Two long-form articles with a mnemonic and a practice sheet for every character, plus a spaced-out study schedule you can follow in a couple of days. This is the standard first step almost every serious Japanese learner is pointed at, and it costs nothing. Do these before touching any app — kana first is not optional, and romaji-based courses will slow you down later.
Explains the language on its own terms — the copula, the real function of は versus が, plain form before polite form — instead of forcing it into English grammar categories. Completely free online, and available as a cheap ebook or app. It is dense and dry, uses casual forms early (which surprises people used to textbooks), and the last update was years ago, but as a grammar reference it has aged well.
Thousands of lessons built around a short native dialogue plus line-by-line breakdown, with PDF transcripts, vocabulary lists and cultural notes at the paid tiers. The sheer volume means you can always find something at your level. Caveats worth knowing: the pricing is aggressive with constant discount emails and multiple tiers, quality varies a lot between older and newer series, and the free account is heavily limited after a trial period.
Balanced coverage of grammar, kanji, reading, listening and production, with a workbook and audio, which is why most university courses use it. Buying both volumes plus workbooks runs to roughly $150, and it really wants a teacher or study partner for the pair-work exercises. If you are self-studying, pair it with the free ToKini Andy video walkthroughs, which are keyed chapter by chapter.
An archived but complete video course arguing that standard textbooks misrepresent Japanese by mapping it onto English, and rebuilding the grammar around an invisible が subject in every sentence. For a lot of learners this is the explanation that finally makes は versus が, passives and causatives click. Cure Dolly died in 2021, so nothing new is coming and the Patreon is gone; the channel and an Internet Archive mirror remain up. Be warned: the synthetic robot voice and avatar put many people off, and subtitles are essential.
Misa goes into far more detail than a textbook on individual grammar points and is unusually good at explaining the casual, contracted and slangy forms that textbooks skip entirely. Videos are long — often 30 to 60 minutes on a single point — which is a feature if you want depth and a problem if you want a quick answer. All free on YouTube.
Teppei talks about everyday nothing-in-particular in slow, simplified Japanese for three to five minutes an episode, with well over a thousand episodes across separate beginner, intermediate and Z (advanced) feeds. The short format makes daily listening genuinely sustainable. Free on all podcast apps. No transcripts on the free feeds and no structure — the value is volume and consistency, not instruction.
Shun talks alone, slowly and clearly, about daily life in Japan, culture and language — no English, but pitched so an intermediate learner can follow without subtitles. The value is consistency: hundreds of episodes in the same voice at the same level, which is exactly what listening ability is built from. Transcripts are available through his site and Patreon. Genuinely easier than any native show here, but too fast for a true beginner.
Yuki speaks slowly in Japanese only, using drawings, gestures and props so you understand from day one without translation — the closest thing Japanese has to Dreaming Spanish. Rebranded from Comprehensible Japanese to Natural Japanese (NIJ) and moved to nijapanese.com; cijapanese.com now redirects there. Most videos are free on YouTube; the site adds a level-sorted library, transcripts and watch-time tracking behind a subscription.
If you are self-studying Genki or Tobira without a teacher, these lesson-by-lesson videos are the closest free substitute for a classroom explanation. Andy also covers study strategy and JLPT prep honestly, without hype. The YouTube content is free; a paid membership adds structured courses and practice material. It is tied to specific textbooks, so it is less useful if you are not using them.
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.
Layla publishes very short episodes in deliberately simple Japanese, sorted into levels so you can start well below what native audio demands. The brevity is the point — five minutes you actually finish beats an hour you abandon — and it fills the awkward gap between kana-stage material and Nihongo con Teppei. Free in the feed; transcripts and vocabulary lists are paid. Do not expect natural adult conversation: the speech is slowed and simplified on purpose.
Chapters are organised around topics — geography, history, pop culture, technology — with substantial Japanese-language readings rather than the drill-a-grammar-point structure of beginner books. The official site hosts free audio, vocabulary lists and supplementary material. It is a genuine step up in difficulty and expects you to already know Genki-level grammar and around 300 kanji; many learners find the jump from Genki 2 uncomfortable.
Dozens of illustrated PDF booklets sorted into levels, from near-zero Japanese up to comfortable intermediate reading, published free by the tadoku (extensive reading) organisation. Perfect for the phase where textbook dialogues are boring but native material is still impossible. The catalogue is small compared to the paid printed sets, and the stories are simple by design.
A second strong comprehensible-input channel, running since 2021, covering complete beginner through advanced with a wider range of formats than most — folktales, vlogs, quizzes, let's-plays. The website is a free index that lets you filter by level, topic and style, read transcripts and download audio. Content is free; there is no structured curriculum, so you pick your own path through it.
Every grammar point and word is illustrated with real in-game text from titles you probably recognise, which makes it stick and shows you the language as it is actually written. Structured roughly along JLPT levels so you can follow it as a course. Free on YouTube. Obviously best if you play games in Japanese; the examples skew toward RPG and fantasy register.
Kaname films ordinary Japanese life — convenience stores, trains, cooking, seasonal customs — speaking clearly and simply with subtitles in both languages. It gives you culture and vocabulary in the same package, which is rare. Entirely free. Not a grammar course, so treat it as listening input rather than study material.
The audio counterpart to NHK News Web Easy: a short radio programme in which the day's news is retold slowly, in plain vocabulary, with difficult words explained as they come up. It is made for foreign residents of Japan rather than for classroom learners, so the topics are real news but the delivery is deliberately gentle — this is one of the very few genuinely comprehensible native-produced news sources. Episodes are brief and the feed keeps only the most recent handful, so subscribe rather than binge. Started in 2026, so there is no deep back catalogue.
Aims to be WaniKani plus Bunpro plus graded reading in a single structured route from pre-N5 to N1, with human-written (explicitly not AI-generated) grammar lessons. $8.99/month, $83.88/year or $349.99 lifetime, with a 14-day trial and a free kana trainer, dictionary and grammar library. N2 content was still being completed as of 2026 and N1 has not started, so advanced learners will outrun it.
Focuses on what native speakers actually say versus what textbooks teach — nuance between similar expressions, casual contractions, and register. Most videos are largely in Japanese with subtitles, which makes them good listening practice in their own right. Free on YouTube; Miku sells separate courses and a podcast membership. Assumes solid beginner grammar already.
Noriko speaks clearly but at close to natural pace about substantive topics — working culture, living abroad, social change — which makes it a real step up from beginner slow-Japanese podcasts. The podcast itself is free; transcripts, vocabulary lists and a learner community sit behind a paid membership. Too fast for beginners; ideal for the B1 plateau.
Hundreds of free lessons working through JLPT grammar points in Japanese only, which doubles as listening practice and is the standard recommendation for N2 and N1 preparation. Free on YouTube; the company also sells structured online courses. Because it is all in Japanese with no English scaffolding, it is unusable below roughly N4 level.
Haruka speaks entirely in Japanese at close to natural speed about news, culture and the vocabulary and grammar that JLPT N2 and N1 actually test. It targets the stage most learners get stuck at — too advanced for beginner podcasts, not yet able to follow native radio — and there are nearly 400 episodes to work through. Transcripts and extras are paid. It is deliberately harder than beginner-level shows, so expect to relisten.
Radicals build into kanji which build into vocabulary, all on a spaced-repetition schedule you cannot rush — that enforced pacing is exactly why it works for people who bounce off self-managed Anki decks. Levels 1–3 are free; after that it is $9/month, $89/year or $299 lifetime (lifetime goes on sale most Decembers). Downsides: you cannot skip kanji you already know, the pace is fixed at roughly 1.5 years to finish, and it teaches readings rather than how to use the words in sentences.
Fills the gap Anki and WaniKani leave: it drills grammar in cloze sentences and, for every point, links to the relevant page in Tae Kim, Genki, Imabi and others so you can read a real explanation before reviewing. There is a permanent free tier plus a 30-day full trial; Premium is $5/month or $150 lifetime, which is cheap for what it covers. It assumes you already have kana and some vocabulary, and it is a review tool rather than a first-time teacher.
Lets you build study sets by JLPT level, grade, frequency or your own list, with flashcards, multiple-choice quizzes, writing challenges and a built-in dictionary — all offline. The free version covers the first few JLPT levels; a single in-app purchase (around $12) unlocks everything permanently, with no subscription. Android only, and the sheer number of options takes a while to navigate.
Over 1,600 episodes of original serialised stories and articles, each with human-recorded audio, per-word definitions in context, and editor notes explaining why a sentence works the way it does — that last part is what separates it from generic reading apps. You can dial furigana down as you improve, and it syncs with your WaniKani level so known kanji lose their furigana automatically. Some content is free; full access is $9/month or $89/year, and it is aimed squarely at the awkward post-Genki stage rather than absolute beginners.
Works entirely offline, shows conjugation tables and example sentences, supports handwriting input, and can export selected words straight to Anki — which makes it the practical companion to a paper textbook or a book you are reading on the train. Completely free with no ads. Android and Windows only; iOS users should use Shirabe Jisho instead.
Covers kana plus 3,500 kanji including all jōyō and jinmeiyō characters, checking your stroke order as you draw. It can sync its order to WaniKani, RTK or JLPT levels so it slots into whatever you already use. Currently free on iOS and Android (the developer has said early users keep the full version free permanently). Handwriting is a real time cost, so it only makes sense if producing kanji by hand actually matters to you.
One of the few sites where the free tier is a complete study system rather than a demo: kanji, vocabulary, grammar and listening schedules, quizzes in several formats, and preset lists matching Genki, Tobira and the JLPT levels. Pro adds extras but is not required. The interface is busy and old-fashioned, and the friendly-mascot presentation is not to everyone's taste, but for a free all-rounder it is hard to beat.
Free blog and grammar reference from the team behind WaniKani, covering everything from particle nuance to honest reviews of other learning resources. Its resource-review database is genuinely useful when you are deciding what to buy. It is reference reading rather than a curriculum, so it works best alongside a structured course.
Built on the free JMdict/KANJIDIC data, it handles wildcard searches, deconjugates verbs, draws kanji by radical or handwriting, and tags words by JLPT level and commonness. Free with no account required. The example sentences come from Tatoeba and vary in quality, and for nuance between near-synonyms a monolingual dictionary will serve you better once you can read one.
Daily news stories rewritten for children and non-native residents, with furigana on every kanji, definitions on hover, and a slow narrated recording of each article. Free, updated every weekday, and the single best bridge from textbook Japanese to real news. Note that NHK moved the site to news.web.nhk and renamed it NHKやさしいことばニュース; old www3.nhk.or.jp links redirect. Articles are short and the vocabulary skews toward politics and disasters.
Hundreds of lessons that go far deeper than any commercial course, including Classical Japanese, dialects and rare constructions, all free. This is where you go when you hit a grammar point nothing else explains properly. Absolutely not a beginner's first course — the writing is academic and the sheer volume is discouraging if you start at lesson one.
Its killer feature is per-media word lists: look up a specific show or novel, see how many words it uses and what percentage you already know, then pre-study that deck before you start. The built-in SRS is fast and keyboard-driven. It is free but rough around the edges — sparse documentation, an opinionated review algorithm, and a small one-person-project feel — and it assumes you have already got past the beginner stage.
The public broadcaster's hourly radio news, posted as short podcast episodes throughout the day and kept for a week or so. Announcer-read NHK Japanese is about as clear as native news gets — every syllable is articulated, the register is formal and predictable, and the same story recurs across bulletins so you get repeated exposure to the same vocabulary. It is still genuinely hard: full native speed, no transcripts in the feed, and dense with 漢語 compounds and political vocabulary. Best used once you can already follow slower native speech; before then use NHK News Web Easy.
A long-running Tokyo podcast in which Michael speaks English and Mami speaks Japanese for the whole episode, each answering the other in their own language. The bilingual format is a genuine crutch for intermediate learners — you always know roughly what is being discussed, so you can concentrate on how Mami says it — and it is the show most Japanese learners hear about first. The Japanese half is unscripted native speed with a lot of opinion and slang. Free to listen; transcripts and study material are a paid add-on.
A hugely popular Japanese podcast about language: etymology, writing systems, why a construction feels wrong, with frequent detours into Japanese grammar as native speakers experience it. For a learner it is the rare native show whose subject matter directly feeds your study, and the explanatory format means points get restated more than once. It is unscripted, fast and full of puns, though, so it is a genuine B2-plus listen; the YouTube version has Japanese subtitles that make it considerably more tractable.
One of Japan's best-known podcasts: a researcher narrates the life of a historical figure or the arc of an era across several episodes while two co-hosts react and ask the obvious questions. The serial format is what makes it usable as input — names and vocabulary recur across an arc, and the co-hosts' questions restate the hard bits. The Japanese is unscripted and quick with a lot of historical and abstract vocabulary, so it is comfortable only around B2 upward. Free, with over 700 episodes.
Ken interviews people on the street and explains slang and onomatopoeia, all in Japanese with dual Japanese/English subtitles, so you get unscripted native speech with a safety net. Excellent for the stage where structured lessons are too slow but raw TV is still too fast. Free. There is no curriculum here — it is listening practice, not a course.
A podcast cut of NHKジャーナル, NHK Radio 1's flagship evening news programme: each episode is a single reported field segment, usually eight to fifteen minutes, on a social or economic story a reporter has actually gone out to cover. Because one subject fills the whole episode, context does a lot of work for you — easier going than a headline bulletin even though the Japanese is the same register. Interviewees speak unscripted and sometimes in regional accents, and there are no transcripts.
A daily segment from NHK's morning radio programme マイあさ！ in which an NHK correspondent posted overseas explains one story from the country they cover. Episodes are short, scripted and delivered at a measured pace, and the subject matter is often already familiar from international news in your own language — which makes it one of the more approachable NHK feeds. The feed retains only about a week of episodes. Vocabulary skews toward politics, economics and place names.
Three hours a day of news commentary hosted by the sociologist Ogiue Chiki, with academics, journalists and activists brought in to argue a single issue through properly. It is the best Japanese there is for hearing how educated adults actually construct an argument — hedging, conceding, pushing back — none of which learner material teaches. It is also hard: overlapping unscripted speech, specialist vocabulary, and no transcripts. Realistically a C1 listen; the daily feed carries the last few months only.
An enormously popular TBS Radio show in which the essayist Jane Su and the former announcer Horii Mika read listener letters and talk, mostly about ordinary middle-aged life. As learning material it is the opposite of the news: casual register, jokes, interruptions, half-finished sentences, and the sort of vocabulary you will actually use with friends. That also makes it one of the hardest things on this list — the humour depends on cultural reference and there are no transcripts, so treat it as a reward for reaching upper-intermediate rather than a study tool.
A long-running TBS Radio show in which three working comedians pick apart a theme each week — the structure of a joke, why a certain phrase irritates people, what makes an era feel like an era. The appeal for a learner is the sheer density of slang, wordplay and 芸人 rhythm you cannot get anywhere else. It is correspondingly difficult: fast overlapping speech and constant references to Japanese TV, so it only starts to pay off well past B2.
A short weekday round-up of the Nikkei's main business and markets stories, read and discussed by a presenter pair. Ten minutes is a realistic daily habit, and the recurring format — same sections, same framing verbs — means the structure becomes predictable fast even while the content changes. The vocabulary is squarely economic and the pace is brisk native radio, so it suits someone who already reads business news and wants the audio to match.
Radio NIKKEI's daily business briefing aimed at younger listeners: one or two stories per episode, explained rather than announced, in a conversational register with the jargon unpacked as it appears. That explain-it-first approach makes it markedly easier than a straight news bulletin while still being made entirely for natives. Episodes run around ten minutes. No transcripts, and the framing assumes some familiarity with Japanese companies.
A well-regarded Japanese talk podcast in which three hosts take an idea — trust, distance, ownership — and think out loud about it across several episodes without notes. It is a masterclass in the Japanese of tentative reasoning: the hedges, reformulations and 「なんというか」 fillers that make speech sound native rather than textbook. That is also why it is hard — abstract, unscripted, no transcripts, and no visual context to lean on. For advanced listeners only.
A researcher and a lay co-host discuss science news and the history of discoveries, with the co-host reliably stopping to ask what a term means. That built-in explanation loop makes technical Japanese unusually followable, and the show publishes show notes with the key terms written out — helpful when you can hear a 漢語 compound but cannot guess the kanji. Still native-speed unscripted conversation, so expect to miss things on the first pass.
Each week a writer, academic or public figure delivers an extended personal essay on a subject they care about, with almost no interruption from a host. Monologue at a lectern is unusually good listening practice: the speaker has prepared, the structure is explicit, and you get a sustained ten to twenty minutes on one topic rather than a scramble of voices. The register is formal and abstract, though, and speakers are mostly older, so expect dense vocabulary and no transcripts.
A daily current-affairs show from 文化放送 in which the broadcaster Nagano Tomoko interviews reporters and specialists about the day's stories. It sits between the NHK bulletins and the free-wheeling talk shows: prepared enough to follow, but conversational and full of the interview vocabulary — 伺う, ということですね, なるほど — that formal news never gives you. Full native speed with unscripted guests and no transcripts, so genuinely advanced listening.
The largest Japanese-learning community anywhere, and unusually well run for its size: a Daily Thread absorbs the beginner questions that would otherwise drown the front page, weekly threads cover writing practice and materials, and the wiki collects the answers people keep needing. Japanese generates more resource-choice paralysis than almost any language — kanji order, which grammar guide, when to start reading — and this is where those arguments have already been had. Opinionated and occasionally combative; read the wiki before posting.
The maintained successor to Yomichan, which was discontinued in 2023 — Yomitan is the version to install now, and it is actively developed, free and open source (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Android via Kiwi-style browsers). Hover any word to get readings, definitions, pitch accent and audio, then send the whole sentence to Anki as a mining card. Setup is fiddly: you must download and import dictionary files yourself, and the Anki integration needs the AnkiConnect add-on.
Runs OCR over manga pages and produces an HTML reader where the text is real selectable text overlaid on the artwork, which means Yomitan works on it. That turns manga from a hard-to-look-things-up format into one of the most accessible ways to read Japanese. Free and open source, but it is a command-line Python tool that you point at files you already own, so expect some setup and no content included.
Built specifically to replace the ageing Core 2k/6k decks, with hand-checked sentences, native audio, pitch-accent marking and no broken formatting. Free on GitHub. It is deliberately small — the point is to get you to the level where you can start mining your own words from real material within a few months, not to be your whole vocabulary plan.
Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, typically $10–15/month with big discounts on annual plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 13 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.
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 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.
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.