🇻🇳 The best media for learning Vietnamese

Endless free current-affairs, business and lifestyle articles in standard written Vietnamese, updated all day. Because VnExpress also runs an English edition, you can often read the same story twice and check your comprehension without a teacher. This is unmodified native material: long sentences, Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and no glossing, so it belongs to the stage after graded readers rather than before.

The official channel of the news department of Đài Truyền Hình Việt Nam, posting bulletins, explainers and fact-checks throughout the day to nearly seven million subscribers. Broadcast news is the most reliable free supply of unmodified spoken Vietnamese there is: the register is formal, the diction is clear, and the same events are covered in English elsewhere so you can check whether you understood. It is genuinely hard — no glossing, no slowing down — and it belongs after the graded input channels, not instead of them. Use the YouTube channel rather than the VTV Go app, which is geo-restricted outside Vietnam.

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.

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.

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.