Resources

This chapter is closely tied to the next chapter. Here I share with you the key resources to use, the choices available to you for each, and the types I recommend you use. The next chapter will introduce the key activities you will do with these resources.

The following sections will first cover how to find resources. We will then move on to how to choose the best resources. The final part focuses on the three core classes of resource that you need, some examples, and what to look out for.

How to find resources

There are three good ways to find resources:

Language repositories—these will be explained next
Communities of learners that are learning your target language—often there will be lists of recommended resources or a popular post by a user
Google search for guides or articles about learning your target language

Every time you encounter a good guide or a resource you think you might like, bookmark it, then keep looking. Only go back to look at the best ones once you’ve spent some time searching.

Language repositories

Language repositories link or store a large number of language resources in one place. Well-curated repositories can be a great place to find useful resources for your language; however, non-curated repositories that simply list lots of resources without ranking them can be overwhelming and often include low-quality resources. The top two listed below are well-curated and recommended.

Some popular language resource repositories

Repository	Description
All Language Resources	A fantastic curated list of resources for lots of languages—Highly recommended
Language Player	Curated lists of video content and useful resources in lots of languages.
r/languagelearning resources wiki	Useful repository with links to subreddits containing resources for many languages
So you want to learn a language	A website with lots of resources
LanguageList	This website lists free resources
Multilingual books	Another website with lots of resources
Open Culture	A website that lists free resources
Recommended resources from polyglot Lindie Botes	A website with resources for ten languages

Communities

While repositories can be helpful, they aren’t always curated specifically for each language. For that reason, I recommend you also try to find communities and guides dedicated to the language you are learning. A great place to start is with Reddit. There are a number of communities dedicated to all of the commonly-learned languages. Links to them can be found here, which is itself also a repository. Use the sidebar to search for your language and look for the link to the subreddit. There will often be a wiki with resources there.

Google search

Another option is a simple Google search along the lines of “How to learn Japanese”. There are three pitfalls to avoid:

There are a lot of cookie-cutter, search-engine-optimised, low-effort articles out there. It’s not a universal rule, but my general experience is that better guides either have their own website or are written by individuals/groups on their own websites or on language learning communities.
Many guides out there are really trying to sell you something, and will try to give you the impression (usually without outright saying it) that the best way to learn a language is with their method/product. Ignore it; I’m giving you that info right here.
Some resources can be very prescriptive about what exercises you do in what order. Don’t feel like you need to follow them to the letter. Pick and choose what works for you.

Choosing resources

Because there are many resources that only deal with one language, this guide does not represent the full range of high-quality resources available. Your own research should hopefully unearth more recommendations from other learners. If you don’t find anything, you’ll still have this chapter.

There are four key factors you should consider when assessing whether a resource is worth trying:

If it is recommended by other learners
How much you think you will enjoy using it
How well it fits the archetype of a good resource outlined in this chapter
Your budget

Core resources

There are many different types of resources. This guide splits them into three core classes, plus one additional class. The three core classes are:

A beginner course
A flashcard program
Input

A beginner course is any kind of course that tries to teach you the fundamentals, such as the core grammar and basic vocabulary, in a structured manner.

A flashcard program helps you learn vocabulary and grammar by repeatedly showing you words or sentences and asking you to recollect their meaning.

Input is any piece of content produced in the language such as books, news, or movies.

The three core classes of resource are crucial for developing your method.

The final class of resource is Supplements. This is a catch-all term for the many other useful tools you need for your learning.

Next we will look at each of these types of resource and what to look for.

Beginner course

There are six basic types of beginner courses you can use. It will be up to you to choose which you prefer.

Online text, audio, or video explanations—websites, podcasts, or video series that explain the basics of your language
Teach-yourself books—books that provide explanations, exercises, and beginner input (highly popular)
Online courses—often websites and/or apps with their own methodology (also very popular)
Listen-and-repeat courses—courses that function by having you listen to phrases and then repeatedly prompting you to recall and say them out loud
Classes—teachers in a classroom
Tutors—one-on-one teaching

Some good examples of beginner courses

Course	Examples
Text, audio, or video explanations	YouTube videos Free online lectures/courses such as listed here Assimil (paid, audio) BBC Languages (free) Live Lingua Project (free resources) FSI, DLI, and Peace Corps language courses
Teach-yourself books	Colloquial series
Online courses	Duolingo (free) LingVist (paid) Busuu (free with paid premium) Glossika (paid) Babbel (paid) Mango Languages (paid) StoryLearning (paid with a free 7 day trial)
Listen-and-repeat courses	Language Transfer (free) Coffee Break Languages (free) Pimsleur (paid)

What makes a good beginner course?

The course you choose should be one that you like and is recommended by other learners. Remember: There is plenty of room for personal preference. Choose something that you think works for you.

Better courses tend to:

Focus on teaching the language in context using input
Have interesting lessons or content
Use interactive lessons
Cover all the bases: grammar, vocabulary, and the four skills
Allow you to follow your interest
Provide the appropriate amount of information to enable learning

Lower-quality courses tend to:

Use few examples or minimal content
Have boring content or presentation
Let lessons be easily completed by passively reading or watching
Focus too much on one aspect and/or ignore other aspects
Force you to complete drills or activities before you can move on
Ignore grammar or not provide any explanation when needed

No course is perfect, but the downsides of the course you use can be countered by the other components of your method. It is common for learners to use multiple courses where their relative strengths and weaknesses balance out. For example, you may use a tutor in addition to your course to practice speaking and get better explanations; or you might use a teach yourself book in addition to a listen-and-repeat course to help improve your vocabulary and listening.

The different types of courses I outlined also have their own advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages and disadvantages of each of the six types of beginner course

Course	Advantages	Disadvantages
Text, audio, or video explanations	Plenty of variety, usually free, and easy to use	Quality is variable and remembering what is taught is usually left to the learner
Teach-yourself books	Courses are usually complete and good quality	Sometimes rely on ineffective grammar exercises
Online courses	Often the highest quality, interactive, and can provide the full set of resources a learner needs	Often pricey and may require an ongoing subscription
Listen-and-repeat courses	Great for travellers, very good at helping you start to speak, get a feel for the language, and remember and use lots of useful phrases	Not well-rounded
Classes	Help students stay motivated; teachers can provide correction and language feedback	Costly; can be a slow way of learning the language if lessons are not frequent
Tutors	Very powerful method; can provide correction and language feedback	Multiple lessons are very costly; often only used as a supplement for this reason

Key tip: Change courses if you need to
Learners commonly change courses as they reach a point where their current one becomes boring or too easy. Switching is a valid choice if your new course still challenges you and helps you learn; however, I don’t advise you do so repeatedly.

Using listen-and-repeat courses

Listen-and-repeat courses are perfect for people who are travelling soon and need tourist phrases as well as anyone that doesn’t have a lot of time to study at their desk. They’re also great at building confidence speaking early-on.

If your focus is on communicating, listen-and-repeat courses are recommended. Because they are so specialised, I advise using them as a supplement. If you are less interested in communicating, consider them optional.

Using Tutors

Tutors are one of the best supplementary resources as they can structure learning to your preference. Tutors are highly recommended for those who can afford them.

Since tutors can be expensive, using one simply to explain the basics to you is not the best use of your money. Any information they give you will also be freely available on YouTube or another website. It is generally a better use of your money to use tutors as a source of input, to identify errors, help you start speaking, and provide correction. Remember: learning is a fundamentally internal process—you still need to put in hard work regardless of the source of the information.

You can find tutors in real life, through your local community, library, or university. Relatively inexpensive tutors are also available online on websites such as iTalki or LinguaTalk.

Budget

Budget is an important consideration for many people. There is no direct correlation between price and quality—many poor resources cost money, while many of the best resources on the internet are free. However, there is a general trend towards paid resources being better. Paying for something that is recommended by others and works for you can be a good investment.

If you prefer a cheaper option, a good path could be using text, audio, or video explanation or free online course in combination with a listen-and-repeat course. If you’re willing to spend a bit of money to make your life easier, you will likely find value in using a paid online course in combination with a personal tutor to help you practise and identify errors.

Flashcard program

Flashcards are a powerful tool used primarily to learn new words and grammatical forms. While you can make them by hand, these days we have apps to make the process simpler and more convenient.

Flashcard software

Flashcard software	Description and links
Anki	iPhone app (paid) Android app (free)
Memrise	An online flashcard program that focuses on using mnemonics
Clozemaster	A flashcard program that teaches using fill-the-blank sentences that features a rather gamified interface
Quizlet	An online flashcard system
LearnWithOliver	Another online flashcard system

What makes a good flashcard system?

The best flashcard programs use spaced repetition. This works by automatically spacing out your revision using something called the forgetting curve. When you first learn a word, you are shown it again at very short intervals. With each revision, the interval becomes longer and longer until the word is safe in your long-term memory.

Principle: Repetition
Words and grammatical forms will be apprehended only once your brain is exposed to them enough times. To ensure you do that, keep repetition in mind as an important principle. Seeing a word once will not usually help you when you encounter it a few months later.

Anki

The most popular flashcard software is Anki. Anki is popular due to its free desktop and android app, large community, functionality, customisability, and clean interface. The flipside is that there can be a fairly steep learning curve, depending on what you want to do with it. For this, the manual will be crucial.

Anki allows its users to export and share flashcard decks they make. There are many pre-made shared decks for you to use to get started here. There is also a great collection of decks by Xefjord. If you’re a complete beginner, find a deck with words ordered by frequency. The best decks also have example sentences. Feel free to download multiple and try them out.

Settings

Anki has a large amount of settings to change the behaviour of the “again”, “hard”, “good” and “easy” options. If you’re overwhelmed by all the options, the defaults will be sufficient to get started. You can also find some clear video explanations here and here. This is the best settings overview I’ve found, and is enough to make you comfortable with the functionality.

You will find yourself confused by Anki at some point, so it is recommended to read the manual soon after you download it. You can find it in the table above and here.

Input

Sometimes content will already be integrated into the course you are doing. Even if your lessons already include texts or audio, it will be useful to find your own that interest you. More content is always good.

Here are some examples of input you might use:

Mode	Example
Reading	Books Articles Reddit-like websites News websites Conversation transcripts
Watching	Interviews YouTube channels Movies TV series
Listening	Music Podcasts Dialogues for learners

What makes good input?

The best input is both comprehensible and interesting to you. This content is often intended specifically for adult beginners. As always, try to find recommendations from other learners. Here are the best resources you can find as a learner:

YouTube channels with conversation or dialogue intended for adult learners
Podcasts intended for learners
Short stories for learners, in books or online
Books for young teens
Websites with articles or news intended for learners
Graded readers
Anything with audio and a text transcript
Anything with naturalistic dialogues

A common method is to use content intended for children; however, the vocabulary is often not very useful nor the topics very interesting to an adult.

Content such as TV series, music, movies, and real news websites is generally made to be understood by adult native speakers. This content is usually too difficult for beginners to use effectively. I do not recommend you use them at the start.

Finding content as a beginner can be difficult, particularly for languages that are not as popular. If you’re starved for interesting content or just want to, feel free to try something outside of the typical beginner range—you can still learn with it.

Good sources of beginner content

Source	Description
Easy Languages YouTube channel	Street interviews with dual-language subtitles—quality beginner content in lots of languages
Language Input Language Reactor YouTube catalogue	Catalogues of good subtitled YouTube videos/channels in lots of languages
Language Player	Curated lists of video content and useful resources in lots of languages.
Netflix	Great source of foreign language TV and movies with subtitles
Olingo	Shows you some good YouTube content for some of the most popular languages
eja.tv	Live TV
r/languagelearning media section	A list of good media resources
Project Gutenberg Wikibooks Loyal Books	Free public domain e-books
Gloss	Website with a lot of beginner content
The Fable Cottage	Dual-language fairy tales
Books by Olly Richards	Conversations and Short Stories series of books available on Amazon

You can also use other learners’ guides online to find good input.

Training the algorithm

Some services, such as YouTube and TikTok use algorithms to guess and suggest what you want to watch next. These can be extremely useful for helping you find more content. This is best done by creating separate accounts and liking content and subscribing to or following accounts you like. YouTube makes this surprisingly easy. This 5-minute video by the folks at Refold is enough to get you started.

Popular tools for input

There is a variety of useful tools to help you improve your learning with input. I recommend you check all of these out.

Popular tools

Tool	Description
Readlang	Import texts and get instant translations by clicking on words, has a built-in flashcard program
Lingq	A popular paid service similar to Readlang that provides lots of content and records and highlights known words
WordLab	Two fantastic chrome extensions, one for Netflix and one for YouTube, that give you more control over playback and subtitles—highly recommended for intermediate learners
Keyword lookup	Chrome tip to help you search dictionaries faster using the search bar
ImTranslator	Dictionary lookup addon

Supplements

When you look at other guides and resources, you will encounter resources for your language that don’t fit with the three core classes, but are nonetheless important.

These are classed separately one or more of several reasons: Some are only important for a subset of languages, some people may not need them for their goals, learners may only need them for a limited period of time, or they can be easily interchanged with no impact on your learning. They still may be very important, so take the time to review the below sections.

Dictionaries

Dictionaries aide your usage of input by helping you find definitions for specific words that are preventing your understanding. They are also useful as a general reference for your course.

The best dictionary to use depends on your language. Not all are listed here. An ideal dictionary will give you example sentences, an equivalent in your native language, and the correct pronunciation.

Here are a few dictionaries that offer translations for multiple languages:

Popular online dictionaries

Dictionary	Description
Linguee	Clean interface. translations are sorted by frequency
Wiktionary	A poplar dictionary with helpful pronunciation guides and support for a wide variety of languages
Bab.la	Great interface and lots of sample sentences. Has a built-in verb conjugator
Reverso	Useful example sentences
Tatoeba	Helps you find example sentences
WordReference	Standard dictionary

Language exchange resources

Later in your learning, it will be useful to find ways to practise your language with others. These resources will help you find partners.

Popular language exchange resources

Resource	Description
Tandem HelloTalk	The two largest language exchange apps
Conversation Exchange My Language Exchange The Mixxer	Websites for finding exchange partners. These sites are more basic than the apps, though many consider that an advantage.
LangCorrect	A community focused of submitting your writing and having it corrected by native speakers
Journaly	Service to help you write journals and get your writing corrected by others

If you live in a big city, there are often meetups for language enthusiasts, specific languages, or more generic meetups that are often attended by expatriates and travellers. Use Facebook groups and meetup.com to help you find them. The country associated with your language may also have a community of speakers in your city.

Pronunciation aides

Some resources are designed to help you improve your pronunciation.

Popular online pronunciation aides

Resource	Description
Wiktionary	Mentioned as a dictionary, but also includes IPA pronunciation guides and audio
Forvo	Example sentences and pronunciation recordings
The Wikipedia IPA Charts	These contain information on how every sound in every language is produced; You are unlikely to use this resource directly, rather good dictionaries such as Wiktionary will link you to the correct IPA symbol
YouGlish	Lets you input a word (supports lots of languages) and shows an example from YouTube of the word being used by native speakers

Writing system resources

These come in to play for learners of languages with different writing systems. I usually avoid giving examples for specific languages, but I will make an exception here since there are a few commonly-learned languages with this requirement and no generic resources. These are popular examples, not recommendations.

Popular writing resources

Resource	Language	Description
Skritter	Chinese	An app to help you practice writing Hanzi
WaniKani	Japanese	A mnemonic-based method for learning Japanese Kanji

For languages with different alphabets, these are more commonly taught within beginner courses or through simple charts and explanations, without the requirement for a specific tool.

Reference resources

Reference resources are there to help you look up some aspect of the language, usually grammar. There are too many to count and are typically only for a specific language, so I don’t have many examples.

Reference resources

Resource	Description
Cooljugator	Tables of verb conjugations for many languages

Translators

Translation software can help you understand entire sentences. Avoid becoming over-reliant on translating whole sentences. Try to understand a sentence yourself first.

Popular translation software

Software	Description
Google Translate	The most popular translation software on the web
DeepL	A powerful alternative to Google Translate

Phrasebooks

Phrasebooks are optional, but phrases can help you get a feel for the language and greatly improve your communicative ability when travelling. A cautionary note: phrases cannot be learned simply by reading them. Learning needs to be supplemented with flashcards.

Here are some websites you might like to use:

Online phrasebooks

Website	Description
Book2	Phrasebooks in lots of languages
LanguageGuide	Interactive way of showing simple vocabulary

Key tip: Use resources you enjoy
Studying languages is not always the most exciting activity, so choosing resources that you enjoy helps a lot. Keep in mind that there is plenty of room for individual preference for resources when it comes to what is the most effective way to learn. Use what you like and don’t worry too much about what others recommend. If you find yourself getting bored with a resource, feel free to change it.

Activities

With this section, done, we’ll now move on to some key activities you can do to begin building your language ability today. The next chapter is meant to be read together with this one, so I advise you to read on before beginning.