The great thing about the Internet is that you can get a lot of things for free. Learning another Language is no exception to that believe it or not and you don’t need to spend a lot of money to learn another language. In fact, there are so many free options that it’s impossible to describe all of them since new ones are popping up every other day.
However, of the free options that you have, here some five of the best ones that you can certainly use. Be sure to check them all out!
- Duolingo
What makes Duolingo so much fun to work with is the fact that it turns Language Learning into something fun and exciting. Instead of offering Courses, Lessons, and reading material for people to download and work with, it takes a different approach to learning where it turns it all into a game to make people feel like they’re being challenged, instead of merely absorbing the information.
Here’s how it does it: At the start of each practice game, you have a certain amount of hearts that constitutes your “life” total. You make a mistake, or you take too long, you end up losing a heart. Lose all of your hearts in that game and you get locked out of that lesson for the day, and have to either wait 24hrs to start again, or spend a collection of gems to renew your heart total. You collect gems by completing levels, not making mistakes, or just by collecting them annually. IMHO Reviews described Duolingo as a new and progressive way to learn the language.
If you want a quick, fast paced, fun way to learn every day, then Duolingo is perfect for you. It does have a prescription to it, but the free accounts are robust in usage and you can use the free account as often as you want
- Open Culture
Open Culture is a great place to pick up a Language to learn, and all for free as well. While it’s not an App you can use on your phone and on the go, such as Duolingo above, it is great in that a lot of the lesson plans you can download range in difficulty depending on your skill level and what you’re comfortable learning from. All lessons range from standard elementary to college level courses and are based entirely on community driven lesson plans from many different sources. These sources, of course, being from either students or teachers themselves.
Of course there are some downsides to this platform. The biggest downside being that there are only 48 options of different languages to learn, and most of them are based off of the most popular, and well-spoken languages such as English, French, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, and Japanese.
The second biggest downside is not all language lessons are made the same. English, for example, has by far the largest amount of Courses available with a lot of the Latin based languages being next in terms of popularity down in descending order. However the fact that its’ community driven, free, and in various different formats and levels makes for an interesting platform to get free Language Learning lessons.
- YouTube
Surprisingly, YouTube has a very robust language learning community when it comes to various users.
It’s true. Through YouTube you can learn various different linguistic histories of various different languages, learn how to pronounce and structure sentences in different languages and even get detailed lessons on how phonetics and accents work to sound more naturalized so as to be better understood by native speakers, or even learn fun and interesting things such as slang and idioms in those specific languages.
Now, bear in mind that YouTube can be either hit or miss depending on what you find. For every 1 great channel that goes fully in depth on lessons that you can use, you’ll find roughly 3-5 bad ones that are either inaccurate or poor produced with lowered quality.
However the best thing is there are a lot of users that are interconnected with various other channels and communities that you can seek to join for every good channel that you find.
- Memrise
What makes Memrise so great is that it takes a different approach to language learning. Rather than learning grammar and sentence structure, and how different languages are spoken natively, Memrise is more oriented towards teaching users vocabulary and designed to help you with memorizing words and phrases that you can say.
Now a lot of people use both this, and Duolingo together, because they both more or less “gamify” Language Learning and treat it as more of a fun activity that you can do rather than bore you with course work and lesson plans and more. Not only that but like Duolingo, it also has a paid and free version of the platform with the free version still being rather robust despite it being… well…free.
So what do you get with the Free version of the App? Essentially the way it helps users is by allowing users to review words and phrases and playing different games. One of which is called “Speed Review” where it challenges users to correctly guess key words and phrases in their languages as fast as they can.
- Hello Talk
A lot of people don’t know about Hello Talk, which is really quite a shame. Unlike a lot of other apps or platforms on this list that curate different courses and lessons for you to peruse and take at your leisure, Hello Talk instead focuses less on lessons and more on connecting users with speakers of their Target Language that they want to learn.
So think of it as more of a ways to hands on learn the language you want to speak. With you being connected with other users who seek your target language, they can help you with your pronunciation, grammar and help you through either text or voice. Not only that, but they also have an up to date translation tool to help users by assisting them when they don’t know what to say, or have difficulty in expressing exactly what it is they’re thinking to say.
With over 10 million users currently, Hello Talk includes one on one conversation, or allows users to connect to their chosen language with others who are learning or native.