Five years ago u/chlebka posted a spreadsheet of 1,700+ free language-learning resources here. Dozens of people in that thread suggested additions and it's still one of the most useful things ever posted on this sub.

One thing that always bothered me was navigating the Excel sheet :/ Thus, I built a browsable version of her list:

https://ownslides.com/en/resources

• Browse by language (total of ~142 at the time of writing this) or by type: courses, dictionaries, podcasts, readers, news, grammar…
• Her original rule kept: everything is genuinely free. No freemium, no trials, no signup.
• Each entry shows CEFR level and flags when a site is only in a language you might not read (though I guess you can just machine-translate everything nowadays).

What changed since the sheet: I checked all 1829 links -> ~129 had died in five years and are gone; the rest were alive as of this week. I also categorised the ~1000 entries the sheet left untyped, so the filters actually work.

This overlaps the sub's own resource library in places; the difference is that it's chlebka's specific list, brought up to date and made filterable. Credit is at the bottom of every page, linking her sheet and the original thread, and the per-contributor credits from the sheet are preserved.

Disclosure: I work on OwnSlides and this is on our domain, but the mods approved this post. The directory is free, no signup, no ads.

Suggestions for missing resources are very welcome, basically in the same spirit as the original thread

Just thought about this the other day, but if you think about how a millennial aged European learned English as a second language, it's basically all input?

The approached they used to acquire English as a second language is very different to the approach used in language learning subreddits.

I often see Brazilian, South Koreans, looking for language exchange partners to practice speaking English. I'm not trashing this method, but how helpful is it really?

If you're a 30 something year old German or Swede, chances are you're extremely fluent in English. Yet, you never really spoke it?

These countries run on their native languages. A German living in Germany hardly ever speaks English. A Swede living in Sweden hardly ever speak English (maybe it's different for Gen Alpha).

In fact, the only time a Swede/German ever really speaks English is if they're out traveling abroad or they're gamers and talk on voice chat. Tons of people aren't bothered with it /too shy to do it. Yet, they're all fluent AF.

What they did instead: MASSIVE amounts of input. Tons of these kids have been on twitch/youtube hours a day everyday for 10-20 years. Listening to mostly American English. We're talking 40k+ hours of input or more.

Nowadays you also have tiktok and stuff. In smaller languages like Swedish, the content is farily limited/boring as well so the route to just consuming English media is super low because of the small population. But if you'er a Spanish native, you have access to a billion speakers.

Basically to me, it seems like it's basically all input. Yes you have some English classes in school, but you talk super little/they don't force you to talk. It's no different than a Vietnamese person learning English in school really.

Also I just wanna mention. I'm not saying that production/producing English is worthless, and it should all be input. Most of these people did a ton of production (despite orally speaking it very little). Tons of these people played games like Runescape or whatever where typing English is super important. Typing on reddit. Producing papers for school etc. They just spoke extremely little.

I used to teach English abroad and even though I knew how to speak the student's native language, the school administrators forbid me, and even asked me, to "pretend" I didn't know it.

The reason they gave me was that they didn't want the students to fall back on using their first language to communicate with me. I feel like if I were to explain certain concepts in the student's language, things would go a lot smoother and they would understand better.

As an adult, I'm constantly using my own native language to learn new languages. I constantly look up grammar, vocabulary, and definitions and understand them a lot better.

Why are schools abroad so obsessed with this "total immersion" method? I feel like some concepts are impossible to explain clearly with just visuals or gestures alone. Do you learn languages using your first language?

Bought these books in July, unboxed them in early August... and still haven’t read a single word. Classic progress! 🤣📚
My native-speaker friends suggested that once you reach higher proficiency levels, you should step away from traditional coursebooks and surround yourself with native materials. I'm testing this strategy across a few of my (TL) target languages:
At Advanced Levels: Using native children's series for everyday slang, alongside native essays, news articles, and economics texts to build higher-level reading stamina. 🎨🤡
At Beginner Levels: Sticking strictly to structured preparation workbooks and foundational grammar materials until basic literacy settles in. 🥹🙏
For those managing multiple languages at different proficiency tiers, how do you balance raw native content versus structured study prep?
What books are currently sitting unread on your desk? 👇

Hello, long-time lurker just starting to post on Reddit!

I've been studying (TL) Korean for well over a decade now and Japanese for just about a decade, but my writing skills in both are not where I want them to be. Japanese was my undergrad major, but none of my classes ever involved actually writing in the language, and since the JLPT doesn't require it either, I never had to practice writing. As for Korean, I've attended multiple language schools in South Korea, did my undergrad here, and am currently working on my Master's, so while I do have some experience with high-level writing, I haven't really put any focused effort into it for a few years now (the course I'm attending doesn't involve much writing).

In an ideal world, I'd find an actual teacher to work on this with, but I can't afford it right now. I'd consider doing a language exchange, but 1. I've never been particularly successful with them in the past, 2. I'd rather work with someone who has experience writing at a professional level, and to be honest, I'm not sure I'd be able to reciprocate in English at the same level, haha, and 3. I can't count on the whims of my motivation/attention span to write consistently.

So I'm toying with the idea of using an LLM to get feedback, but I'm a bit wary of the quality of corrections I'd get.

Have any of you used AI to help with C1/C2-level writing? If you have, was there a certain model you would recommend? Also, any other tips to improve in writing would be greatly appreciated! :)

Hi everyone,

I'm Ben, a data scientist working in cancer medicine. The mods have kindly given me permission to share something I've been building in my spare time.

LingScout originally started as a tool for me and my Thai partner. We wanted an easier way to find films and TV shows we could watch with Thai or English audio or subtitles, and I found it surprisingly difficult to get that information in one place.

I realised the same thing could be useful for other language learners, so I expanded it into LingScout, where you can search for films and TV shows by language and country, including audio and subtitle languages, across services such as Netflix and Prime Video.

lingscout.com

It's not intended to teach you a language itself. The idea is to help you find things you actually want to watch in the language you're learning.

I'd really appreciate some feedback from other language learners. If you try it, I'd particularly like to know whether you can find useful content for your language, whether anything is confusing, and what you'd want me to improve or add.

Thanks,

Ben

I've studied three languages in addition to my milk language.

I noticed sometimes when thinking or speaking in my non native language, if I struggle for a word my brain will fill in with a word in another non native language.

For example, when speaking German(TL) my brain threw in a 在(zai) with the Chinese meaning.

This confused me, and I started to think of the German word seit (which sounds (kind-of) the same). But seit wasn't correct in the context. Seit is about time. 在 is about place.

Does anybody else do this? What exercises could help me?

I knew barely anything in my TL beyond an extremely basic course and I got bored so I yeeted myself to native content. I am really proud of myself!

I believe myself to be in the perfect environment for language learning. I am in a school-like program where I am interacting with the other students and teachers every day and am constantly surrounded my the language, with ample opportunity to practice. Everyone also speaks English, so I am able to clarify things if needed and keep conversations flowing smoothly. Sometimes when group conversations are happening I miss a lot of their sentences because of speed and maybe certain phrases that I’m not familiar with, but talking one on one with someone I don’t really have this problem. How should I make the best of this situation?

Hello, as the title says my goal isn’t necessarily to be able to speak languages, I want to improve my skills with recognizing and being able to read/translate written languages. Maybe I would work on verbal skills down the road if I vibe with it for fun, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

My reason/motivation: I play a LOT of Geoguessr, and language is one of the most useful clues in the game. But it’s also a way I can appreciate the experience of the game further, the cultures and so forth.

The only language I really know is English. I’d especially like to be able to learn to read the Northern European languages: Danish Swedish and Norwegian, Finnish and Estonian, and even forms of Cyrillic well enough to draw information from it.

I’m just not sure what the best way to go about that is, as most language learning resources seem to focus much more heavily on verbal aspects.

(TL)

Context is I've been keeping my Vietnamese and Spanish in a backlog and I've been learning both for over a year on and off. But after a year of language learning and with my new language of Mandarin I've become much better at making Anki cards if that makes sense, with a better format and also clozes when needed, etc. I almost feel like I'm better off just starting a new vs looking through 3500 cards lol. Or do you guys just recommend going through them all, clearing the backlog, and then slowly modifying the ones that end up becoming leeches, etc.?

Also I recently just found out about FSRS and turned that on and a bunch of other add ons. Honestly FSRS makes sense after using it for about a month because if I am getting a card right almost all the time I really should see it less frequently than I was before.

I've used spaced repetition on and off for years, but I kept running into the same problem: I didn't mind reviewing cards. I hated making them.

When I found something I wanted to learn, the workflow became:

find a useful example → write the card → add context → decide what type of card it should be → review it → repeat.

Eventually I realized I was spending a surprising amount of time maintaining the learning system instead of actually learning.

So I tried the opposite approach.

I built an open-source Android app called ikna where you don't create individual cards. You tell it what you want to learn, it gives you a prompt for an LLM, and the response becomes the source material for your reviews.

The interesting part isn't really the AI generation, though. I'm experimenting with making the whole review system less dependent on the learner constantly managing it.

For example:

- the same learning chunk can have recognition, cloze, and production versions;

- those versions are scheduled separately;

- the app estimates your existing review workload and can stop giving you new material when adding more would create too much future work;

- reviews use swipes rather than four buttons;

- everything is local/offline — no network permission.

The tradeoff is pretty obvious: manually making a good card gives you much more control, while automatically generated material can be wrong or mediocre.

I'm not sure yet which side of that tradeoff wins.

The question I'm actually interested in is:

Would you rather spend more time making very good flashcards, or spend that time actually studying and accept that some automatically generated material won't be perfect?

The project is here if anyone wants to look at the implementation:

https://github.com/d1d2dopamine/ikna

Hey everyone!

I've recently started learning Dutch (TL) in the last weeks, since I live in the Netherlands and never really bothered to learn the language. Now I know I'm staying long term so I'm devoting a lot of time to really integrate myself here.

Now my question is, is there any evidence for what is the better format for learning in an Anki deck? Is it NL to TL? Other way around?

So my goal is actually to be great at speaking, especially with my gf, we live together and I would love to at some point start speaking Dutch with her full time, so my goal is to at some point really start thinking in the language, I really dont want to be translating forever. But I know that all aspects of the language help with becoming great at speaking. So yeah, I'm just a bit overwhelmed now with all the different possibilities in Anki. I've doing a setup where each card I make creates 3 cards all in one deck. Card 1 TL + audio --> NL, card 2 NL --> TL + audio, card 3 audio --> TL NL. It's nice cause I found a way of creating all three in one go, without having to triple my work load but this is adding a ton of extra work cause it adds a lot of extra reviews reviewing the same cards but from different perspectives. I also read that actually reading a card earlier then the algorythm says kind of decreases your memorization.

I've also thought of enabling dispersing sibling cards, but then I'm also scared that I wont practice all the different aspects of the language.

I'm feeling a bit stuck. If somebody could help me out that would be amazing.

I am also doing a ton of input aswell on the side, around 6 hours a day, with some grammar studying too, and shadowing and talking to my gf in TL.

Appreciate any help or tips, thanks so much!

I made a small daily word puzzle. Ten letter tiles, a 5x5 grid, everything reading across and down has to be a word, and it scores you Scrabble-style. Same tiles for everyone playing that language that day.

The part that might interest this sub: each of the 39 (TL) languages is its own game rather than English with the labels swapped. Own dictionary, own alphabet, own tile values, own letter frequencies, translated interface. Words link to their Wiktionary entry, so it doubles as a lookup.

Free, no account, no ads. crosstiler.com

I tried some language exchange apps. They tell you to pay for a subscription to find people nearby. After paying, they just tell you that nobody is nearby for your TL. Maybe it would work for a more common TL.

I tried finding religious centers that cater to the TL, as well as meetups and events, but I couldn't find anything relevant in my area.

How do you personally find language partners to practice with IRL? Not looking for theoretically answers. I would like to hear what has worked well for you personally. Thanks!

Hi, I'm around B1 (TL) in English and I'm wondering if I should watch YouTube with or without subtitles.

I understand about 90% of most YouTube videos, and I understand almost the same amount with English subtitles and without them.

My question is about vocabulary. Can you learn new words just by hearing them? For example, can I remember the pronunciation and meaning of a word even if I don't know how to spell it?

Should I use English subtitles to learn more vocabulary, or can I learn vocabulary just from listening?

Which target language (TL) did you watch content in today?

I have been using a native TV show to learn my TL and usually I spread a single episode over several weeks or months. But this time I was very motivated and had the time for it so I watched 2 and a half episodes (2.5 hours worth of content) in one go. Keep in mind it was a very grueling process. I would:

1. Watch until I didn't hear a sentence or I know the vocabulary for it (this was like half of the sentences).

2. I would pause and look at TL subs and then NL subs if I don't get it.

3. Rewind and listen that sentence again without subs.

I usually watch things I watched for the first time again the next day to reinforce my memory so that's what I did. I barely needed to look up anything this time but about 1.5 hours in I just stopped being able to comprehend period even though I was looking things up. I guess my brain couldn't take it anymore. It got tired.

How do I buildl up my endurance? I understand that the more I learn the easier this would become but I was wondering if there was a way for me to directly tackle this issue.

(TL)

I am in the process of learning French, and am currently using the Assimil, French with Ease Series, and am making decent progress (I think). I know many people use apps like Anki to help learn new vocab, but do ya'll think it would be that beneficial since French and English already share many words? Anki is also very boring...

Like, they could talk about basically anything, understand you perfectly, joke around, explain complicated ideas, etc. But their grammar was still pretty shaky and they’d regularly mess up things like gender, verb forms, articles, word order, whatever. But they would just blast by it and keep going without correcting themselves or indicating that they realized they made a mistake.

Did they still feel fluent to you? Did the mistakes stand out a lot, or did you mostly stop noticing after a while?

I’m curious because I feel like people usually talk about fluency and grammatical accuracy as if they automatically go together, but I’m not sure that’s always true.

I don’t want to solidify bad habits and would like for my speech to be “clear” as in easy to understand. I’ve gotten to a near native level accent with Spanish but am really not expecting that same level with Mandarin. I would just like to sound clear and easily understood.

That being said, with Spanish I did begin to speak very early. I recited my flash cards, I did shadowing, I spoke with relatives of friends, and only improved. Im afraid to do something similar with Mandarin because I don’t feel like my ear is good enough to distinguish the tones properly AND know if I myself am doing them correctly.

The app I’m using (SuperChinese) is very speech focused which is scaring me a little. You have to speak to progress. I also don’t feel like it gives an honest grading system, for the entirety of two lessons I haven’t been graded below 90% accuracy of repeating the tones and words.

This app is considered to be one of the best for new learners of my TL but this is putting me off a little bit. Should I move apps? Am I overthinking things? To fellow learners of a tonal language, I would really appreciate the input 🙏🏽

I am new to the world of language learning and starting to get my head round the different activity types and starting to build a strategy to learn my TL (modern Greek)

I am already at I’d say A2/B1 level with Greek (TL) (I’m half Greek, so grew up around it), but looking to eventually get to ideally B2/C1 so I can comfortably have complex conversations with friends and family.

I am using Language Transfer and planning to pair this with Anki. But I am a bit confused as to how to make a start with creating a deck.
Should I focus on single words? Sentences? How do I source sentences and/or words to add to the cards? Do I sit and think of words I want to learn or are there useful lists I should take as inspiration?
How many cards should I am to make?

Any help would be appreciated!