Free English learning resources
26 free resources, checked and categorised.
No trials, no paywalls, no sign-up required.
Everything below is free to use — no trial periods and no paywalls. The list covers the main ways people study English: structured courses to build a foundation, dictionaries to look things up, and listening and reading material to spend real time in the language. Start with one course and one dictionary, then add listening once you can follow simple sentences.
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BBC Youtube channel for all of you that can't watch BBC in your country.
A blog about English dialects! Hope the author comes back to posting one day.
Disney Youtube channel. Songs from Disney movies with lyrics.
"I'm Tom and I make weekly videos teaching you fresh modern British English. My job is to help you fall in love with English, one video at a time, so that you can take your English to the next level. Lots of vocabulary, not much grammar. There are also accent analysis videos."
Have any questions regarding the English grammar? You can ask them here.
Learn beautiful British English for free on Youtube with English teacher Lucy Bella Earl.
A vocabulary quiz. 10 grains of rice is donated to charity for every correct answer.
Learn English through TV series, songs, interviews, movies and animations. Includes colloquialisms and their cultural context.
A language learning game - choose the song and the difficulty level and fill in the blanks in lyrics while listening.
Non-prescriptivist blog about the English grammar.
A lot of information about American dialects, includiang a map and tables. Tons of content collected and put together by Rich Aschmann.
A Youtube channel - grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. A great guy.
Origins and meanings of phrases and sayings.
An Irishman's blog about the English language. A rare example of a blog listed here that is still active.
About the differences between British and American English.
About the history of the English language.
About new collocations in the English language.
Thesaurus and word tools for your creative needs. You can search for synonyms and anthonyms here, but also for rhymes, words containing particular letters and more. Useful if you want to cheat in Scrabble.
English phonetics in a nutshell.
Learn it there, practise it here
Free resources are great for input — reading, listening, explanations. They are weaker at the two things that actually move you forward: speaking English out loud, and remembering what you met once. That is what OwnSlides is for.
Say it out loud
Talk to an AI tutor that answers back, or join a live room with other learners and native speakers.
Practise what you read
Turn a grammar point or article into exercises, so it moves from recognised to usable.
Keep the words
Save new words to My Words and let spaced repetition bring them back before you forget them.
This directory began from a community-built list of free language resources — a year of collecting and checking by Joanna (u/chlebka) and dozens of contributors who suggested links, shared freely. See the original list. We have since expanded, re-checked and re-categorised it, and we keep the per-resource credits where the original list recorded them.