This Site Offers Hundreds of Free Language Learning Courses.
Whether you learned Spanish on Sesame Street or took French in high school, your skills may have gotten a little rusty over the years. Or maybe you work in an industry where understanding Arabic, Korean or Finnish is helpful, or you want to learn Italian to help explore your background. Whatever the reason, if you want to learn a new language, there are plenty of free online courses and resources to help you get started. Here’s one that offers courses in 49 languages.
Where to find free online language courses
The OpenCulture.com website is a wonderful repository of free online resources, from public domain films and audiobooks to public domain art and countless educational courses. The website has a page with a permanent list of free online language courses.
Free online lessons are currently available covering 49 different languages:
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Amharic
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Ancient Greek
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Arab
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American Sign Language
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Bambara
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Bulgarian
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Cambodian
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Cantonese
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Catalan
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Chinese (standard)
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Czech
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Danish
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Dutch
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English
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Farsi/Persian
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Finnish
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French
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Frisian
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German
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Greek
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Hebrew
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Hindi
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Hungarian
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Icelandic
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Indonesian
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Irish
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Italian
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Japanese
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Korean
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Laotian
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Latin
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Lithuanian
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Luxembourgish
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Mandarin
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Maori
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Norwegian
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Polish
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Portuguese
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Romanian
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Russian
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Serbo-Croatian
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Spanish
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Swahili
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Swedish
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Thai
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Turkish
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Twi
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Vietnamese
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Welsh
There is a description of each language course, as well as the types of free materials available, such as mp3s, PDFs, streaming videos and interactive modules. While many courses are an introduction to languages, others are more specialized, such as Medical Spanish for Healthcare Professionals , Arabic in Jordan , Basic French for Global Communication , and Japanese for Travel . There are also general courses , providing tools for anyone who wants to improve their foreign language skills.
For more information, you can find a complete list of languages, courses, and resources at OpenCulture.com . And for more language learning tools, check out Lifehacker’s previous posts on learning a new language while casually browsing the Internet and how to learn a language so you can actually understand it.