🇺🇦 Ukrainian for advanced learners: the best resources

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.

A volunteer project that queries around a dozen English-Ukrainian dictionaries simultaneously and shows the results side by side, which is genuinely useful when a word has several plausible translations and you want to see which sources agree. It leans scholarly and includes specialised and technical vocabularies you will not find in app dictionaries. The sister site r2u.org.ua does the same for Russian-Ukrainian and hosts a spelling checker. Free, but the interface is utilitarian and Ukrainian-only.

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.

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.

The main English-language gathering point for Ukrainian learners, with native speakers reliably answering 'why this ending' and 'how would you actually say this' questions, plus recurring resource threads. Useful for resolving the specific doubts no textbook covers and for sanity-checking sentences you have written. Free. As with any subreddit the answer quality varies and Russian-Ukrainian comparison threads can get heated.

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.

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.

Goroh pulls definitions, full declension and conjugation tables, transcription, synonyms, phraseology, etymology and rhymes into a single lookup, which makes it far more practical than consulting several dictionaries in turn. The inflection tables alone justify bookmarking it when you are wrestling with noun endings. Everything is in Ukrainian with no English interface, so it becomes usable somewhere around B1. Free and maintained by volunteers.

EdEra's open handbook covers Ukrainian phonetics, word formation, every part of speech, punctuation and text style across sixteen sections — effectively a complete reference grammar you can search. It was written for Ukrainian school students preparing for the national ZNO exam, which means it assumes you already speak the language and focuses on correctness. That makes it superb for advanced learners and heritage speakers cleaning up their written Ukrainian, and largely useless as a first course. Free and in Ukrainian only.

Yedyni's flagship is a free 28-day programme of daily tasks, materials and mentor support designed to move Russian-speaking Ukrainians into using Ukrainian every day, backed by online and in-person speaking clubs and webinars. The speaking-club network is the real prize — sustained conversation practice with native speakers at no cost. Everything runs in Ukrainian with no English scaffolding, so it suits heritage speakers and confident B1+ learners rather than beginners. Some paid advanced courses exist alongside the free track, and participation is restricted by nationality.

A donation-funded library of Ukrainian-language audiobooks spanning poetry, short stories, novels and children's fairy tales, with progress tracking and favourites if you make an account. Fairy tales and shorter prose are a realistic on-ramp at B1; the literary catalogue is native-level listening. Free, with no subscription — support is via voluntary contributions. Recording quality varies between titles since much of it is volunteer-narrated.

Published by the Ukrainian Lingua-Information Foundation of the National Academy of Sciences, this is the authoritative monolingual dictionary — the one to cite when you need a definitive answer about a word's meaning or usage. Note that the widely-linked sum.in.ua is an unofficial copy of older volumes; this is the sanctioned, maintained edition. Entirely in Ukrainian and written for native-level users, so it is an advanced tool rather than a learning aid. Free to search.

Not a learning channel at all: a well-made Ukrainian video essay series about Ukrainian literature, its censorship under Soviet rule and the writers school made boring. That is exactly why it is valuable once you are past B2 — natural pace, rich vocabulary, and subject matter that repays the effort with real cultural literacy. Free, actively publishing through 2026. Expect no concessions to learners: no subtitles aimed at you, no slowing down.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Same idea as HelloTalk but with vetted profiles and a cleaner focus on actual voice and video calls, which makes it noticeably less spammy in practice. Free to use; Pro adds unlimited partner search and extra languages, 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.

Six seasons that climb from the alphabet to B2 discussion, each episode pairing a dialogue with grammar and cultural commentary — it is the closest thing Ukrainian has to a complete free audio curriculum. The final episode landed in July 2024, so treat it as a finished archive rather than an ongoing show; that also means the whole arc is available to binge in order. All 240 episodes are free; transcripts, translations and flashcards sit behind the paid Premium membership. If you only pick one Ukrainian resource, this is the usual answer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the larger dedicated Ukrainian schools for foreigners, running levelled group courses, private lessons, short conversation sessions and a kids' programme with a sizeable teaching staff. It is the straightforward option when self-study has stalled and you need someone correcting you. Its YouTube channel publishes free comprehensible-input and tips videos and was active through August 2026, and there is a free placement test. Course pricing is not listed publicly — you have to request a consultation, which is worth factoring in.

The most complete description of Ukrainian grammar available in English, covering morphology and syntax in the systematic detail that learner courses compress or skip. It is a reference to consult, not a book to read front to back, and it expects you to already know basic terminology. Worth owning once you are past the beginner stage and want authoritative answers about aspect, government of verbs or case usage. Expensive, and the presentation is dry academic prose.