Languages: Over 20 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
Pros:
Can study for as little as five minutes a day
Engaging activities that cover tons of vocabulary
A gamified learning platform that keeps you interested
Cons:
Can be easy to lose your learning “streak”
In-app purchases for special vocabulary sets, power-ups, timed quizzes
Lots of ads
Duolingo focuses on engaging activities that help you learn by testing your vocabulary. As such, you’ll be asked to speak words/phrases, translate, match words to their meanings and more.
Vocabulary sets are grouped thematically, and you progress along Duolingo’s set order, though if you’re more advanced, you can also test out some of the lessons.
Once you’ve completed a lesson, you can go back to reinforce what you learned.
Languages: 12 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
Pros:
Personalize goals based on your own language objectives
Explanations of vocabulary, grammar and culture
Comprehension checks for critical thinking about word meanings
Cons:
Quality varies depending on your language course
Content is somewhat lacking in entertainment value
May receive incorrect corrections from community
Busuu’s free version can give you your flashcard fix while helping you decide whether a full subscription might be in your future.
This is just a small fraction of what Busuu offers to paid members, so if you like the format, you might consider purchasing a subscription, which gives you conversations with native speakers, quizzes, grammar exercises, official certificates and more.
Languages: A huge variety of languages (over 50), including popular options like Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
Pros:
Lots of high-quality content targeted at beginners
Over 50 languages available
Freedom to choose which language skills to focus on
Cons:
The interface isn’t very user friendly
Lessons are not accurately labeled or described
If you’re a beginner looking to jumpstart your language learning journey, look no further than 50Languages.
50Languages is designed to teach basic vocabulary, and it offers plenty of free resources that do just that.
The app offers free lessons, tests and games that you can use to learn some of the most essential vocabulary and reinforce what you’ve learned.
In-app purchases are also available to remove ads and open up additional materials.
Languages: Features 33 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
Pros:
Innovative ways to learn through VR, AR and a Chatbot
Competitive platform to give learners a bit of a push
Good for learners of all ages (there’s a separate app for kids)
Cons:
Lack of differentiation between levels
The monthly fee covers only one language
The Mondly app packs a powerful learning punch, and you can experience a fraction of that punch without spending a dime.
As a free user of Mondly’s app, you’ll have access to the basic material and ongoing content to set up a learning routine—a new daily lesson, a weekly quiz and even monthly challenges.
If you find you love the free access but want more material, don’t worry. A paid subscription can give you access to more lessons, conversations, vocabulary builders, conjugation tables and other features.
The quality across language programs isn’t consistent
Videos could be more engaging
Each week, Innovative Language offers new free audio and video lessons.
You can easily make these freebies part of your learning routine, but if you’re wanting to try their other offerings, you might consider subscribing to a free trial.
Innovative Language’s free trial gives you full access to a premium language course, which includes a whole library of audio and video lessons, lesson notes, dialogues with audio, a personal word bank and more. If you like it, you might consider subscribing for continued access.
Languages: Available for around 45 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
Pros:
Huge vocabulary bank covering a variety of topics
Repetition-based learning
Ability to skip words you already know
Cons:
No grammar explanations or lessons
Minimal audio
No conversation practice
Drops’ goal is to help you learn a language in just five minutes a day.
It’s based on visual learning, pairing images with words in your target language.
This way, you can associate new words with their actual meanings rather than with English words.
And the app has no shortage of words for you to learn. For each language, there are around 1700 words organized into 99 topics.
And best of all, it’s completely free.
If your addiction to Drops is just too great to be contained in five minutes a day, you can subscribe for unlimited learning time.
Languages: 42 languages including English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Greek, Norwegian, Latin, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Czech, Romanian, Arabic, Finnish, Hebrew, and Turkish.
Pros:
Thousands of audio lessons
Ability to look up and save new words to your personal database
Transcripts included with lessons, podcasts, audiobooks and interviews
Cons:
You need a paid subscription for more content
No grammar lessons
LingQ is an app that immerses users in text and audio media in their target language.
The app lets you read authentic content like news articles and stories and listen to podcasts, audiobooks and more.
As you read, you discover “lingQs,” which are words that you don’t know yet.
Save these lingQs to your flashcard deck, and you can review them with the app’s SRS program. All audio content comes with a transcript, so you can easily save new vocabulary words from any content.
Though most of the content is accessed with a paid subscription, there’s some good free beginner content to get you started.
Languages: Over 300 languages have been exchanged on the app, from popular choices like Spanish and Chinese to pop culture creations like Klingon and Dothraki.
Pros:
Excellent segue into in-person interactions
Substantial accessibility with a free account
Speaking partners can be vetted
Cons:
Learners can easily be bombarded with messages
Exchange partners can be hit or miss when it comes to their intentions and consistency
Used only for practicing language skills
Want to start chatting right now? Tandem can hook you up for immediate interaction in your target language.
On Tandem, you can search who’s currently online, message them and start chatting via video, text message, voice message or even picture exchange.
All of the main features are available for free. However, if you want to subscribe, you can also get unlimited translations, opt out of ads and see who viewed your profile.
How to Get the Most Out of Free Language Learning Apps
Consider using multiple apps
Free apps work well together or in conjugation with paid apps. You can use a combination of apps to fill different learning needs.
For example, you can pair a free language exchange app with an online learning program like FluentU, which helps you learn languages in context through authentic videos—like movie trailers, music videos and other media content—that come with interactive subtitles.
Try as many as you want
Don’t limit yourself! There’s no reason not to try all you want when apps are free.
That way, you can get a hands-on feel for how each app works and what it has to offer.
Then, you can make a well-informed decision about which app(s) you want to keep using.
Take advantage of free trials
Many paid apps offer free trials, but by all means, take advantage of these.
You get a period of free learning (yay!), and you’ll also see if the app is valuable enough to be worth spending your hard-earned money on.
Whether you want it totally free or are willing to pay for a more premium product, apps are definitely the way to use new technology to learn a language.
So try out these 10 free language apps today. Better late than never!
