Leyla Shams has been teaching spoken Persian here since 2010, and the 230-plus podcast episodes remain free in any podcast app — warm, unhurried lessons built around phrases Iranians actually use, with cultural context woven in. Paid membership (from about $10/month with a 30-day trial) adds the structured Speak, Read/Write and Poetry paths, printable worksheets and live sessions. It is the best single starting point for spoken Farsi, but it is listening-led: the free feed does not teach the script, there is nothing to force you to produce language, and it plateaus around intermediate.
The Innovative Language formula applied to Persian: a short native dialogue, then a line-by-line breakdown, with PDF transcripts, vocabulary lists and flashcards on the paid tiers. A free lifetime account gives real access to the newest lessons, and the absolute-beginner series is a reasonable structured entry point. Two honest caveats: the Persian catalogue is far smaller than the flagship Japanese or Spanish ones and thins out badly above lower-intermediate, and the marketing is relentless, with several confusing tiers and constant discount emails.
A charity-funded project that sets out to be a complete free aid for anyone learning Persian: sequenced lessons beginning with the alphabet, courses, reading and poetry sections, and a separate strand for pre-schoolers. Everything is free and the site is still alive, with new articles published into 2026. Registration is only needed to track progress. The material is broad rather than deep and the presentation is plain WordPress, so it works best as your free backbone alongside an audio course rather than as your only resource.
An old-school free lesson series that starts with the Persian alphabet letter group by letter group and works up through grammar, everyday phrases and poetry, with audio on the lesson pages. There is no registration, no paywall and no upsell — you click lesson one and start, which is exactly why people keep recommending it. The design is dated and most of the site has not changed since the late 2010s, so treat it as a stable free textbook rather than a living course, and get your listening practice elsewhere.
Each episode builds vocabulary and grammar around a theme, with Persian literature segments, guest interviews and recurring Iran Facts sections on culture and tradition, and episode titles that tell you the level so you can jump in at the right point. It was still publishing in mid-2026 and the whole archive is free. The catch is that the project's own website is offline, so the podcast feed is effectively the resource — no transcripts, no worksheets, nothing to read along with.
John Mace's volume in Routledge's Comprehensive Grammars series describes modern Persian systematically — verb system, ezafe, word order, colloquial contractions and the gap between written and spoken forms — with examples in script and transliteration. It is the book that answers the questions courses gloss over, and it is organised for lookup rather than reading front to back. It is a descriptive reference with no exercises and no audio, and at reference-book prices it only earns its place once you are past the beginner stage.
A native teacher working through grammar, vocabulary, listening and conversation, with a deliberate emphasis on spoken Persian because, as he puts it, formal written Farsi differs considerably from what people actually say. There are also videos built on films, songs, poetry and idioms for later stages. Running since 2019 and still uploading weekly in 2026, all free. Playlists are the only structure on offer, so you need to impose your own order — good as your main free video teacher, not as a graded syllabus.
Bahareh is an English-Farsi translator and educator with a doctorate in translation studies who started making videos because so little existed for conversational Farsi, and it shows in how carefully she separates bookish forms from what people say. Uploads were still frequent in August 2026 and everything on the channel is free. The videos explain in English, which makes them approachable early but means this is a channel about Persian rather than immersion in it — pair it with an all-Persian input source.
Parisa teaches by comprehensible input: she speaks only Persian, keeping the language simple and supporting it with drawings, objects and gesture so you work out meaning from context rather than translation. That makes it one of the very few genuinely all-Persian input channels for beginners, and it is free. The catalogue is small — the channel only started in 2025 and uploads paused in early 2026 — so it is a supplement to a bigger course rather than a source you can live inside for months.
A step-by-step reading course: individual letters and their sounds, then words, then sentences, then simple stories, with new videos published Monday to Friday and still running in mid-2026. For a script that intimidates most beginners, this steady free drip is unusually effective, and hearing each word read aloud fixes pronunciation early. It is pitched at children and absolute beginners, so adults should expect a slow, cheerful pace and very simple vocabulary.
Produced since 2017 by a small studio for diaspora families who want their children to keep Persian, with animated songs, stories and letter-by-letter alphabet material, all free and all in Persian. Uploads continued into 2026. Adult learners are obviously not the target, but children's material is genuinely useful early listening — short sentences, heavy repetition and pictures carrying the meaning — so it is worth a look if you want easy Persian audio and can tolerate the register.
The host's own description is the whole pitch: we talk together in Persian and only in Persian. Episodes run roughly 25 to 40 minutes on everyday subjects — driving in Iran, ordinary objects, small philosophical detours — at a natural but unhurried pace, and it was still publishing in August 2026. Free, with no transcripts and no English scaffolding at all, so it only starts working once you can follow connected speech; below B1 it will be noise.
Yusuf and Alice — a native speaker and a learner — hold unscripted conversations in colloquial Persian on ordinary subjects, and each episode's show notes list the new words with English glosses and usage warnings, which is what lifts it above the many similar feeds. Free, supported by voluntary Ko-fi tips, and also on YouTube and Spotify. The learner side of the conversation means the Persian is a little slower than native chat, and the recording is homemade rather than produced.
Made for learners stuck between textbook Farsi and native media, with more than eighty free episodes and a third season built around Iranian cinema — one film per episode, discussing symbolism and comparing it with other films and literature. Publishing weekly through 2026. The production is deliberately homemade and there are no transcripts, and the cinema season assumes you will watch the films alongside it, which is either the appeal or the obstacle depending on your patience.
Elyar, a Tabriz-born teacher based in Milan, has built an unusually well-organised free site around spoken Persian: themed vocabulary guides running to thousands of words, grammar and script explanations, reading practice, and blunt reviews of the other Farsi resources on the market. The reference material is free; one-to-one lessons are the paid side, with a free 25-minute first session. It is one person's opinionated project rather than an institution, and it is newer than the classics, so cross-check anything surprising.
Saeed Yousef and Hayedeh Torabi split beginner Persian grammar into compact units, each explained in a couple of pages and then drilled with exercises whose answers are in the back, which makes it one of the few Persian books that works properly for self-study. There is a companion Intermediate volume when you outgrow it. It is exercises and explanation only — no audio, no dialogues, no conversation practice — so run it alongside a podcast or a tutor rather than on its own.
The Armenian School of Languages and Cultures runs Persian schools of two to ten weeks with native instructors, covering beginner through upper-intermediate, plus tutoring, excursions and a cohort of fellow students. For most people outside Iran it is the realistic way to get intensive in-person Persian, since studying in Tehran is impractical or unwise for many passports. It is expensive once you add flights and accommodation, the cohort skews academic, and dates are fixed months in advance — plan around a term, not a whim.
Built by the University of Texas at Austin as a free supplement for Persian courses, this is the reference you want open in a tab: the writing system explained piece by piece (connecting letters, hamze, madd, tanvin, tashdid), a transcription system, instructions for typing Persian, and grammar entries covering nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs and sentence structure, plus vocabulary with audio and quizzes. Everything is free and needs no account. The interface dates from 2007 and it is a reference rather than a course, so use it to answer questions your main course raises.
Hafez, Rumi, Ferdowsi, Saadi, Khayyam and hundreds of lesser-known poets, digitised in full and free, with recitations attached to many poems and links between related verses. Persian literary culture runs through poetry to a degree that surprises learners, and this is where Iranians themselves look a line up. It is classical language, so it will not teach you to order lunch, and there are no translations or learner notes — bring an advanced reading level or a teacher.
One of the biggest Persian-language news operations outside Iran, publishing text articles, video reports and programmes every day, all free and all in standard written Persian. As a graduation target it is ideal: the same story is often available as text and as video, so you can read first and then listen. Nothing is graded or slowed for learners, the register is formal, and the political framing is contested inside Iran — worth knowing, though it does not affect its value as language input.
The Persian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, publishing news audio, podcasts and matching text throughout the day — the audio-first counterpart to reading BBC Persian. Free and easy to work through in short bursts. It is a US-funded outlet and is blocked inside Iran, so its framing is not neutral and Iranian friends may react to it; as with any news source, use it for language and get your perspective from more than one place.
The everyday lookup tool many Iranians use: two-way Persian-English definitions with spoken pronunciation on a click, a machine translator, and a community question board where you can ask about a phrase nobody has defined. It is free and covers colloquial words that formal dictionaries omit. The interface is Persian-first and heavy with ads, and crowd-sourced answers vary in quality, so verify anything important against Vajehyab or a printed dictionary.
The largest English-language forum for Persian, and the practical place for the questions this language keeps producing: whether a phrase is bookish or spoken, how a word is pronounced in Tehran versus Kabul, where to buy Persian books abroad. Native speakers and heritage learners answer, and the mix is worth more than any single course for a language whose written and spoken forms diverge as far as this one's do. It is a general Persian community rather than a learners' one, so search before posting.
Type a word and it returns entries from more than twenty dictionaries side by side, including the monumental Dehkhoda lexicon and Moin, plus Persian-English glosses — the fastest way to see how a word is defined by Persian lexicographers rather than by a translation app. The core lookup is free; a subscription removes limits and ads. The interface is entirely in Persian and the definitions are written for native speakers, so this is a tool for the point where bilingual dictionaries start failing you, not for week one.
An online editor that converts Finglish, the Latin-letter transliteration Iranians use in chat, into proper Persian script as you type, with speech-to-text and downloadable desktop versions. It removes the single most common excuse for not writing Persian, which is that installing and learning the keyboard layout feels like a project in itself. The basic editor is free and paid plans add longer documents and extra features. It is a crutch: eventually learn the real layout, or your spelling will stay guesswork.
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.