Whether you learned Spanish from Sesame Street or took French in high school, your skills might be have gotten a bit rusty over the years. Or maybe you work in an industry where it’s helpful to understand Arabic, Korean, or Finnish, or you want to pick up some Italian to help research your ancestry.
Whatever the reason, if you’d like to learn a new language, there are plenty of free, online courses and resources to help get you started. Here’s one of them, which offers courses in 49 languages.
Where to find free online language courses
The website OpenCulture.com is a remarkable repository of free online resources—from open-access movies and audiobooks, to public domain art, to countless educational courses. The site maintains a page with a running list of free online language courses.
Currently, there are free online lessons available, covering 49 different languages:
Amharic
Ancient Greek
Arabic
American Sign Language
Bambara
Bulgarian
Cambodian
Cantonese
Catalan
Chinese (standard)
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Farsi/Persian
Finnish
French
Frisian
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Lao
Latin
Lithuanian
Luxembourgish
Mandarin
Maori
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbo-Croatian
Spanish
Swahili
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Twi
Vietnamese
Welsh
There’s a description of each language course, as well as what type of free materials are available—like mp3s, PDFs, videos to stream, and interactive modules. While many of the courses are introductions to the languages, others are more specialized, like medical Spanish for healthcare providers, Arabic in Jordan, foundations of French for global communication, and easy travel Japanese. There are also general courses providing tools for anyone looking to improve their foreign language skills.
For more information, you can find the full list of languages, courses, and resources on OpenCulture.com. And for additional language-learning tools, check out these previous Lifehacker posts on learning a new language while casually browsing the internet, and how to study a language so you actually understand it.
