenced beginner-to-intermediate video curriculum with unusually good pronunciation coaching and a conversational rather than exam-driven emphasis, plus a Chinese Characters course for reading. Explanations are in English and paced for absolute beginners. It is a subscription, the library stops around upper-intermediate, and there is little advanced material once you finish the main tracks.

A free chart where you click any initial-final combination to hear it in each tone, with short video lessons on the sounds English speakers get wrong (zh/ch/sh vs j/q/x, the ü vowel, the third-tone sandhi). Working through this before you memorise vocabulary saves months of fossilised pronunciation errors. It is a reference tool, not a course, so pair it with feedback from a teacher or tutor.

Trinity College Dublin's Irish speech synthesiser, with separate voices for Ulster, Connacht and Munster Irish. Paste in a sentence you have written and hear whether it sounds like anything — and switch dialects to hear how far apart they are. Synthetic, so it is a pronunciation check rather than a listening model.

Short lessons on pronunciation, greetings and the grammar points where Afrikaans surprises English and Dutch speakers — the double negative in particular. Only around twenty videos, so it is a foundation rather than a course, but the explanations are unusually clear.

Celia publishes a few minutes at a time — practical vocabulary, tone and pronunciation tips, cultural context, and some episodes recorded entirely in Cantonese as comprehensible input — with about fifty episodes by mid-2026 and a new one most weeks. Free, and transcripts are available if you email her. The episodes are deliberately tiny and not sequenced into a course, so use it as the habit-forming daily drip rather than your main study.

NTNU's Computer-Assisted Listening and Speaking Tutor gives structured pronunciation, listening-discrimination and spelling exercises, and does something no other Norwegian tool does: because Norwegian has no standard spoken form, it lets you choose which dialect to practise producing while training your ear on several. Free, with registration to save progress. Be aware it is in transition — the project has been moving to a newer implementation, so expect a dated interface and occasional roughness.

A Taiwanese teacher whose channel is unusually strong on the things textbooks gloss over: tone pairs, tone changes in fast speech, mouth position for tricky sounds, and the difference between mainland and Taiwanese pronunciation. Explanations are in English with Chinese examples, so it works from day one. She speaks Taiwanese Mandarin, which is a feature if that's your target and a minor accent difference if it isn't.

A long-running channel of short themed lessons — greetings, food, transport, common verbs — with careful attention to where each Arabic sound is produced in the mouth, which is exactly what most beginners get wrong and never fix. Everything is free and the Egyptian dialect is the one you will hear across Arab media. Videos are standalone rather than a sequenced course, so you need to impose your own order.

A long-standing free reference whose strongest section is pronunciation: every Czech sound recorded by a native speaker, including the ř that defeats most learners, alongside grammar basics, themed phrase lists with audio and simple exercises. It remains the quickest way to get the sound system straight before you start speaking. The copyright line stops at 2021 and no new material has appeared since, so treat it as a fixed reference rather than a maintained course.

A small, focused site that walks absolute beginners through the alphabet, the six tones and basic pronunciation with audio and interactive practice, then adds topic lessons such as greetings and introductions. Tones are the wall every Vietnamese learner hits first, and doing this before any phrasebook saves months of being misunderstood. There is no account or paywall; equally, there is no depth beyond the beginner stage.

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.

A University of Texas project that contrasts each Portuguese sound with its Spanish equivalent, using paired dialogues plus a cultural comparison between the US and Brazil. If you come to Portuguese from Spanish it addresses your actual problems — nasal vowels, open and closed e/o, the sounds Spanish simply lacks — rather than starting from zero. Completely free with transcripts, from an academic institution. It is an older series with no new episodes, and useless if you have no Spanish.

Built around the observation that most learners in Portugal can read fine and understand nothing, so the method leads with pronunciation and reduced everyday speech rather than grammar tables. The YouTube channel (around 134K subscribers, posting regularly) and a free beginner training are the entry points; the Portuguese Pro courses are paid. She is a fluent non-native teacher explaining in English, which some prefer for the early stages and others specifically do not want.

Khru Nan is a Thai university lecturer with a PhD in linguistics, and it shows in how carefully she handles tones, vowel length and the sounds learners systematically mishear. The podcast is free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube, with transcripts and Quizlet flashcard sets on the site; extra episodes sit behind Patreon. Episodes are short and conversational rather than a structured syllabus, so use it alongside a course.

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.