It’s home of the double-headed eagle and the legendary Skanderbeg, where iso-polyphonic singing can still be heard if you’re lucky. Albania is a country that isn’t on everyone’s radar, but maybe it should be. It’s a country with friendly people, incredible landscapes, and an impressively distinct language.
Ling is a gamified language-learning app with courses on over 60 different languages. Practice happens through short themed lessons, making for convenient and entertaining study time. It isn’t the most comprehensive resource out there, especially for more popular languages, but it can make a decent way to get started with a less common language.
The app is easy to use and visually appealing, but I found some mistakes in the material.
There aren’t many explanations, and the materials are the same for each language, but practice is varied.
For many of its less common languages, there aren’t a lot of viable alternatives, but the price feels high.
It uses native speaker audio.
The activities are enjoyable and don’t become overly repetitive.
It’s easy to use and is visually appealing.
There are very few grammar explanations.
There are no translations for individual words.
Some activities can be buggy.
Over 60 languages, including less common ones like Thai, Tagalog, Serbian, Nepali, Albanian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Finnish, and Khmer.
| Monthly | $8.99 |
| Annual | $43.99 |
| Lifetime | $119.99 |
Assimil is a French company that has been selling language-learning resources since 1929. Assimil materials are available as books, CDs, and downloadable e-courses; there are a variety of available course types, and instruction is based on interacting with phrases in the target language. The popular Sans Peine or, With Ease, courses are for absolute or false beginners that would like to reach the B2 level, but we think you’ll need to incorporate some other study materials to make this happen.
The language materials are reliable, the audio is high quality, and the program is fairly easy to use after a bit of practice.
Assimil is chock-full of explanations and thorough translations for all material, but you might need more to reach the advertised B2 level.
There are cheaper resources out there, but Assimil provides super solid instruction for the price.
The audio quality is great.
The culture notes add a lot of value.
There are plenty of grammar explanations, but they aren’t a focus.
The mobile app isn’t super intuitive.
The pronunciation feedback method could be better.
The exercises aren’t especially engaging.
The majority of courses are for speakers of French, but instruction is available in 13 different source languages.
English speakers can find the popular With Ease courses in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. There are also phrasebooks and writing courses for a variety of other languages like Japanese, Chinese, and Russian.
Prices vary by course. The Spanish e-course is €49.90, the Spanish With Ease book (no audio) is €26.90, and the Spanish With Ease Superpack is €74.90
The world’s number of English learners is massive, and this has given way to the production of a huge number of viable resources for learning English online. For beginners and those looking to get well-rounded practice in a variety of English skills, online courses are often the best way to go.
In this post, we’ll look at over 35 of these online courses for English learners. The “Top Tier” category contains our favorites, and we’ve listed the others roughly in order of how fond we are of them. While we have tested a ton of the courses ourselves, others we haven’t yet had the chance to try, so we made our best guess based on the information we could find regarding where to place them.
This list certainly isn’t exhaustive, but it should help you narrow down your search or give you a good place to start.
Top Tier
Babbel, Pimsleur, Language Transfer, Memrise, Magoosh, Cambly, Duolingo
2nd Tier
Lingodeer, Busuu, BBC Learning English, Lingoda, Chatterbug, Rocket English, ABA English, ESLPod, Perfectly Spoken, Alison, Learn English Network, mmmEnglish, Live Lingua, English Central
3rd Tier
Hello English, Glossika, EdX, Coursera, Udemy, MOOEC, Mango Languages, Living Language, uTalk, USA Learns, ESOL Courses, engVid
Stay Clear
Transparent Language, Language101, Mondly, Rosetta Stone (more…)
Super Chinese is an app for learning Mandarin that claims to help users, “Learn efficiently using our proprietary artificial intelligence.” Produced by the creators of HSKOnline, it’s available for iOS and Android, is free to download, and requires a subscription for full access. Language practice happens in a variety of interactive exercises that test learners’ abilities in reading, writing, listening, and speaking Mandarin.
The app is easy to use and fun, but animated videos aren’t especially engaging.
Practice is varied, and lessons build on each other nicely, but I think it’s doubtful you’ll come away fluent or proficient at writing.
There are cheaper resources out there, but study time with Super Chinese should equip you with some practical language skills.
The practice activities are varied.
There’s male and female native speaker audio.
It’s fun to use.
There’s no clear character memorization aspect.
The writing practice feels insufficient.
I wanted more guidance with pronunciation.
Mandarin Chinese
A subscription to Super Chinese+ is €59.99/year, €24.99/three months, or €9.99/month. You can save 15% with the coupon code ‘alr15’.
Skritter is a language app that teaches learners to write characters in Chinese and Japanese. It uses handwriting recognition technology in conjunction with a spaced repetition system to teach stroke order, meaning, and vocabulary. Users can choose from many pre-made study decks, including some from popular textbooks or programs. It’s also possible to create your own decks.
The app has a great design and quality content; the handwriting recognition isn’t perfect, but it’s rarely inaccurate.
It sets out to teach reading and writing and does a great job, but some additional explanations would be nice.
The SRS makes practice efficient and worthwhile, but some people may only want to pay for a month at a time.
Native-speaker audio is high quality.
The handwriting recognition works very well.
The design and interface are great.
It’s somewhat costly for a resource with a narrow focus.
The review mechanics can be confusing at first.
Chinese and Japanese
| One Month | $14.99 |
| Six Months | $59.99 |
| One Year | $99.99 |
| Two Years | $179.99 |
You can save 10% on any subscription by signing up with the link below.
The Coffee Break Languages series teach languages through podcast-style lessons. The lessons have a casual feel and offer lots of explanations, building on each other nicely. Courses are available for a one-time purchase, but much of the material is also available for free as podcasts or Youtube videos.
The audio is of high quality and the instruction is thoughtful.
There are lots of explanations, and you can start as an absolute beginner, but practice opportunities are limited.
There is a lot of high-quality content available for free; the paid courses might not be worth the price for some.
Explanations are thorough.
Lessons build on each other logically.
The language often feels authentic.
There’s lots of free content.
Opportunities to interact with the language are limited.
There isn’t much of a focus on productive skills.
I expected the paid courses to offer more extra materials for the price.
Italian, German, French, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Swedish, English
Many audio lessons are free. The premium version of each season includes extra materials and costs $104.
One season: $104
Two-season bundle: $183
Three-season bundle: $275
Four-season bundle: $335
Mandarin Blueprint is an online course for learning Mandarin Chinese. It teaches the language through videos and flashcards on the Anki flashcard app. It also makes use of the Hanzi Movie Method, which is a mnemonic memorization technique involving visualizations. The course is very thorough and designed for absolute beginners looking to build a solid foundation in Mandarin.
There’s some great teaching material, but the course relies on third-party resources like Google Slides and Anki.
The course is detailed enough to take absolute beginners to the intermediate level.
The initial phases are time-consuming, but serious learners will get a lot of value from the course.
The Hanzi Movie Method is effective.
The hosts are likeable and provide quality instruction.
Native speaker audio includes male and female voices.
The material is culturally aware.
There is a lot of English explanation.
The course progression is confusing at first.
Most of the practice happens through Anki flashcards.
Mandarin Chinese
There are three different options for purchasing Mandarin Blueprint:
One-Time: A single payment of $599 gives you full, lifetime access to everything.
Subscription: A $29 monthly subscription gives you full access to everything for the length of your subscription.
Installments: 12 monthly payments of $65 gives you full, lifetime access to everything.
You can save 20% on your purchase by using coupon code “ALR20”
Cudoo is an online learning platform that offers courses in over 160 languages. The platform also offers courses teaching soft skills and other professional development courses. Certificates are available upon course completion, and courses are provided to libraries and non-profits for free. We feel that the quality of the language courses is quite low, and that the prices are relatively high.
It’s nice to have native speaker audio, but I personally found the course to offer very little learning potential.
The course didn’t cover everything listed under “Course Content” and offers no explanations.
This course is way overpriced in my opinion. I wouldn’t even use it if it were free.
Audio by a variety of native speakers.
I wanted more explanations
Practice opportunities felt severely limited
I found the material unengaging
Content doesn’t build on itself logically.
There are courses in over 160 languages on Cudoo. You’ll find languages as rare as Alsatian, Jerriais, and Navajo alongside more popular languages like Spanish and German.
Price varies by course, from $4.99 to $24.99, with language bundles costing up to $199.
Yabla is a language-learning platform that uses videos with interactive subtitles and language games to help users learn a language. It’s currently available on the web and for iOS, with an Android app in development. Its videos are of varying difficulty levels and types, and are either sourced from the internet or originally produced, but all videos use native speakers.
It’s very easy and enjoyable to use, but the flashcard feature could be more developed.
While they vary slightly for each language, the video libraries are extensive and full of interesting content.
It’s most valuable for learners at the intermediate and advanced levels and is priced very fairly, but you’ll only get access to one language.
It’s very affordable.
The review activities are enjoyable and varied.
You can filter content by region.
There are plenty of interesting and varied videos.
Audio in some review activities is robotic.
No speaking practice.
Translations don’t take context into account.
Chinese, Italian, German, French, Spanish, English
After a 15-day free trial, users can subscribe to one of the following options:
One month: $12.95
Six months: $54.95
One year: $99.95
