Most "free" language resources are free right up until you want to use them. Three exercises, then a wall. A promising tool, then an email gate. If you’re a teacher trying to point thirty students at something useful, or you just want five minutes of practice without creating another account, it’s maddening.
So: a short list of things that are actually free and usable right now. No account, no email, no trial clock. Several are ours and are marked as such. The rest are here because they’re good.
Daily games (no account, one puzzle a day)
Short daily puzzles suit language practice well: small enough to actually do, and the daily reset builds the habit that decides long-term outcomes. All four of ours are free, need no login and take about two minutes.
- Langle: a short audio clip in a mystery language, and you guess which. Better ear training than it has any right to be, and you’ll find you can nearly identify more languages than you thought.
- Spellee: a spelling ladder that keeps getting harder. Aimed at orthography, the part of vocabulary everyone neglects until they have to type something.
- Speakle: pronunciation practice with scored feedback, so you learn what you actually sound like rather than what you assume you sound like.
- Citle: a daily city-guessing game built on geographic and cultural clues. Less drill, more context. Works well as a classroom warm-up.
All four are collected on the games hub if you want to try them in one place.
Reference tools
- Our vocabulary dictionary: browsable, with pronunciation and example usage across the languages we cover. Readable without an account.
- Our translator: for when you want a quick check rather than a full dictionary lookup.
- Wiktionary: community-built, with etymology and pronunciation coverage that routinely beats commercial dictionaries, especially for less-common languages.
- Forvo: native speakers pronouncing individual words, which settles arguments no written phonetic guide ever will.
Free resources worth knowing about
Not ours, no affiliation. Leaving them out would make this list worse:
- Anki: the open-source spaced repetition tool. Free on desktop and Android, and still the strongest option for serious vocabulary work. The iOS app is the exception and costs real money.
- Language Reactor: dual subtitles and inline lookups for watching native video without constantly pausing.
- Tatoeba: a big open collection of example sentences with translations. Good for seeing a word in context rather than in isolation.
- Your public library: many give free access to paid course platforms with a library card. Comfortably the most underused resource on this page.
For teachers
If you’re assembling classroom resources, the daily games work as a five-minute opener. They’re short, they reset daily, and students can play on a phone without an account, which sidesteps the parental-permission mess that comes with signing a class up for anything.
Everything here is free to use and free to link to. If you keep a resources page for your students, link straight to whatever’s useful.
The best free resource is the one your students can open in ten seconds without asking you for a password.
And if anything here stops being free or starts demanding an account, tell us. The entire point of the list is that it all works immediately.
