Lærdansk runs language centres across Denmark delivering the official danskuddannelse programme up to the Studieprøven, tuition-free for residents referred by their municipality, though self-supporting students and workers pay a refundable deposit per module. If you live in Denmark this should be the spine of your learning; nothing online replaces a teacher and a class of people at your level. Only relevant inside Denmark, and availability and pacing depend on your municipality.
A full self-study course built with support from the Danish integration ministry, organised into modules of texts and dialogues, grammar explanations with dozens of interactive exercises, and 'lyt og forstå' listening tasks. It costs nothing, needs no account, and covers exactly the ground the state language schools cover in their first modules. The design is dated and there is no speaking practice, so treat it as your grammar-and-reading backbone rather than your whole plan.
Vigdis, who has taught Danish as a second language to adults since 2015, splits the show into a beginner season of short constructed stories matched to the topics of language-school modules 1 and 2, and an intermediate season of personal narratives at natural pace. That explicit level split is rare and makes it easy to find episodes that actually fit you. Roughly 80 episodes exist and new ones now appear only occasionally, so treat it as a strong archive.
Hundreds of short dialogue-plus-explanation lessons with transcripts, line-by-line breakdowns, word lists and a spaced-repetition trainer, arranged into level pathways. For a language as underserved as Danish, this is the largest structured audio course you can buy, and the free feed alone gives you a lot. The usual caveats apply: constant upsell emails, some very old lessons, and the top tiers are poor value unless you use the tutoring.
Emilie Bradtberg publishes a new episode nearly every day, each built around a single topic — housing standards, holidays, work culture — spoken slowly enough to follow but in genuinely natural Danish. The sheer cadence is the point: it makes daily listening a habit rather than a project. Episodes are free in any podcast app; a premium membership adds a library sorted by CEFR level, MP3 downloads and early access.
A long-established Copenhagen school offering Danish at every level including intensive and evening formats, online classes, and preparation for the official Prøve i Dansk and Studieprøven exams. It is the usual recommendation for people who want faster progress or smaller groups than the municipal track allows. Paid, and priced accordingly — worth it mainly if you need speed or a specific exam date.
Made specifically for people learning Danish as a second language, with each episode explaining something about Denmark — traditions, food, history, companies, the idea of danskhed — in deliberately slow and distinct speech. It fills the awkward A2–B2 gap where textbook audio is too easy and native radio is impossible. Free to listen, with optional extra material and a shop supporting the project.
Christina speaks only Danish, at a pace pitched at learners who have outgrown beginner audio but cannot yet handle native podcasts, on topics chosen to be more interesting than textbook fare. It is a small archive — around 18 episodes, the most recent from mid-2025 — so it is a supplement, not a course. Worth the download precisely because so little Danish audio targets this level.
A one-person video school covering vocabulary, grammar breakdowns, listening practice and preparation for the Prøve i Dansk 3 exam, sold as tiered packages you own permanently rather than a subscription. The PD3 focus makes it unusually relevant if you are working toward Danish residency or study requirements. Production is homemade and there is no live teaching or feedback, so pair it with a class or tutor for speaking.
Robin Allan, Philip Holmes and Tom Lundskær-Nielsen cover Danish morphology and syntax systematically with English explanations and plentiful examples, indexed so you can look up a problem rather than read it front to back. Danish is thin on serious reference grammars in English; this is the standard one. It is a reference, not a course — there are no exercises and no audio.
DR's easy-language news desk publishes the same stories as the main bulletins in short, simply-worded articles that can be read aloud on the page, so you can read and listen to the same text. It is updated constantly and it is the single best free source of Danish that is real but not yet overwhelming. Written for Danes who find news hard rather than for foreigners, so cultural context is assumed rather than explained.
Run jointly by the Danish Language Council and the Society for Danish Language and Literature, sproget.dk collects usage articles, spelling rules and thousands of answered questions about Danish, plus links to the official reference works. When you need a defensible answer about commas, compound words or ligge/lægge, this is where it lives. Everything is in Danish and aimed at native speakers, so it is only usable from roughly B1 up.
Anders Basby, a Danish teacher at a language school in Copenhagen, has put his exercise bank online for free: adjectives, word order, prepositions, modal verbs, pronouns and more, each with a short English explanation and immediate feedback. It is the fastest way to actually practise the rules other resources only describe. The site is plain HTML on an unencrypted host and looks like it was built in 2008, which it more or less was — the content is what matters.
DR's streaming catalogue — drama, documentaries, children's programming and news — is free and much of it carries Danish subtitles, which is the single most effective way to bridge from written Danish to the spoken language's dropped consonants. Children's series are an underrated on-ramp for adults at B1. Most of the catalogue is geo-blocked outside Denmark, so from abroad you will need a Danish connection.
Once learner podcasts stop challenging you, this is where you go: hundreds of Danish shows on news, history, crime, science and culture, produced for Danes with no concessions to learners. Unlike DRTV, audio is generally available outside Denmark. Expect a hard step up — fast, regional and slang-heavy speech with no transcripts.
lex.dk hosts Den Store Danske and a dozen other Danish reference works as a free, ad-free encyclopedia written in careful standard prose. It is excellent reading practice precisely because the register is neutral and the topics are ones you already understand in your own language. Purely reading input — no audio, no exercises, no learner scaffolding.
Danish public libraries lend ebooks and audiobooks digitally at no cost, and reading a novel while listening to its audiobook is one of the most effective intermediate-to-advanced routines there is. The catalogue includes plenty of translated fiction, which is easier to start with than Danish originals. You need a Danish library card, which in practice means a CPR number, so this is for people living in Denmark; the service now runs through each local library's own website.
Published by the Society for Danish Language and Literature, DDO covers Danish from 1950 onward and is updated continuously, with pronunciation recordings, gender, inflection tables, real usage examples and idioms on almost every entry. For a learner the audio and the en/et marking alone justify making it your default lookup. It is Danish-to-Danish only, so beginners will still need a bilingual dictionary alongside it.
This is the book Danish spelling rules are officially defined by, covering orthography, inflection and the comma rules, and it is free on the web. If you are writing Danish that will be marked — exams, applications, work email — settle disagreements here rather than by searching. It is a norm reference, not a learning resource: no definitions, no examples, no English.
A small but consistently helpful community where native speakers answer questions about grammar, pronunciation and word choice, and where resource threads surface things that never rank on Google. Useful precisely because Danish learning material is scattered and under-documented. Traffic is low compared with the big-language subreddits, so expect hours, not minutes, for an answer.
ODS documents older Danish with full citations, which is what you need once you start reading Blicher, Pontoppidan or anything printed before the war and hit words DDO no longer carries. Purely a reference for advanced readers and anyone curious about how the language moved. Entries are written in older Danish themselves, so it is unusable below a solid C1.
A free searchable corpus of contemporary Danish texts that answers the question dictionaries cannot: which preposition really follows this verb, and how often do Danes actually write it that way. Invaluable when you are writing Danish and want evidence rather than intuition. The interface is academic and there is a learning curve to the query syntax.
Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, with the monthly price falling steeply on longer plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 14 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.
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.
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 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.
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.