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By Tanya English French German Greek Hindi Italian Japanese Mandarin Chinese Portuguese Russian Spanish Thai Urdu

Oxford Dictionaries

4.2 
Price: From free to €16.99, depending on the language

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Oxford Dictionary has published numerous bilingual dictionaries over the years, many of which are not designed to be comprehensive. While some are “complete” dictionaries, others are called “mini”, “concise”, “essential” or even “shorter”.

Even the smaller ones are pretty thorough, however. The Oxford Mini Greek dictionary contains 40,000 words and phrases, many of which also contain multiple translations. It’s a lot shorter than the Oxford Hindi dictionary, at 100,000 entries, or the New Oxford American English Dictionary at 350,000 – but it’s still got a wider vocabulary than the average English speaker.

You can purchase the books themselves, but most learners will prefer the convenience of the apps with their regular updates and learner-friendly features. Search Autocomplete, Fuzzy Filter, Wild Card and Voice Search help you find words you don’t know how to spell. Favourites help you save useful words and phrases, while Word of the Day will introduce you to new words. Some dictionaries also contain audio recordings and thesauruses. And the freemium Oxford Dictionary with Translator will translate words and paragraphs to and from 14 languages.

For some languages, learners already have plenty of free, thorough dictionaries available to them. Spanish learners, for example, will probably prefer to combine the free apps SpanishDict and Diccionario RAE (Google Play, App Store). Mandarin Chinese learners will likely find Pleco more useful. But for some languages, these dictionaries may well be the most thorough and reliable ones available.

The rating is our best guess, but we haven’t yet had the opportunity to fully test and review this resource.

 

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By Nick Thai

The Best (And Worst) Online Thai Courses For 2021

Learning Thai can be complicated without the right tools. The good news is that there are tons of language courses that can help you become fluent.

Here, we’ll explain which resources are best for learning Thai, those that are just okay courses, and which you should pass on.

We’ll cover the top tier options for learning Thai, the merely passable courses in the second tier, and a selection of courses we suggest you steer clear of (third tier).

Let’s get started with the top courses for learning Thai.

Top Tier
Italki, ThaiPod101, Lingopolo, Pimsleur, Learn Thai Podcast

2nd Tier
Pickup Thai, FSI, Udemy, Glossika, Mango Languages, Mondly

3rd Tier
High Speed Thai, Transparent Language

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By Michelle Arabic Armenian Belarusian Bulgarian Cherokee English French Georgian German Greek Hebrew Hindi Italian Japanese Korean Lao Mandarin Chinese Persian Portuguese Russian Spanish Thai Ukrainian Vietnamese

Lang Workbooks

4 
Price: $5.99

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For learners of languages that use unfamiliar writing systems, the Lang Workbooks series can be a helpful and practical way to master the intricacies of writing in their target languages. Among numerous other writing systems, the series includes the Korean, Russian Cyrillic, and Armenian alphabets; Persian and Thai script; the Hindi Devanāgarī abugida; Chinese characters; and Japanese Hiragana and Katakana. The series also covers languages that use the Latin alphabet with diacritical (accent) marks, such as French, German, and Portuguese.

Many books in the series have been translated into other languages, such as Italian, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. The series also covers writing systems that may have fewer available resources for learners, such as Lao script and the Cherokee syllabary.

Each book in the series presents its featured writing system with suggested pronunciations. The practice pages in each workbook have useful features for each letter, symbol, or character, such as a recommended stroke order, font variations, example words, and a “Trace and Learn” section.

Each workbook is relatively inexpensive. In addition, the publishers of the series have granted teachers and students a license to make photocopies of the workbook pages for personal use, so you can get unlimited chances to practice. Considering the depth of information in each language’s workbook, the books in this series can provide great value for learners.

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By Tara Cebuano English Filipino French German Greek Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Mandarin Chinese Polish Portuguese Russian Spanish Swahili Thai Turkish Ukrainian

OPLingo

3.5 
Price: Freemium, Premium Subscriptions cost $6.99/mo, $60/Year

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OPLingo is a community-oriented, non-profit language learning site. It essentially combines the functions of LingQ, LangCorrect, Readlang, iTalki, and HelloTalk.

The free version gives you limited access to some functions, but by paying for a membership you support ethical causes — such as building a primary school in Tanzania.

You can browse user-contributed texts or easily import your own YouTube videos, articles, or ebooks into the Reading Tool. OPLingo has also developed hundreds of audio conversations in several languages, including Tagalog, Cebuano, Thai, Swahili, and Russian.

Within each page, you can read a transcript and get definitions and pronunciations of unknown words. By identifying which words you don’t know, the next passages you read will highlight the number of known or unknown vocabulary words.

In their Write & Correct section, you can write in over 100 languages and exchange corrections with other users, although Spanish, French, and English learners have a better chance of receiving corrections than other languages at the moment.

You can also practice a language by texting with fellow community members, or by hiring a teacher in your target language.

OPLingo has a lot of potential and is a good alternative to LingQ, but it needs a community of learners to help it grow — so check it out!

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By Tanya Afrikaans Arabic Bengali Bulgarian Burmese Cantonese Croatian Danish Dutch English Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Igbo Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latin Malay Malayalam Mandarin Chinese Marathi Mongolian Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Shona Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Xhosa Yoruba Zulu

AmazingTalker

2.5 
Price: From around $10 per 50-minute class

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AmazingTalker is an italki and Verbling competitor that lets you book classes with language teachers and academic tutors of your choice. It has a lot of attractive features for students, but teachers complain about high commission rates and lack of support.

It boasts a 3% acceptance rate for teachers and a 100% satisfaction guarantee. If you’re not happy with your class, they’ll rebook you another one for free. There are lots of teachers to choose from, or you can also use their AI Matching Service to find a tutor. The teachers’ profiles include videos, reviews, and their résumé.

However, AmazingTalker doesn’t seem a great choice for teachers. It charges English and Japanese teachers astonishingly high commission rates of up to 30%. While these rates fall as teachers earn more through the site, they have to make $1,500 a month before the commission reaches levels comparable to italki and Verbling. Making it worse, there’s an additional 8% fee for payment processing and tax that all teachers have to pay, no matter what language they teach. 

There have also been complaints on Reddit from teachers claiming to have been harassed by students and fellow teachers. However, we cannot corroborate these.

Given all this, we’d recommend trying italki (review) or Verbling (review) first. Alternatively, check out our guide to the best platforms for online language classes.

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

Verbling

Quick Review

4.6 

Summary:

Verbling is an online language-class marketplace where you can take lessons with teachers of your choice. It has some student-friendly extra features, including a built-in online classroom, flashcards, homework calendar, and a filing system for lesson materials. There are also useful but disorganized forums where you can discuss languages, share writing for critique, and do free language drills and exercises.

The lessons are generally high quality and well structured, plus the filters make it easy to find teachers who specialize in everything from accent reduction to interview preparation. 

However, it can be slightly pricier than alternatives, so if you’re on a tight budget, you may want to look elsewhere. It also has fewer languages than some of the bigger competitors, so it might not be a good choice if you want to study Azerbaijani, Khmer, or Yoruba.

Teacher Quality 

There are some less experienced teachers, but I found the lessons to be more consistently high quality than on italki.

Platform 

The classroom technology, flashcards, and filing system are fantastic for learners and easy to use.

Value

Some teachers charge more than on italki, but you get better classroom technology, more privacy, and fewer disorganized teachers.

Languages

Verbling lists 65 different languages on their platform, from Spanish and Mandarin Chinese through to Twi and Berber. Not all of them have available teachers, however.

Price

Prices are set by the teacher and range from $5 to $75 for an hour-long lesson. You can get discounts for buying packs of 5, 10, or 20 lessons with a teacher. Every student gets one free trial lesson, after which they’re $6 each.

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By Tara Arabic Belarusian Bulgarian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Filipino Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latin Mandarin Chinese Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Thai Turkish Ukrainian

Internet Polyglot

1.3 
Price: Free

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Internet Polyglot is a website for memorizing vocabulary words in dozens of languages. It has 44 “lessons” that cover topics like cars, time, religion, politics, feelings, measurements, and more. Each lesson is essentially a word list with native speaker pronunciation, an English translation, and a link to a picture to help you remember each word.

There are picture games, matching games, guessing games, and typing games, plus a word search and a slide show that reviews all of the words in the lesson.

Given that none of the vocabulary words in Internet Polyglot are taught using example sentences or context, learning vocabulary using this site may not be the best use of your time. You are probably better off using Anki to curate personalized vocabulary lists and downloading native speaker audio files from Forvo to accompany your flashcards. Nevertheless, you may find it useful if all you are looking for is a site that already has lists of vocabulary words with native speaker audio.

If you are looking for audio files for less commonly-studied languages in context, you can check out iLoveLanguages.

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By Tanya Arabic Bengali Bulgarian Cantonese Czech Filipino Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Italian Japanese Khmer (Cambodian) Mandarin Chinese Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Russian Spanish Swahili Thai Turkish Vietnamese

Complete Language Lessons

0.2 
Price: $8.99 for the CD/$1.29 per track on Amazon, free on Spotify

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Complete Language Lessons has audio courses for numerous languages on Amazon, Spotify, and Deezer. We tried out the Swahili audio course, Learn Swahili Easily, Effectively, and Fluently – and were extremely disappointed.

The audio tracks we sampled consist of Swahili phrases repeated over and over again, with no translations, explanations, or anything in English. The audio quality isn’t great, either, and the occasional muted club music adds to the bizarreness. 

It feels to us like the audio tracks are supposed to accompany a textbook, but we couldn’t find one. If one existed at some point, we suspect it’s no longer available.

If you already speak the language and are looking for native audio recordings to help you improve your listening and pronunciation, you might get some value out of Complete Language Lessons. However, if your aim is learn the language, we would skip these CDs.

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By Tara Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bengali Burmese Catalan Cebuano Chewa (Chichewa) Corsican Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Frisian Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Khmer (Cambodian) Kinyarwanda Korean Kurdish Kyrgyz Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luxembourgish Macedonian Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maltese Mandarin Chinese Maori Marathi Mongolian Nepali Norwegian Odia Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Samoan Scots Serbian Shona Sindhi Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Sundanese Swahili Swedish Tajik Tamil Tatar Telugu Thai Turkish Turkmen Ukrainian Urdu Uyghur Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Xhosa Yiddish Yoruba Zulu

My Language Exchange

4.2 
Price: Freemium, Gold Memberships start at $6/mo

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My Language Exchange has been growing since 2000. Although the website seems out of date, it still has an active community of millions of language-learners who speak almost 200 native languages (including less commonly studied languages).

You can choose a pen pal by reading their bios, or there is a chat room available for you to instantly connect with a language exchange partner — note that if you create a Gold account, you can initiate chats with other users, but as a regular user, you will have to wait to be contacted.

Using the Cormier Method, the website provides tools to help intermediate speakers effectively practice with other learners. It advertises a Chat Companion with lesson plans to accompany your exchange, or lesson plans developed by teachers (although the quality of these resources varies drastically). 

You can also find language teachers on the site, but given that the transactions take place directly between you and the teacher, you may feel safer using a 3rd party platform like italki or Verbling. 

Although there are outlines on how to participate in language exchanges, how these outlines are followed depends entirely on you and your partner(s). My Language Exchange will help you build connections with other learners, but it’s up to you to plan how to practice. The concepts can also be used with any language exchange platform, such as Lingbe, italki, Tandem, and Amikumu.

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By Tara Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Austrian German Azerbaijani Basque Bavarian Bengali Bislama Bosnian Breton Bulgarian Burmese Cantonese Catalan Chechen Cherokee Coptic Croatian Czech Danish Dari Dutch English Estonian Faroese Filipino Finnish French Frisian Georgian German Greek Gujarati Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Ingush Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Khmer (Cambodian) Korean Kurdish Kyrgyz Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luxembourgish Macedonian Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maltese Manx Maori Marathi Mongolian Nahuatl Nepali Norwegian Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Sanskrit Scots Scottish Serbian Sherpa Sindhi Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Swahili Swedish Syriac Tajik Tamil Telugu Thai Tibetan Tigrinya Turkish Turkmen Ukrainian Urdu Uyghur Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Wolof Yiddish Yoruba Yucatec Maya Zulu

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.

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