I just spoke with a friend who is getting started learning Portuguese. She’s super excited and is really motivated, but doesn’t know exactly what to do beyond Duolingo.
Don’t get me wrong, Duolingo is great – the game-like feel, the structured layout, the mobile app… it is really a great learning resource. But it’s not a complete package, and you might well “finish” a language on Duolingo without any real ability to speak, especially because many of the sentences are fairly unlikely to occur in the course of a normal conversation.
There’s so many language learning programs, softwares and websites out there that it can be seriously difficult to weed out that junk and actually find good resources. So, aside from Duolingo, what are some of the tools that I consider “essentials” in my language learning toolkit?
Full disclosure – the FluentU and italki links below are referral links, so I’ll get a bit of credit if you use them. Rest assured that I wouldn’t offer a recommendation on these resources if I didn’t love them, but in either case I wanted to be transparent.
italki
Yep, no surprises here. I wouldn’t keep recommending it if I didn’t love it so much. italki is a social network for language learners that allows you to connect with partners for language exchanges (“tandems”), find informal tutors to help you learn, or even get professional instruction from certified language teachers.
The site itself is free, as are the language exchanges. When it comes to finding a tutor or a professional teacher, prices vary pretty widely, mainly depending upon the cost of living in the location where the tutor lives. This almost always works out in favor of someone who lives in the US – the dollar is pretty strong right now and I usually pay between $8-10 for an hour of tutoring.
While the tutoring isn’t free, I think it’s the absolute best “bang for your buck” way to learn a language. And if you’re really on a tight budget, just use the language exchanges – not only will you likely make a new friend in another country in the process, you’ll find that the average person on the other end of the skype call usually knows more than enough about their native language to answer your questions :) I’ll admit that language exchanges can be scary, but with the right approach, you can do a lot to make them less intimidating.
As a bonus – if you sign up by clicking this link, after you complete a lesson we’ll both get 100 ITC (about $10) for use in language lessons.
FluentU
This one is another great resource. One of the funnest ways to learn is through watching TV shows and movies. It can get pretty time-consuming and frustrating to hunt down content, however, and even harder to find good videos with matching subtitles.
That’s what I like about FluentU – it’s a platform for learning through videos with subtitles. FluentU has a flashcarding feature which lets you save new vocab to flashcards for later review, but what I think really makes the platform shine is just its content base, which is divided into skill levels for all types of learners.
If you’re looking for a good way to learn with video, this is one of your best options. It also has a mobile app for on-the-go learning, which even allows you to download videos for offline viewing.
To balance out the review, however, the site recently moved away from its “freemium” model, so there isn’t a free option anymore. This was a huge bummer for someone like me who initially just used FluentU for quick learning bursts. It’s still reasonably cheap – $15/month for individual use – but not free. All of this goes to say that FluentU makes my personal list of essentials, but depending upon your learning style, might not be a “must” for you.
Readlang
When I was studying for my DELE Spanish exam, I asked my professor (who, at the time, sat on the board which was responsible for creating the test) what I should do to prepare. Her advice was simple: “Hay que leer la prensa” – you have to read the news.
I won’t go into all of the pros and cons of reading as a learning mode right now (maybe if there are enough nerdy people out there who want to hear it, I’ll write up a post later :) ). But I will say that Readlang makes it into my top five because it totally simplifies the process of reading in a foreign language. You can click on words or phrases and get in-line translations, and you can turn those translations into notecards for review. Readlang even lets you upload your own texts to practice.
Pro tip: If you’re looking for sources of written content in your target language, check out this google spreadsheet created by several users of LingQ.
Lang-8
Lang-8 is another language learning social network where you can post written texts and get critiques and feedback from native speakers.
Since it’s community-based, it’s totally free, and the more you contribute by critiquing other’s posts in your native language, the higher priority will be given to your posts when you ask for a review in your target language.
This fills a pretty key part of my language learning process early on, because it lets me create really accurate scripts for conversations, which I then take in hand and use in language exchanges on italki.
Forvo![Capture]()
Last, but certainly not least, I use Forvo. Forvo is basically a wikipedia which contains audio clips spoken by native speakers, allowing you to look up a word and hear how it’s actually supposed to be pronounced. And since it’s crowdsourced, it has translations available in a ton of languages.
It’s totally free, and you can download the audio recordings for use in flashcards (if you’re like me and you also use Anki to make your flashcards suck less).
Forvo is a great resource because it not only helps you get used to hearing native pronunciations of words, and you can use it to hone your own pronunciation as well by replaying sounds and mimicking them.
In Summary…
When I look out there at the vast amount of content on the internet – with more tools and websites being created every day – these five stand head and shoulders above the rest. They’re simple, they’re mostly free (depending on how you use them, you could end up spending just a total of $25 per month to learn), and they provide a nice, balanced approach to learning that engages several learning modes (listening, reading, speaking, etc.).
What tools do you use? Are there any that you think I should add to this list? I’m always on the hunt for more!