The Internet is everywhere. Your school, office, local café, and probably your home. Wi-Fi hotspots are popping up across the globe in airports, on buses, in shopping centres, and perhaps most impressive of all – across entire cities.

With all this Internet floating around, we may as well put it to good use – language learning! Not that I’m biased or anything. If you want to use it to watch a cat walk into a door then don’t worry, I’m not going to judge, we’ve all done it.

Anyway, keeping on task here before I get distracted by the magical world of Internet cats , I want to share with you today some of my favourite online language learning  websites.

So, without further ado, I present to you my current favourite free online language learning resources:

MEMRISE

Memrise is a great website. When people ask me what they can do themselves at home to learn a language, I always recommend this first. Memrise uses spaced repetition to calculate how well you know your stuff and just when will be a good time to go over the word again. Remember the days of writing endless paper flashcards and always starting with the top of the pile but never learning the poor lonesome words at the bottom? Well those days are over!

Memrise is a bit Farmville-esque with the idea of “growing plants” (learning words) and “watering plants” (revising words) but if you can get over than then it is definitely highly recommended. Courses are constantly being created by keen users so the choice of languages is huge! Oh, and I almost forgot its major selling point – when you learn a new word, you’re shown it with a “mem” – an image, video, phrase or anything else to help you remember. If the mem shown won’t help you then you can select another that will! Follow me on Memrise here and we can compare each other’s progress! Go get planting quick!

WORD REFERENCE

Word Reference is THE online dictionary for a number of languages. French and Spanish are better than others such as German, but it’s always being added to. There’s also thorough verb tables for French and Spanish and Italian for the grammar geeks among us! Not only that, but if you can’t find what you want, keep scrolling down until you hit the forum entries and someone may have already asked your question and been answered by a native speaker. Perfecto!

YOUTUBE

Yes, you read that right. YouTube is your new best friend. YouTube Captions are the thing you need. You need to have an initial good understanding of the language for this one. Basically, take a look to the bottom right-hand side of the video screen and click…

selecting the language you want. You’ll often have to watch a video in the target language for that language to be available for Captions. Be careful though because they are often created automatically by YouTube so don’t take them as Gospel. I lost your interest didn’t I? NO! Stop! Don’t type “bike fail” in that search bar! Well, go on then, but first scroll to the bottom of the page and change your language. The button is right next to the YouTube logo on the left-hand side of the screen. At least you’ll get some passive learning in when the text around your video is displayed in another language.

There are also some great YouTubers from across the globe that are well worth checking out!

8TRACKS

Whenever I’m working at my desk, I’m pretty much always listening to 8Tracks. 8Tracks is a music streaming website that allows you to play playlists created by an amazing array of users. “How does this help my language learning?!” I hear you cry. Well, if you type “French Pop”, “Portuguese Rock” or “Italian Disney” into the search bar, then guess what you’ll be listening to? I’m hoping to create some foreign language playlists in the coming months so follow me on 8tracks for updates. Enjoy!

IKINDALIKELANGUAGES

I Kinda Like Langauges is brilliant. Its fun, well-structured and free courses are ideal for those of us new to language learning, or just those of us interested in a brief introduction to a different language. Courses start from just 30 minutes and require no registration, no Facebook login or any extra hassle. Just click and away you go.

ITALKI

People always say to me, and I always say to people, that speaking is the hardest skill to acquire when learning a foreign language. Note the irony there? 😉 Especially given that most of us aren’t lucky enough to be in a lovely foreign land surrounded by lovely native speakers. Bummer. But don’t worry! Italki will save you from your silence! The friendly italki community is full to the brim with language learners and teachers from across the globe all eager to learn something from someone or teach something to someone. You can opt for a free language exchange to begin with, perhaps 1 hour with a Spaniard speaking Spanish for 30 minutes (helping you) and then speaking English for 30 minutes (helping them). If that proves a success but you’re keen to develop your skills further then you can pay for either a community tutor or a professional tutor at a rate quoted by them. If you’re interested in English tuition on Skype, you can find me on italki here.

DUOLINGO

Duolingo is a relatively new kid on the block but having reached over 10 million users, they must be doing something right. And they are. If you’ve already clicked the Memrise link from my praise above then you’ll (hopefully) be squealing with joy when I tell you that Duolingo is a bit like Memrise but with sentences. It gradually builds up sentences by using the words it teaches you. A very clever website and hard to believe it’s free!

NEWSPAPERMAP

Newspaper Map is how I aim to start each working day. I’ll filter by language and be shown an array of pins showing me where newspapers in that language are in the world. Click a pin and you’re shown a link to a newspaper, one more click and you’re reading articles in your target language! Such a time saver!

I hope this list proves useful to you whatever stage you’re at with your language learning.