🇵🇹 Portuguese for advanced learners: the best resources

Rui and Joel have built since 2012 what nobody else has for European Portuguese: 100+ structured units, hundreds of graded audio Shorties and podcast episodes, a verb trainer, pronunciation analysis and an SRS review system, all in the Lisbon standard rather than Brazilian. The Practice Portuguese Podcast and Shorties are free in any podcast app; full site and app access is about €15/month with no free trial but a money-back guarantee. If you live in Portugal and can only pay for one thing, this is it — the caveat is that it is Lisbon-accented and light on the northern varieties.

The best-known European Portuguese YouTube channel (around 290K subscribers), covering everything from why Portuguese sounds the way it does to interviews with speakers of other Romance languages, with Portuguese subtitles throughout. He also runs separate Beginner and Intermediate Portuguese Podcast series and gives away several ebooks; the B1, B2 and pronunciation courses are paid. YouTube uploads have slowed to every month or two, so treat the channel as a deep archive and the podcasts as the active feed.

The most reliable Brazilian Portuguese teaching channel: pronunciation, grammar, verb conjugation and culture, taught slowly in Portuguese with English support, and still uploading several times a week to over 330K subscribers. Free on YouTube; the paid side is a school with levelled digital courses, group classes and private lessons. A good default first stop for Brazilian Portuguese, and it pairs well with a conversation podcast once you can follow one.

Innovative Language's Portuguese arm: short dialogue-plus-explanation lessons organised into level pathways, with line-by-line transcripts, flashcards and a decent mobile app. Sheer volume is the selling point — you will not run out of material at any level. The free account gives limited access and the marketing is relentlessly discount-driven, so never pay list price. It teaches Brazilian Portuguese, so it is the wrong tool if you are living in Portugal.

Marcia has a master's in linguistics and teaches the questions intermediates actually get stuck on — pronoun placement, verb pairs that look interchangeable, how to follow fast speech — without dropping into English. Around 750 videos and one of the largest Portuguese-for-foreigners channels anywhere. The channel is free; courses and lessons are paid. Not a starting point: the all-Portuguese delivery assumes you can already follow an explanation.

The state body responsible for teaching Portuguese abroad runs self-study and tutored eLearning courses aligned to both the CEFR and Portugal's own QuaREPE framework, along with workplace-Portuguese tracks and a network of Portuguese Language Centres. Being the official institution matters if you want certification or a syllabus that matches what Portuguese schools teach. It is bureaucratic to navigate, courses are paid and run in enrolment windows, and the platform feels institutional rather than modern.

The companion series to Speaking Brazilian's main show, and the more useful of the two once you can follow a slow conversation — holidays, why the hosts left Brazil, the difference between 'pouco' and 'um pouco', all discussed in Portuguese with no English scaffolding. Fewer than twenty episodes so far, so it is a supplement rather than a course, and the main podcast is where the explanation lives if you still need it.

Carla and Marlon built 'The Journey' — 80+ filmed episodes following two characters solving a family mystery around Portugal — and hang vocabulary, grammar and exercises off the narrative, which keeps motivation up far better than unit-by-unit slogging. Podcast episodes, YouTube lessons and a weekly email are free; membership is €30/month or €349/year. Genuinely goes up to C1–C2 grammar, which almost no other European Portuguese course does, though the storytelling format is slower per hour than a conventional textbook.

A Brazilian and her American partner talk about whatever is going on — music, relationships, Brazilian politics, language mistakes — without scripting or slowing down much, which is the whole appeal once learner audio starts to feel fake. The podcast is free; playbooks, worksheets and a self-study membership (around $149/year) are paid. Heavily carioca in accent and slang, so budget some confusion if you learned a more neutral Brazilian Portuguese.

Teaching since 2008, with self-paced courses, private video lessons and dedicated prep for Celpe-Bras — the Brazilian government's official proficiency exam, which matters for study or work in Brazil. The blog and YouTube channel carry a long run of free grammar and idiom lessons that stand alone even if you never book a class. YouTube uploads have become infrequent; the paid tutoring is the active part of the business.

One of the oldest Portuguese learning podcasts, with several hundred lessons on conversation, vocabulary and the popular expressions textbooks skip. The podcast feed stopped publishing around 2020, so treat it as a large free archive rather than an active show. The audio podcast is free in any app; structured course bundles and lesson materials are sold through their Teachable site, which is now the main web presence. Production is basic and the archive is organised by episode number rather than by level, so plan on some digging.

Susana works through relative pronouns one week and the Portuguese furniture industry or summer herbs the next, which gives you grammar and real cultural vocabulary from the same voice. Most videos are entirely in European Portuguese at natural speed; a minority — the vlog-style ones aimed at newcomers to Portugal — are in English, so it is filed as explained-in-English. Over 800 free videos and a large archive; paid courses and coaching are sold separately.

Instead of studio dialogues you get episodic video stories filmed on location, with the language graded across series and grammar explained visually rather than in tables. It is the strongest option if you learn from narrative and want to hear Portuguese in situ rather than in a classroom. Subscription-only with some free sample posts, the accent is a deliberately neutral Brazilian one, and the video library grows slowly — long-standing subscribers do notice.

A native Portuguese teacher offering personalised online lessons, with a specific focus on the CAPLE exams — CIPLE at A2 and DEPLE/DIPLE at B1–B2 — which matters if you are working toward Portuguese nationality or residency requirements. She publishes a free podcast on idioms and a blog on culture and learning. Pricing is not listed publicly, so you have to ask; this is a tutor, not a self-study product.

Susana Morais of Portuguese Lab writes these to fill an obvious gap — nearly every Portuguese graded reader on the market is Brazilian. Each book targets a level and consolidates specific grammar through story rather than exercises, with audio available. Reasonably priced ebooks; the range is smaller than the Brazilian equivalents, so heavy readers will exhaust it faster than they would like.

Conversational episodes aimed squarely at learners abroad, covering how Brazilians actually study, work and socialise as well as the language itself, all in Portuguese at close to natural speed. Over three hundred videos since 2020 and still publishing. Because there is no English at all it is a step up from beginner channels — useful once you can follow a slow conversation and want to stop being talked down to.

Pairs of Brazilians improvising a scenario — a complaint, a negotiation, a piece of gossip — filmed unscripted so the hesitations and interruptions survive, then annotated with commentary bubbles explaining what just happened and why. Portuguese transcripts and English translations come with every clip, and the whole set is downloadable as a PDF. Free, from UT Austin. Aimed at intermediate and up; the archive is fixed at 35 dialogues.

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 digital home of Portugal's biggest reference publisher: the Portuguese-language dictionary plus Portuguese–English and other bilingual pairs, verb conjugation, and native audio for headwords, all from a European Portuguese perspective. The core dictionary lookups are free; some encyclopaedic content sits behind a subscription. Between this and Priberam you have European Portuguese lexical questions covered without paying anything.

Run out of ISCTE in Lisbon, it answers submitted questions about grammar, usage, regional variation and the spelling accord, and the searchable back catalogue now covers nearly every argument speakers have about the language. This is where you go when a grammar book gives a rule and you want to know whether anyone follows it. Entirely in Portuguese and written for an educated native audience, so it is a C-level reference, not a study tool.

Type an infinitive and get every tense and mood laid out, including the personal infinitive and the future subjunctive that make Portuguese conjugation genuinely harder than Spanish. Free, fast and paired with dictionary, synonym and grammar sections from the same publisher. It is a Brazilian site, so where a form differs between varieties the Brazilian usage is what you see — check Priberam if you need the Portugal norm.

Pedro built this for the specific problem of understanding Portuguese as it is actually spoken in Portugal — fast, swallowed vowels, idiomatic — with levelled listening practice, vocabulary saving and grammar articles. The free tier gives a weekly allowance of content and vocabulary review; Plus is about €11.60/month annually and adds unlimited access and AI speaking practice. Explicitly best from A2 upward; absolute beginners should start elsewhere.

RTP is Portugal’s state broadcaster, and its channel carries the widest range of registers of anything on this page: scripted news read at pace, unscripted studio discussion, and documentary narration. For a learner that mix is the value — the same day’s vocabulary comes back in three different deliveries. Everything is European Portuguese and nothing is slowed down for you.

Experiments, explainers and how-things-work films made for a Brazilian general audience, not for learners. It earns its place on a learning list because the visuals carry most of the meaning: you can follow an episode on why earthquakes happen long before you could follow a podcast on the same subject. Free, enormous archive, several uploads a week, Portuguese auto-subtitles are reliable enough to lean on.

Short sketches, usually two or three minutes, performed at full conversational speed with the slang, sarcasm and cultural references intact. Nothing here is adapted for learners, which is exactly the value: if you laugh at the right moment you understand Brazilian Portuguese. Free, enormous back catalogue, Portuguese auto-subtitles are usable. Frequently crude and irreverent about religion and politics, so it will not suit everyone.

A historian and a columnist take a historical episode apart each week; it is one of the most listened-to podcasts in Portugal and the reason many Portuguese people started listening to podcasts at all. For a learner it is hard: two people interrupting each other, heavy on names, dates and irony. Note that Observador does not publish a public RSS feed for this one — it is on Apple Podcasts and Spotify only.

Antena 1 pushes its main bulletins straight into a podcast feed, so you get a few minutes of the day’s national and world news in careful, standard European Portuguese whenever you want it. Broadcast diction is clearer than conversation, which makes bulletins a good daily habit, but the delivery is quick and headlines give you no context to lean on. No transcripts. Best used repeatedly on the same day’s news you have already read.

Paulo Baldaia runs a daily briefing from Sunday to Friday, talking to Expresso journalists and foreign correspondents about the stories that outlast the day’s noise. Over 1,500 episodes and one of the most-listened news podcasts in Portugal. It is conversation rather than bulletin reading, so it is faster and more elliptical than Antena 1’s Noticiário — better once you can already follow the news in Portuguese.

Bernardo Mendonça has been recording these conversations for Expresso since 2016, now well past 470 episodes, with actors, writers, musicians and people nobody has heard of. It is the gentlest listening on this page for its level: one guest at a time, no crosstalk, long reflective answers in full sentences about childhood, work, loss and everyday life — the register you actually need in Portugal, not political jargon. Guests are often split across two parts, so the same voice and vocabulary carry over an hour or more.

A fixture of Portuguese political culture: Clara Ferreira Alves, Daniel Oliveira, Luís Pedro Nunes, Pedro Marques Lopes and Aurélio Gomes going at the week’s politics and culture. If you want to understand what Portuguese people are actually arguing about, this is the show — but four people talking over each other with heavy irony is about as hard as native audio gets. Advanced only.

A daily few minutes from one of Portugal’s most popular radio personalities, built out of strange news items and conversational tangents. Because the stories are self-contained and often absurd, you can dip in anywhere, and it is a rare chance to hear informal, joking Portuguese rather than broadcast register. Fast, slangy and full of pop-culture references, so it rewards people already living in Portugal.

José Maria Pimentel, an economist, has been running deep fortnightly conversations about science, society, economics and philosophy since 2017, and it is repeatedly ranked among the country’s top podcasts. Episodes are long and single-subject, which is ideal for a learner: the vocabulary repeats and the guest speaks in full paragraphs. Native speed and intellectually demanding, but the format does most of the work for you.

The video arm of a Portuguese daily whose podcasts are already on this site. Pieces are short and topical, which makes them a good way to pick up the words actually being used in Portugal this week rather than textbook vocabulary. Speech is fast and unadapted; the on-screen text and headlines give you something to anchor to.

Comedy is the hardest listening on this page and the most revealing: it runs on slang, timing and shared references, so following it is a real test of how much Portugal you have absorbed rather than how much Portuguese you have studied. Save it for when the news feels easy. Strong language throughout.

A presenter-led channel mixing interviews, reported segments and commentary across news, culture and sport. The range is the point for a learner: the same voice moves between registers, so you hear formal delivery and loose conversation from someone whose accent you have already tuned into. Large audience for a Portuguese channel and updated regularly.

The BBC's Brazilian service publishes tightly edited video explainers, usually five to ten minutes, in careful broadcast Portuguese. Newsreader delivery is clearer and more structured than conversation, which makes news a reasonable first step into native material, and the subject matter is often already familiar from English coverage. Free, several videos a week, very large archive.

Short, frequent episodes in which the linguist Marco Neves explains the origin of words in the news, unpicks regionalisms, kills off grammar myths and answers listeners’ questions. It is the rare native show whose subject matter is the language you are learning, so the vocabulary keeps paying off. Delivered at full native speed with no transcripts — comfortable around B1 if you already know the topic, harder if you do not.

Every weekday at 06h30 the host talks to the Observador reporter who covered the day’s main story, so you get one subject explained properly instead of a headline sprint. Because a single topic runs the whole episode, context carries you through vocabulary you do not know — which makes it one of the more forgiving native news podcasts. Still full-speed studio Portuguese, and there are no transcripts.

One guest, one interviewer, most of an hour — the format that gives a learner the most help, because the questions frame what is coming and the guest has room to finish thoughts. Vítor Gonçalves interviews politicians, writers, scientists and business figures, so you hear a range of individual speaking styles rather than radio delivery. Native speed and no transcripts; the audio is the TV programme.

A daily culture-and-conversation show that has been running since the 2000s, mixing studio guests with listener contributions. This is where you hear how Portuguese people actually talk to each other: overlapping speech, slang, jokes that depend on knowing the country. Genuinely difficult, and not the place to start — but if you are at C1 and stuck on colloquial register, it is exactly the right medicine.

A Portuguese radio institution: every morning Fernando Alves reads a minute of dense, literary reflection on the day. The recording quality and the slow, deliberate delivery are ideal for working on rhythm and vowel reduction, and a minute is short enough to replay ten times. But the vocabulary and syntax are poetic, so do not expect to understand it early — this is an advanced listener’s pleasure, not a comprehension exercise.

TSF puts a topic on the table each day and lets listeners call in and argue about it. It is the single best source of unscripted, non-broadcast European Portuguese: people from all over the country, on bad phone lines, with strong regional accents and no editing. That is also why it is hard. Use it when you want to stress-test comprehension against how the language is really spoken.

Monday to Friday, Sara de Melo Rocha talks to Público journalists and outside experts about what happened, why it happened and what it means. Same shape as Observador’s daily show, different newsroom and a slightly more analytical register, so it is worth having both if you want daily Portuguese on the news. Native speed, no transcripts.

Margarida de Magalhães Ramalho and Lourenço Pereira Coutinho pick a historical subject each week and talk it through, deliberately keeping it conversational and tying the past to the present. Gentler than the shoutier history shows: two friendly voices, one topic, no interruptions to speak of. A good way to pick up Portuguese and European history you will hear referenced constantly in Portugal.

Every Friday Miguel Sousa Tavares turns his Expresso column into audio and then improvises an extra subject at the end. For a learner the appeal is the format: a single practised voice, no interruptions, sentences built to be read aloud — far easier to follow than any panel show. The difficulty is the content, which assumes you already follow Portuguese politics and takes strong positions in a literary register.

Ana França, Hélder Gomes, Catarina Maldonado Vasconcelos, Pedro Cordeiro and Mara Tribuna take one international story a week and work through it with reporters on the ground. It is a useful bridge if you already read world news in English: you arrive knowing the events, so you can spend your attention on the Portuguese rather than the facts. Several voices in conversation, so expect natural speed and overlapping turns.

The paper’s politics desk talks through whatever is dominating the news, plus whatever they cannot let go of, and has done so for close to 500 episodes. This is the hardest kind of listening in the language: three or four journalists interrupting each other, heavy on names, acronyms and party in-jokes. Worth it once you can follow the news comfortably, because it is where you hear how Portuguese people actually argue.

Lia Pereira, Luís Guerra, Mário Rui Vieira and Miguel Cadete run Expresso’s music magazine as a Thursday podcast, usually with a Portuguese musician in the room. Lighter and funnier than the news shows, and the vocabulary is culture and everyday life rather than politics, which makes it a softer landing at the same speed. Good for learning who Portuguese people actually listen to.

A listener-funded investigative outlet that scrutinises inequality and abuses of power in Portugal, mixing narrated reportage with long interviews. The narrated episodes are scripted and clearly produced, which helps; the interviews are not. It will teach you the vocabulary of Portuguese institutions, politics and law faster than any news bulletin, and the site publishes supporting written material alongside episodes.

PÚBLICO’s channel leans toward reported pieces and longer interviews rather than rolling news, so sentences run longer and speakers finish their thoughts — easier to follow than a bulletin once you are past the intermediate wall. Marked pt-PT throughout, so YouTube’s own captions come out in European Portuguese.

SIC is commercial television, so the register is conversational where the public broadcaster is formal: chat shows, studio banter and human-interest segments. That makes it useful for the everyday Portuguese that news bulletins never use. Publishes in bursts rather than daily, so treat it as a back catalogue rather than a feed.

Antena 1 is a talk radio station and this is its video feed, which means long unscripted conversation with no visual distraction to lean on. Good listening practice precisely because it was made for ears first. Several of its programmes are already on this site as podcasts; this is where you can watch them being made.

The format does the work: a single guest talking at length about their own work, which means vocabulary repeats within the episode and the speaker finishes sentences. Closest thing on this list to 45 Graus in shape, on a different subject. Native pace, no concessions, but the length is what makes it learnable.

Relaxed studio conversation rather than journalism, so the Portuguese is closer to how people actually speak — interruptions, asides and slang included. Harder than the news in some ways and easier in others: the vocabulary is everyday, but nobody is enunciating for an audience. Updated very regularly.

Presents the day in a looser, more interactive format than a standard telejornal, which means more unscripted speech and fewer read-aloud sentences. That makes it harder than a bulletin in one way and easier in another — the pace is human rather than broadcast-fast, and points get repeated. Published daily.

Covers music, the arts and cultural conversation from a Black Portuguese-speaking perspective, made in Portugal. Worth having on this page because most native listening here is news read by broadcasters: this is people talking to each other about culture, with the vocabulary and rhythm that come with it. Also a corrective to a catalogue that would otherwise be entirely institutional.

German public broadcasting in Brazilian Portuguese: mini-documentaries on cities, migration, science and politics, mostly eight to fifteen minutes. Unusually for a news channel it publishes hand-made Portuguese caption tracks rather than leaving you with automatic ones, so you can read along with what is actually said. Free, publishing several times a week.

The São Paulo public television channel puts most of its output on YouTube: long-form interviews, arts programmes, education and current affairs, with an archive well past thirty thousand videos. Nothing is adapted, and the register is often literary or academic, so this is where you go when learner material has stopped stretching you. Free, updated daily.

Thousands of short documentary and explainer videos from RTP's archive, organised by school subject — history, science, literature, Portuguese language itself — with accompanying text. It is made for Portuguese schoolchildren rather than foreign learners, which is the point: real European Portuguese, clearly enunciated, on topics concrete enough to follow. Free and not geo-blocked like RTP Play, but there is no vocabulary support of any kind, so bring a dictionary.

Miguel Miranda, a geophysicist who ran Portugal’s weather and sea institute for a decade, discusses science with the journalist José Manuel Fernandes. Two speakers, a calm studio and a single topic per episode make it easier listening than a news panel, and the scientific vocabulary is largely Latin-based so it transfers if you know another Romance language. Roughly monthly, so the archive is small.

Isilda Sanches takes a real science story and turns it into a few scripted minutes, aimed at the curious non-specialist. Because it is written then read rather than improvised, the sentences are complete and the diction is clean, which makes it one of the gentler native listens here. New episodes most weekdays and a deep archive. No transcripts, and it moves quickly for a short format.

Alice Vilaça talks to Portuguese people scattered around the world about how they live, what they do and why they left. The interview format and the personal, unhurried subject matter make it easier going than news, and you get a spread of regional accents rather than studio standard. Weekly, with a large archive. No transcripts.

A calm, well-produced look at the stories and people shaping world events, which for a learner has a useful property: you probably already know the news being discussed, so you can spend your attention on the Portuguese rather than the facts. Measured studio delivery, one subject at a time, long archive. No transcripts.

Renascença’s morning thought for the day: a minute of measured, scripted Portuguese inviting the listener to pause. The brevity is the point — one minute is short enough to replay until you catch every word, and there are well over a thousand of them in the feed. Renascença is the Catholic church’s radio station, so the tone is occasionally devotional; the language itself is plain standard European Portuguese.

Casal Mistério answer the questions behind Portuguese food: who invented bacalhau à Brás, who Zé do Pipo was, why the bolacha Maria is not Portuguese. Short episodes, concrete subject matter and a lot of everyday food vocabulary you will actually use in a Portuguese kitchen or restaurant. Two hosts bantering means overlapping speech, but the topics are light enough to follow from context.

A specialist outlet, and that is the point for a learner: economics and business talk reuses the same few hundred terms, so a subject you would find hard in general news becomes tractable after a handful of videos. Advanced, and assumes you already follow Portuguese politics.

Scripted narration is the gentlest native listening there is: it is written before it is spoken, so the sentences are well formed and the pace is even. Covers Portuguese history, which also gives you the cultural references that turn up constantly in the news and in conversation. A small channel, still publishing.

Reported stories from small towns and rural Portugal rather than Lisbon and Porto. For a learner that means two useful things: ordinary people speaking unrehearsed, and regional accents you will not hear on a national broadcast. Slower and more personal than news; good once bulletins stop being a wall of sound.

Academic speech is the most structured native listening you can get: prepared, signposted, and delivered at a pace built for note-taking rather than for television. The subject vocabulary repeats heavily within a lecture, which is exactly what makes long-form listening learnable. Advanced, and demanding, but unusually forgiving in its delivery.

A northern counterweight to the Lisbon-centred outlets elsewhere on this page, which matters more than it sounds: the accent and the local references differ. Coverage is general news and reportage. Publishes in bursts rather than daily, so treat it as a catalogue to dip into rather than a feed to follow.

Rádio Observador's daily opinion programme: José Manuel Fernandes takes one story at 10h10 in about seven minutes, and a longer panel debate with Helena Matos and guests follows, often over an hour. Two very different listens from one feed — the short piece is a single voice at radio pace and is the way in at B2, while the debates are three people interrupting each other and are genuinely hard. It is commentary rather than a bulletin, and Observador sits on the liberal right of the Portuguese press, so treat the opinions as opinions; what it gives a learner is current political and economic vocabulary in European Portuguese, every single weekday.

Fast, free and comprehensive, with full conjugation for every verb, etymologies, and an explicit switch between the Portuguese and Brazilian orthographic conventions — which is exactly what you need when the same word is spelled differently on each side of the Atlantic. Definitions are in Portuguese only, so it becomes useful around B1. This is the dictionary most Portuguese speakers actually open.

Published by Melhoramentos, with over 350,000 definitions including regionalisms, colloquialisms and slang, plus Portuguese–English and other bilingual dictionaries alongside the monolingual one. It is the Brazilian counterpart to Priberam and the better choice when a word is Brazil-specific. The web version is free; the site is ad-heavy and the mobile apps are paid.

The main English-language forum for Portuguese learners, with native speakers from both sides of the Atlantic. Its usefulness for this language is disproportionate to its size, because the first decision a Portuguese learner makes — which variety to study, and what happens when your materials disagree — is a question about people's habits rather than about grammar, and no book answers it as well as a hundred replies do. Smaller and slower than the Spanish and Japanese communities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.