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lexilogos

3.5

Price: Free

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Although Lexilogos seems to have entirely neglected its aesthetics, it holds more than meets the eye. If you click on one of the 130+ languages listed at the bottom of the page, you will find a series of resources to support your studies. This is especially useful for less-studied languages, like Marathi, Basque, and Pashto. Although the lists don’t provide recommendations for applications, they do provide a list of dictionaries, keyboards, news sites, books, and research papers. Additionally, if you switch to the French version of the site, there are even more languages and resources available for you to explore.

Within each language’s page, there is also a dictionary search function. You will notice that more commonly studied languages will have dozens of dictionaries to choose from, while less commonly studied languages may only have one or two.

Overall, Lexilogos is a great option for finding resources for less commonly studied languages. They regularly update their site, so make sure to check back if you don’t find what you’re looking for the first time around.

The current rating is our best estimate. We haven’t had the opportunity yet to more thoroughly evaluate this resource, as we do for our full reviews.

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By Brian Spanish Arabic Czech Danish Dutch English French German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Korean Latin Mandarin Chinese Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Swahili Swedish Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese

Duolingo

Quick Review

4

Summary:

Duolingo is a super popular free language-learning app. It’s available for desktop as well as mobile and offers over 90 different language courses in over 20 different languages — there are currently 35 languages with English instruction. The Duolingo approach is gamified and easy to use, but the bite-sized lessons don’t offer much in the way of in-depth practice. The Duolingo tag line is “Learn a language in just five minutes a day.”

Quality

It’s easy and fun to use, but some pronunciation and grammar instruction is of low quality, especially for Asian languages.

Thoroughness

The app works well for learning the basics, but there’s little speaking practice and grammar instruction is limited.

Value

It’s a lot of content for free, but you’ll need to use supplementary resources.

I Like…

The short lessons are ideal for quick, convenient practice

The game-like features make the exercises engaging and fun

The community aspect is motivating

I DON’T LIKE…

There’s no opportunity to create your own sentences

Grammar instruction isn’t part of the lessons

Text-to-speech audio is sometimes low quality

Languages: Duolingo offers 35 language courses with English instruction, three of which are constructed languages. Courses are available in most popular languages, including Spanish, French, German, etc.

Price

Duolingo is totally free. Duolingo Plus offers a few additional features and is available for:

$12.99/month (paid monthly)
$6.99/month (12-month subscription)

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By Brian Spanish Albanian Arabic Armenian Cantonese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Filipino French German Greek Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Korean Lithuanian Mandarin Chinese Norwegian Ojibwe Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Swahili Swedish Thai Turkish Twi Ukrainian Vietnamese

Pimsleur

Price: Subscriptions start at $14.95/mo

Quick Review

4

Summary:

Pimsleur is one of the most popular and longest-standing resources out there for learning a foreign language. Its courses place a strong emphasis on aural and verbal communication skills, paying less attention to grammar explanations and reading or writing skills. There are over 50 language courses available with Pimsleur, and the bulk of the material is taught with audio lessons.

Quality

The platform is extremely well designed and easy to use. The content seems to be of high quality at all levels.

Thoroughnes

Timely repetition and active practice work well, and lessons build on each other nicely, but the “intermediate fluency in 30 days” claim may be a stretch.

Value

The subscription option provides good value for some, but there may be more efficient ways to learn some languages.

I Like…

The lessons are structured well and are an appropriate length.

There are both male and female native speakers.

Lessons build on each other nicely.

The platform is easy to navigate and visually appealing.

I DON’T LIKE…

There’s very little visual content.

Lesson speed isn’t customizable.

Languages

There are courses in over 50 languages; you’ll find popular ones like German, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese alongside less common languages like Albanian, Finnish, and Haitian Creole.

Price

Subscriptions of either $14.95/month or $19.95/month are available for courses with at least 60 lessons. Prices otherwise range from around $20 to over $500. All purchases come with a 7-day free trial.

Try a free 7-day trial of Pimsleur

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Language Trainers

4

Price: Online course packages range from $390/10h to $2500/100h

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Language Trainers is an online and in-person tutoring service. They have a high satisfaction rate both with employees and students, and offer classes in over 80 languages. All of their teachers have teaching qualifications and are provided with additional material from the company to organize their classes according to their students’ needs. There is also a free placement test you can take on the site to determine your language level, but your teacher can also make that assessment during your first lesson.

The site usually doesn’t allow single-lesson purchases, but if you don’t enjoy your first class, you will not be billed for your first session and can switch to a different teacher. You can also get a refund for your purchase, minus the classes you have already attended at their hourly rate.

Although the classes are significantly more expensive than on Italki, if you can invest in Language Trainers, you can be sure that your classes will be personalized, structured, and will support your motivation to continue learning your target language.

The current rating is our best estimate. We haven’t had the opportunity yet to more thoroughly evaluate this resource, as we do for our full reviews.

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Master Any Language

0.2

Price: Free

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Master Any Language has a counterintuitive interface with activities that are frustrating to navigate. Its only perk is that it supports less-studied languages, but even if you do find yourself lacking resources in your target language, this website will probably detract from your learning. You will jump through hoops trying to find the audio recordings by native speakers, so you may want to try ilovelanguages or Learn101 instead; they have low ratings, but they won’t make you lose your motivation to learn altogether.

Most of the activities on Master Any Language are matching games that require you to click on two identical characters, words, or letters: the purpose of this is unclear because it tests neither recall nor recognition. Another activity asks you to form or match nonsensical sequences of words (Ex. Find the sentence identical to “el el el el tchèque tchèque tchèque el el tchèque tchèque”….).

Ultimately, you would probably be better off trying to decipher a page of text with absolutely no guidance than to even attempt to wrap your head around MAL’s activities.

The current rating is our best estimate. We haven’t had the opportunity yet to more thoroughly evaluate this resource, as we do for our full reviews.

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By Tara Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Bulgarian Cantonese Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Faroese Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hakka Hausa Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Igbo Indonesian Irish Italian Jamaican Creole Japanese Korean Kurdish Latin Lithuanian Luxembourgish Macedonian Mandarin Chinese Norwegian Occitan Papiamento Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Sanskrit Serbian Shona Slovak Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Thai Tibetan Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Welsh Wolof Yiddish

Verbix

2.3

Price: Free

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Verbix is a verb conjugator website and app developed by an independent non-profit organization. It conjugates over 100 languages, including Old English, Latin, and Yiddish

The amount of information on the conjugation page varies depending on how common the language is. At its best, it will display nominal forms, most common verb conjugations, verbs that have similar conjugations, translations, synonyms, antonyms, cognates, and a section on etymology. Sometimes there are sample sentences (without translations) that seem to come from articles and books. The final section on additional information seems a bit random, and its purpose is unclear.

To conjugate a verb in another language, you have to know the verb in its infinitive form. Unfortunately, although Verbix has a translation function, it doesn’t seem to cover all of the available languages, so you may not be able to find the verb you are looking for in the first place.

A fun page to explore is Verbix’s list of over 6000 languages with a map depicting where each of these languages is spoken. Otherwise, Verbix seems a bit random and incomplete. It may be a helpful resource for less commonly studied languages, but check out Reverso Translation, Cooljugator, and SpanishDict first.

Also, if you want to practice verb conjugations in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Latin, check out Conjuguemos

The current rating is our best estimate. We haven’t had the opportunity yet to more thoroughly evaluate this resource, as we do for our full reviews.

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By Tara Afrikaans Ainu Albanian Arabic Armenian Assamese Aymara Azerbaijani Balinese Bambara (Bamanankan) Banjar Basque Bavarian Belarusian Bengali Berber (Tamazight) Bhojpuri Bislama Bosnian Breton Bulgarian Burmese Cantonese Catalan Cebuano Chavacano Chechen Cherokee Choctaw Chukchi Cornish Corsican Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Erzya Esperanto Estonian Ewe Faroese Fijian (ITaukei) Filipino Finnish French Frisian Friulian Ga Galician Georgian German Greek Greenlandic Guarani Gujarati Haitian Creole Hakka Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Iban Icelandic Ido Igbo Indonesian Inuktitut Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kalmyk Oirat Kannada Kazakh Khmer (Cambodian) Kirundi Korean Kurdish Kyrgyz Ladin Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) Lakota Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Lombard Luganda Luxembourgish Macedonian Maithili Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maldivian (Dhivehi) Maltese Manchu Mandarin Chinese Manx Maori Marathi Marshallese Minangkabau Mingrelian Mirandese Mongolian Nahuatl Navajo (Diné bizaad) Nepali Norwegian Nuer Odia Ojibwe Okinawan Palauan Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Quechua Romani Romanian Russian Samoan Sanskrit Sardinian Scots Serbian Shanghainese Shona Sicilian Sindhi Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Sundanese Swahili Swazi Swedish Tajik Tamil Tatar Telugu Thai Tibetan Tigrinya Toki Pona Tongan Tsonga (Xitsonga) Turkish Turkmen Ukrainian Urdu Uyghur Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Wolof Xhosa Yakut Yiddish Yoruba Zaza (Northern) Zulu

Tatoeba

3.3

Price: Free

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Tatoeba is sentence-focused, not word focused. Therefore, by searching for a word in any language, you are searching for examples of that word in context. The site is community-driven, but you don’t have to speak multilingual to contribute to the site — it needs native-speaking writers to expand the example database and proofread user sentences.

All of the translations are interconnected: even if there is technically no direct translation from Zulu to Chinese, an English translation for the same sentences in both languages will provide direct translations between them.

Although Tatoeba supports about 388 languages, about 200 of these languages have less than 100 sentences, and about 58 have less than 10. Nevertheless, the database is continuously growing, and with more community members, the less common languages may have a chance to develop further.

It is prohibited to use a translation tool or copyrighted sentences to contribute to the translation database. Unfortunately, some contributors write in a language in which they are not proficiently fluent. As a result, the site has grammatical mistakes and sentences that don’t sound natural. You may have to do some digging to figure out if the contributor is a native speaker or not.

Because of the potential user errors on the site, you may want to check out WordReference, Pleco, SpanishDict, Kanji Study , and Linguee to find words in context for more commonly studied languages.

The current rating is our best estimate. We haven’t had the opportunity yet to more thoroughly evaluate this resource, as we do for our full reviews.

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By Tara Czech Dutch English French German Italian Polish Portuguese Spanish

Lingua

3.5

Price: Free

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Lingua is a free resource that offers reading, listening, dictation, and vocabulary activities.

Every day, the site provides six new dictations in your target language. You can listen to two separate native speakers reading a series of sentences first at a normal speed, and then a slower speed. After you have finished transcribing, the website will automatically check and correct your writing.

There are also short readings and listening comprehension exercises accompanied by a reading comprehension quiz on the side. The difficulty of content available depends on the language. Each exercise focuses on a theme relevant to everyday life, such as family, travel, and activities. Although each reading piece seems to have been written by native speakers, you may catch a few grammatical errors within the texts.

You can choose to quiz either your passive or active vocabulary with a flashcard-like activity, although you may want to make personalized flashcards on Anki or use pre-made decks on Brainscape for a more curated practice.

It’s probably possible to get through most of Lingua’s content in a month, as there are only a handful of exercises in each language. Nevertheless, it’s a solid supplementary resource for reading, listening, and dictation practice.

If you study French or German, TV5 Monde and Deutsche Welle are sites that have similar, more extensive free content.

The current rating is our best estimate. We haven’t had the opportunity yet to more thoroughly evaluate this resource, as we do for our full reviews.

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Loecsen

2.5

Price: Free

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Loecsen’s strengths are its attractive interface and drawings that accompany the content. It also uses high-quality audio recordings by native speakers, even in the less-common languages.

The website offers 41 different languages, but unfortunately, there are only about 432 phrases to learn, which will not take you beyond even the absolute basics. These phrases are practical, however, so in a pinch, they may save you abroad.

Despite the attractive interface, the buttons are not very intuitive, so you may have to click around to figure out what each one does. Below the main interactive program, you can see a list of vocabulary and a progress bar for speaking and vocabulary activities — the vocabulary highlights in green as you complete the quizzes. At the very bottom of the page, you can also see an overview of basic pronunciation.

For pronunciation practice, the read-aloud tool provides you with a series of songs or text excerpts that you can record yourself reading aloud and then compare with the original song (or a robot voice).

If you’re just looking to learn basic essential phrases and pick up some vocabulary for a trip, Loecsen is an attractive program for the very casual learner. Otherwise, many other resources can take you to at least the intermediate level in most of the same languages.

The current rating is our best estimate. We haven’t had the opportunity yet to more thoroughly evaluate this resource, as we do for our full reviews.

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By Tara Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Assamese Azeri Basque Belarusian Bosnian Bulgarian Burmese Cantonese Catalan Cebuano Croatian Czech Danish Dari Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish Flemish French Galician Georgian German Greek Greenlandic Gujarati Haitian Creole Hausa Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Khmer (Cambodian) Korean Kurdish Latin Latvian Lithuanian Maasai Macedonian Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maltese Mandarin Chinese Marathi Mongolian Nepali Norwegian Odia Oromo Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Samoan Serbian Shona Sindhi Slovak Somali Spanish Sundanese Swahili Swedish Tajik Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uyghur Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Xhosa Yiddish Yoruba Zulu

ilanguages

1.3

Price: Free

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Learn 101 is almost identical to iLanguages; they have the same native speaker audio files, languages, and mostly identical ‘lesson’ layouts. The main differences are that Learn 101 seems to have added some grammar explanations and reformatted a bit, while iLanguages seems to have added some extra phrases.

Since every one of the languages’ “lessons” has the exact same format, including the grammar section, you will learn how to say ‘and’, ‘but’, and ‘or’, in 107 languages, but you will not learn where these types of words fit within a specific language’s sentence structure. Every page is just a list of words with a translation (and sometimes an IPA symbol transliteration).

This site could be used if you want to hear native speakers pronounce basic words in very rare languages, or if you want to look up the IPA symbols of a rare language’s alphabet — otherwise, you’re probably better off making flashcards yourself on Anki or trying one of the hundreds of other resources we recommend on this site.

The current rating is our best estimate. We haven’t had the opportunity yet to more thoroughly evaluate this resource, as we do for our full reviews.

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