There is a whole host of free resources available online to help you learn a language. Here are some tips to get you successfully started.
Although this website has not been updated since 2007, it has been left for posterity and contains a wealth of resources to help you advance in a language from the very beginning. There you will find video tutorials, pronunciation audio clips, and phrase banks in 40 languages, comprehension quizzes and much more.
The United States Foreign Services Institute brings this website to you. It provides quality courses for over 40 languages developed by the US government “to foster the learning of worldwide languages”. It offers audio as well as text materials.
This is an online language learning social network that aids your study via video and live classes and peer review. Native speakers around the globe are on hand for chat, reference and assistance.
This app’s language courses are divided according to the different levels of the Common European Framework of Reference. You learn key words and phrases and can interact with native speakers by submitting practice exercises to the community. It offers eleven languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Turkish.
This is an amazing app that gamifies the process of language learning, making it fun and addictive. You test your knowledge by completing quizzes or competing against other players for points, and your progress is marked by levelling up. It also develops your translation skills. The languages on offer are English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
This is a vocabulary-building app that uses algorithms to help you memorize new words. You can create your own flashcards complete with images and sound. There are many shared decks made by other users for you to download so you can get started right away.
A similar flashcard app is Memrise that also uses algorithms to select when to repeat a flashcard you learnt previously to check that you remember it. You can measure your progress with statistics.
Finally, do not forget to do a search for language podcasts or blogs on YouTube like “EnglishAnyone” or “Learn Chinese with Chinese Class”. There are thousands of them.
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