Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/Internet-resources-for-polyglots

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Best Free Services for Polyglots

If your English is not good, please find links with “!!”. Links with “!!!!” are the most important to improve your English. Also, go here.


The Internet is a giant treasure. It provides so many free services.

An interesting list: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/06/27/european-music-media-organizations-article-13/

This page is updated from time to time, not frequently, not regularly.

It would be great if you pay a visit to every site on the list. Don't lose your curiosity.

Condensed version with services' names: Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/IRFP-in-brief.

If you want to do creative work to help others to learn languages and to know about cultures, please visit Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/Productivity-tools-for-polyglots.

If you see GitHub or GitLab links, please notice that the download icons on GitHub and GitLab mean to download the source code. Links to download built programs are elsewhere like “Releases” or links in the README.MD file.

It is not recommended to put some banner like “featured in Polyglot Club” on your website, because this list is dynamic.

It is highly recommend to have privacy protections on. An open-source website on privacy: https://www.privacytools.io/

Blue Light Filter

!! http://jonls.dk/redshift/

Filter for Linux and BSD. Windows version is experimental. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/LibreShift/red-moon/

Filter for Android. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/Tyrrrz/LightBulb

Filter for Windows 7 and newer versions. It is open-source.

Dark Mode

!! https://darkreader.org/

Dark mode for web browsers. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/eleloya/NightPDF

View PDF in dark mode. It is open-source.

Rest Reminder

!! https://workrave.org/

It can lock your keyboard and mouse buttons when it is time. It is open-source.

!! https://hovancik.net/stretchly/

It supports Windows, Linux, BSD and macOS. Fewer features than Workrave. It is open-source.

Self-Control Helper

!! https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/

Browser add-ons for blocking websites. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/Alikaraki95/Getoffyourphone

Lock the app and suspend the network for Android. It is open-source.

!! https://timelimit.io/

Limit your app using time for Android. It is open-source.

!! https://detoxdroid.flx-apps.com/

Some other measures to help you on Android. Need to use a PC to enable developer mode. It is open-source.

It can be downloaded from F-droid.

!! https://selfcontrolapp.com/

Block websites for Mac. It is open-source.

Activity and Habit Tracker

https://activitywatch.net/

Track your own activity. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits

For Android. It is open-source.

Brain Trainer

https://www.lumosity.com/

Practise through mini-games, 3 random games everyday for free.

Whether brain training works or not is controversial, just like hydroxychloroquine. I believe it works in specific aspects.

This is merely a little teaser, not something like Ikaruga.

https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/gbrainy

Mini-games. It is open-source.

http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/

Dual n-back. It is open-source.

Its latest version 4.8.7 is not available on the website, but on the SourceForge page.

Relaxation & Meditation

https://mynoise.net/

Generate noises in different scenarios.

But I still prefer finding multi-hour-long videos on YouTube, because it offers much more options.

https://gitlab.com/tslocum/meditationassistant

Meditation assistant. It is open-source.

https://gitlab.com/axet/android-binaural-beats

Binaural beats. It is open-source.

https://ashutoshgngwr.github.io/noice/

Background noise. It is open-source.

Keyboard

!! https://colemak.com/

This one supports a lot of languages in Latin script, but it means to learn typing again. It is worth it. You may have noticed that “Kolemak” is even better than Colemak. How to modify keyboards will be discussed below.

A better layout image.

Note that the download link on the home page is “Caps Lock Unchanged”. The idea of replacing Caps Lock with Backspace is great because of its convenience to press Backspace, but having it unchanged is generally better because it's punitive to press Backspace, urging you to make fewer misspellings.

There is a flaw of no “„” or “‚”. You can replace “÷” and “×” with them. Also, the positions of single and double quotation marks only benefit British people for not pressing Shift. You can exchange their positions, too.

In my modification, I exchanged positions of “q” and “j”, “x” and “b”, according to letter frequency. There are also some pages on this.

For languages with other letters such as Ə and Ɔ, autocorrection (or called in another way: text replacement) is required.

People think it's uncomfortable to type “he” with Colemak because it requires stretching the index finger and shrinking the middle finger. I type “e” with my ring finger in this case.

https://bepo.fr/wiki/Accueil

Based on French, giving consideration to European languages. But if you don't type French much, it might be not ideal.

No English translation for this site, but it doesn't matter, because this keyboard is generally pre-installed in common operating systems. You just need to find it in the “French” section of keyboard settings.

https://forum.colemak.com/topic/519-rulemak-russian-colemak-layout/

Variant of Colemak for typing Cyrillic. It is available as source code. It is pre-installed in some Linux distributions including Debian, but it might require some effort as mentioned in the guidance of changing keys in “Colemak” to make sure it is listed on those 2 XML and 2 LST files. “Greek (Colemak)” is also available there.

For Windows, Portable Keyboard Layout is required. Or you can use that keyboard creator to do that manually.

!! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kl.ime.oh

It is lightweight and supports many languages, with many keyboard layouts. But it has problems, such as poor plugins.

Typing

!! https://klavaro.sourceforge.io/

Typing tutor. It is open-source.

!! https://10fastfingers.com/

A place to train typing.

Shortcut

!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_keyboard_shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts in general.

!! https://defkey.com/

Keyboard shortcuts for specific programs.

To-Do-List & Task Calendar

!! https://www.taskcoach.org/

It has many functions: hierarchy, progress, different views of the list. It is open-source.

A video about it.

!! https://abstractspoon.com/wiki/doku.php?id=todolist-description/

A different to-do-list. It is open-source.

!! https://tasks.org/

To-do-list on Android. It is open-source.

!! https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/calendar/

Calendar program. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/Etar-Group/Etar-Calendar

Calendar program. It is open-source.

Notebook

!! https://www.zim-wiki.org/

A desktop wiki. It is open-source.

A tutorial about it.

!! https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/

It supports hierarchy. It is open-source.

A video about it on Windows; a video about it on Linux.

!! https://standardnotes.org/

It is privacy-focused. It is open-source. Can't insert images without payment.

Mind Map

!! https://www.freeplane.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Successful fork of the discontinued FreeMind. Java is required. It is open-source.

A video about it; another video about it.

!! https://github.com/juzzlin/Heimer

Simple and intuitive mind map. It is open-source.

Hierarchical Spreadsheet

!! http://strlen.com/treesheets/

It combines mind map, spreadsheet and other forms of data. It is open-source.

A video about it.

International Phonetic Alphabet

!! https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/

The site of the maker. The full IPA chart can be downloaded here. There is also a link to an interactive IPA chart.

!! https://easypronunciation.com/en/ipa-phonetic-transcription-converters

IPA and romanization transcriptions. Very detailed, but there is a limitation for each hour. Its “More Tools” is also noteworthy.

https://github.com/dmort27/epitran/

Transcription to IPA. It is open-source. It won't help if you don't know Python.

It only supports words, as is discussed. Somebody can develop a tool for sound change.

Logic

https://forallx.openlogicproject.org/

Book under a public icense and is edited by different people.

https://tellerprimer.ucdavis.edu/pdf

Book under a public license. Old and short.

https://www.logicmatters.net/tyl/

All rights reserved, conditioned distribution allowed.

!!!! https://www.duolingo.com/

The best free online language courses. It is actually a collection of exercises instead of real teaching courses. It is also under criticism, from quality to method.

Don't neglect their other products.

https://www.coerll.utexas.edu/coerll/

This one has a lot of materials as well as other things.

https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/

Mainly courses of Foreign Service Institute, Defense Language Institute, Peace-Corps. FSI is initially aimed at middle-aged officials, so maybe not everyone likes it.

https://www.coursera.org/browse/language-learning/

Some super cool courses. This is suggested by RomDasha.

https://www.lingolia.com/

A little site with useful basic courses of 5 languages with good design.

https://grammar.collinsdictionary.com/

Grammar lessons.

http://native-languages.org/

Material of native American languages.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Languages

Books are mostly incomplete and in lack of update, but some are nearly completed or completed, not bad.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/

It is discontinued, but deserves a mention for quality. It is for beginners.

https://elon.io/

Only 3 languages, but still worth a mention for its quantity and maybe quality.

Linguistic Article

https://scholar.google.com/

When you are confused about the grammar, or simply out of curiosity, you want to touch linguistics. This site can help, though few articles are free.

http://www.oajse.com/subjects/linguistics.html

A list and a search engine of open-access Linguistic journals.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/ampersand

Open-access Linguistic journal by Elsevier.

Speaking

!! https://forvo.com/

Dictionary of pronunciation.

!! https://speechling.com/

Submit the recording and wait for the response. Supported languages are not many.

https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/

With this one, you can say you are “studying” pronunciation.

A little tutorial and a big playlist of various videos.

!! https://ivypanda.com/tongue-twisters

Try not to hurt yourself when practicing.

It covers an older site and has improved a lot. There's no copyright affair involved because such a list is not a “creative work”.

You may want to ask if this page is protected by copyright. All my comments are protected, the list of links like the one in that brief version is not.

Vocabulary

!!!! https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Offline flashcard platform. You can find its manual at “Docs” on the website. Content can be rendered in HTML and CSS. There are also many powerful add-ons for it. It is open-source.

Its community has many shared decks, but this is not mentioned at the home page. There is a successful collaborative project: Ultimate Geography.

Unfortunately, not free on iOS.

Related add-on wiki page.

Looks like no one tells people how to export anki decks into spreadsheets. Let me do it:

  1. click on the cog of your deck, click on “Export”;
  2. in “Export from”, select “Notes in plain text (.txt)”;
  3. export;
  4. open the file in a spreadsheet program, which should be able to automatically recognise its separator “tab”.

If you want to batch rename files, there is a program to do it and it is open-source.

If you are still confused, go to communities about Anki and find solution.

!! https://mnemosyne-proj.org/

If your want a simple alternative to Anki, try this one. It is open-source.

!!!! https://www.memrise.com/

Flashcards in high quality can be found. Some most popular languages have courses of 0-5k and 5k-8k words, or divided differently and still reach 8k. A few can be over 30k.

Though it is said to be memorizing words with “mems” (memes in many cases), the “mems” are actually not in good quality.

Its app is quite worse than the web version. On the app, you can't add other courses besides official ones, and the download for offline use always fails if the vocabulary is over 3k.

In the app, don't look at the candidates (including candidate letters) at first, to avoid getting hints from them.

You can import from a spreadsheet.

!! https://quizlet.com/

It is not so good at efficient memorization as Memrise. It is for having quizzes. But you can find specific practice such as reflexive verbs, weak nouns.

It even encourages you to copy other people's card decks and create your own variants, in case a good deck has flaws and the creator doesn't respond to it.

You can import from a spreadsheet.

!!!! https://www.clozemaster.com/

Learn with cloze. It is effective, but sometimes it is just repeating the same point in different questions. Also, synonyms are not supported.

!!!! https://lingvist.com/

Four languages to learn, for lower intermediate learners (roughly telc B1). There is a trial automatically started after you register, so don't expect all features will continue if you don't pay after 48 hours.

!!!! https://context.reverso.net/translation/

Among its products, the mobile version of Context seems to be the most helpful: learn and practise new words with example sentences.

!! https://www.languagedrops.com/

It focuses on visual training, which has both advantages and disadvantages. Free users have to wait 10 hours for the next 5 min practice session.

!!!! https://www.learnwitholiver.com/

Simply learn words and sentences.

!!!! https://babadum.com/

It's pretty good for educating young polyglots.

!!!! https://github.com/tkrajina/10000sentences

Sentences from Tatoeba to practice. It is aesthetically same with Anki (I mean copy-paste). It is open-source.

!! https://www.languageguide.org/

Some basic vocabulary.

!! https://www.wordofthehour.org/

They may think “word of the day” is too inefficient, so do I. It is constantly being improved, but not satisfying for now. The response of a contact is quick and friendly.

http://sublearning.com/

Practice sentence translation through subtitles. Don't expect word-to-word translations.

https://www.iclanguage.com/

A site of basic vocabulary with a different design.

https://babadada.com/

Visual dictionary. No grammatical genders or pronunciation, suitable for revision.

A lot of languages has not been completed yet, without any notice. Also, look out for polyseme mistakes.

https://github.com/lexica/lexica

Word game for Android. It is open-source.

https://mainichi.me/

A great idea to learn a word each time you open a tab. Only for three languages. Only for beginners.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Swadesh_lists

Swadesh lists are basic vocabulary initially for linguistic use. But it can be the starting point of vocabulary building for language learners as well.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists

Frequency lists. Make use of it with programs that help to memorise, such as Anki.

If you seriously want to learn a language, and there are no ready-made free flashcards reaching the native level, and you don't want to spend money, this may be the most effective way to memorise words.

I will make a tutorial on using Regular Expression to extract entries from dictionary files later.

Test

https://www.transparent.com/language-resources/tests.html

Test your proficiency.

There is only one set of test for each language. Don't search the meanings of the words you don't know, if you want to take this test again later.

https://www.arealme.com/vocabulary-size-test/en/

For testing your vocabulary size.

There is only one set of test for each language. Don't search the meanings of the words you don't know, if you want to take this test again later.

https://www.ezglot.com/vocabulary-test.php

Test your vocabulary size. It's faster and maybe not so accurate. The result is at an inconspicuous corner.

Reading

!! https://www.wikipedia.org/

Numerous articles in many languages and they are usually proofed to read.

Don't forget to browse the “Category” to find specific contents.

Also take a look at its sister projects on Wikimedia.

Remember it is left-leaning.

!! https://www.kiwix.org/

Make Wikipedia and some other sites offline. It is open-source.

https://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/

The largest collections of books in the public domain, mostly in English though.

There is a book catalog website with ever-changing domain names: LibGen, which contains a wider range of books. Make sure you don't see any strange link there.

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/archives.html

List of book collections. Many links are available in “https” now but appear as “http” on this page.

!! https://quiterss.org/

RSS feeder. It is open-source.

If you don't know what RSS is, you can read this article.

!! https://getflowlingo.com/

Read and create flashcards to learn. The response of a contact is quick and friendly.

!! http://paralleltext.io/

As what its domain name says, parallel text. Classical works.

!! https://readlang.com/

Articles in many languages, with online dictionaries.

https://vocabhunter.github.io/

Find unfamiliar words in a document. Great for getting familiar with all words in a document before reading. Better to disable the filter. Java is required. It is open-source.

It doesn't support Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Vietnamese, because words are not separated by spaces or a word is usually separated by one or more spaces in these languages. Inflection is not supported.

!! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/autoscrolling/

Autoscrolling for Firefox. Good for practising reading speed. It is open-source.

!! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simple-auto-scroll/dccjkemhmffnljlnnoffljpkhkfpldff

Autoscrolling for Chrome. Good for practising reading speed.

https://www.bible.com/

Declaration: suggesting it is not for preaching.

The full Bible has been translated into at least 670 languages, more than double the number of languages of Wikipedia.

https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

Save the web page as a single file.

There is also a SingleFileZ, which can compress pages.

https://librera.mobi/

Reader for Android. It is open-source.

https://okular.kde.org/

Reader for desktops. You can take notes with it. It is open-source.

https://www.onlyoffice.com/

Works better in some aspects like reading PDF than Librera on Android. It is open-source.

https://learning-with-texts.sourceforge.io/

This is a PHP project. The page design is very bad and you need sufficient patience to read the guide and follow it. It's a DIY, offline and free version of LingQ. Inflection is not supported. It is open-source.

A video for its introduction; a video about its setup; a video about its more features.

Their installation tutorial is not clear, and the reply on a common problem is responded impolitely (they have cleared all the discussion up now).

LingQ is freemium, but it can't be recommended, for its unacceptable limitations on free users.

Writing

https://owl.excelsior.edu/

It is not for learning languages, but for how to write and read.

It is teaching about English, so something does not applies to some other languages.

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/purdue_owl.html

Another online writing lab. A bit dumb but also good.

!!!! https://www.lexicool.com/

List of dictionaries.

!!!! https://www.wiktionary.org/

Practical, no need to switch dictionaries, translations in many languages are shown together.

!!!! https://www.wordreference.com/

It is really completed.

!!!! https://www.linguee.com/

It is completed, with example sentences of high quality. You can even find uncommon words with meanings of common words.

!!!! https://bab.la/

It is completed for several languages.

!!!! https://github.com/meetDeveloper/Dictionary-Anywhere

Add-on for Firefox, powered by Google's partner Oxford Languages. You can download history in TSV format (with “txt” as file extension). It is open-source.

!! https://iate.europa.eu/

Terminology dictionary of European Union. That is to say, what you search should be a term.

!!!! https://glosbe.com/

It supports a lot of languages, citing results from several corpora. It is somehow messy and in many cases inaccurate, but if the dictionaries listed above have no result about a word, this one may help.

!!!! http://goldendict.org/

It supports several dictionaries in the free version, and also Lingoes in the paid Android version. No one would want to pay after knowing a link below. It is open-source.

You can search the word by selecting it and listen to Forvo pronunciation. You can also add dictionary websites.

!!!! http://aarddict.org/

Offline dictionaries. It is open-source.

!!!! https://bravolol.com/

Offline dictionaries and phrase books.

!! https://www.freelang.net/

Offline dictionary with even larger quantity and lower quality.

Translator

!!!! https://translate.google.com/

The best translator by now. It also supports optical character recognition on mobile.

There is an article on how to save its text-to-speech files

There is a video about how machine translation works.

There is a video about why machine translation makes mistakes.

!! https://www.bing.com/translator

It supports several languages that Google Translation doesn't support, but its quality is not so good as Google's.

https://simple-translate.sienori.com/

Browser add-on for Google Translate. It is open-source.

https://translatr.varunmalhotra.xyz/

Translate to multiple languages at one time. It is open-source.

https://nicetranslator.com/

Similar to Translatr, but it is powered by Microsoft.

https://www.soimort.org/translate-shell/

Command-line translator from different sources. It is open-source.

https://www.apertium.org/

It is open-source. Promising.

A video about it.

Conjugation

!!!! https://cooljugator.com/

Conjugation and some declension.

!!!! https://www.verbix.com/

Conjugation. I didn't expect Chinese is also there.

Gender

!! http://www.passion4teq.com/apps/

Apps for practising genders in 4 languages. You can also estimate how long you can practice until your battery becomes empty.

Number

https://gitlab.com/GrimPixel/Numeration

Program to practise reading numbers. It is open-source.

In progress. It can see major progresses during school holidays. Introduction: Language/Multiple-languages/Vocabulary/Numeration-Tutorial.

!! https://www.languagesandnumbers.com/numbering-systems/

Rules of writing numbers, more concise than Wikipedia's entries.

!! https://www.random.org/sequences/

Generate a random sequence. You can practice reading them or train your listening with TTS.

Grammar Checker

https://languagetool.org/

It supports several languages but works well on the few. It is open-source.

A video about the rule editor.

!!!! http://www.listeningpractice.org/

To practice listening. Not very good-looking. Voices are from volunteers, the quality is not very good. It also has conjugation exercises.

!! https://librivox.org/

Books read by volunteers.

!! https://lyricstraining.com/

Listen to songs and fill in the blanks of lyrics.

!! https://rhinospike.com/

Listen to recordings.

!! https://www.languagepod101.com/

Materials can become no-free after a period of time.

It doesn't mean that you can't see an archived lesson forever if you don't pay. They offer a random lesson each Thursday for free.

Just too much English.

!! https://audio-lingua.eu/

Listening materials with public licenses. It doesn't have transcripts but can search according to your level.

!! https://www.audacityteam.org/

This is for editing audio files, but it can also do something else: record the playback from your computer, which means that you can record online stream radios.

There are a video about labeling, a video about pronunciation checking and a video about automatically splitting words from a vocabulary recording.

A video about tips for using Audacity.

It is open-source.

!! https://obsproject.com/

When you are playing games in the languages you are learning, it is often hard to focus on the voices and subtitles without failing your goals in the games. You can solve this problem by recording your gameplay with this program. It is open-source.

https://greatlanguagegame.com/

Listen and identify the language. It has been shut down, but it has links to two other sites in the same type. Verbling has this game, too.

Text-to-Speech

!! http://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm

A software to read texts. If you don't know how to get the voices, you can see Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/How-to-use-SR-and-TTS-on-Windows.

!! https://github.com/Danesprite/tts-util-app

Text-to-Speech For Android. It is open-source.

!! https://app-t2s.web.app/

It is the most highly rated platform on Android.

!! https://readaloud.app/

Browser add-on. It is open-source.

https://pypi.org/project/pyttsx3/

Offline Text-to-Speech with Python. It is open-source.

a video about it.

https://pypi.org/project/gTTS/

Online Google Text-to-Speech with Python. It is open-source.

a video about it.

Speech Recognition

!!!! https://www.speechtexter.com/

Turn audios into texts, powered by Google.

!!!! https://speech-to-text-demo.ng.bluemix.net/

Turn audios into texts, powered by IBM Watson.

https://pypi.org/project/SpeechRecognition/

Speech recognition with Python.

A video about it.

Example Sentence

!!!! https://tatoeba.org/

Example sentences in many languages. It is open-source.

Don't forget to try searching in both directions. You can not only see the meaning of a sentence, but also try to translate a sentence into the language you are learning and see how you did.

If you want to translate, translate sentences with audio first, because the translations may appear on sites which provide translations of audio.

!!!! https://www.dictionarist.com/

Search for example sentences of a word, with the Lingoes dictionary inserted. Many results are from Tatoeba.

!! https://deskell.sketchengine.co.uk/run.cgi/skell

Sketch from a large of text corpus.

!!!! https://weblate.org/

Website for localisation. You can easily find parallel texts. It is open-source.

https://subasub.com/

Search for parallel texts in subtitles.

Parse Tree

https://www.mapsofspeech.com/2017/10/02/treeform/

A tool to draw parse trees and have a better understanding of sentence structures. It is open-source.

A video about it.

https://ltc.sourceforge.io/

A different one to draw parse trees. It is open-source.

Text Memorization

!! https://github.com/zg/text-memorize

For memorizing text. Python is required.

!! https://rememberthetext.com/

Memorization with hints. It has some libraries of text samples. You can add your texts.

It is also useful for building the impressions of sentence structures.

Unfortunately, it doesn't support many scripts. The reasons are: 1. it does not recognize the punctuation of many scripts such as Arabic; 2. it does not recognize words in scripts in which words are not separated by spaces such as Han or some languages where a word have spaces inside it, such as Vietnamese.

Solutions are: 1. add punctuation according to Language/Multiple-languages/Grammar/Punctuation-of-many-languages; 2. add dictionaries of Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, etc. from Wiktionary or elsewhere.

memorizer.me has the same problems.

Phrasebook

!!!! https://www.funeasylearn.com/

It provides apps for both phrase and vocabulary, but I have categorized it in this one because it provides IPA in the apps of phrases.

!! https://www.loecsen.com/

It supports many languages, and it is detailed.

!! https://www.50languages.com/

Actually a few more than 50 languages. You can also have a test there.

World Clock, Calendar & Weather

!! https://www.timeanddate.com/

It has not only the world clock for every city but also many other features, such as calendars with festivals of most countries.

!! https://www.ventusky.com/

A lot of things about meteology.

!! https://earth.nullschool.net/

Wind, weather, ocean conditions.

!! https://waqi.info/

Air condition around the world.

Community

!! https://www.italki.com/

The most popular language learning community by now. It also pushes helpful articles written by teachers.

!! https://www.reddit.com/

It is surely a miscellany, and it is a good miscellany.

Go to r/languagelearning or r/linguistics to enjoy.

!! https://www.tolearnfree.com/

The design of the webpages is old-fashioned but it has a lot of content, including little tests.

Its French version has something more.

!! https://polyglotclub.com/

There are some rare features of it, such as Wiki lessons, Events. It adopts ISO 639-3, almost every language is included here.

Questions & Answers

https://hinative.com/

Ask and answer with people around the world. Unfortunately, don't expect them to be effective in dealing with spamming and abusing. But I'm not encouraging you to do so.

Search before you ask.

Do not feed the trolls.

Do not answer blanked homework questions, because the questioner is too lazy to deserve an answer.

Do not answer the meaning of a single word. The questioners should consult a dictionary on their own. Exceptions are newbies, because they may be just following the tutorial and have a try, not lazy.

Do not ask questions in English channels, because the questions are too many, the answer rate is extremely low. Try asking at Polyglot Club.

Ask in parallel text. Then the respondent won't need to ask you about the real meaning if the sentence is not understood.

https://stackexchange.com/sites#culturerecreation

One of the most popular Q&A site.

Language Exchange

!! https://www.lingbe.com/

An app for talking with people who are as nervous to talk with strangers like you.

!! https://mylanguageexchange.com/

Free users can be contacted by those who have paid. Since they have paid, they are more likely to be serious learners.

Blog

https://blog.thelinguist.com/

Things about language learning. It is active.

https://blogs.transparent.com/

There are periodically good contents being presented.

https://www.thoughtco.com/languages-4133094

Languages are fewer than Transparent's, and so do the update frequency. But its quality is still high.

https://blog.feedspot.com/culture_blogs/

Blogs about cultures. There are also magazines.

Lyrics

!! https://www.musixmatch.com/

See lyrics and translations.

!! https://lyricstranslate.com/

Lyrics and translations.

Subtitle

!! https://www.opensubtitles.org/

One of the most popular subtitle sites. Subtitles in European languages are easier to find.

!! https://subscene.com/

One of the most popular subtitle sites. Subtitles in English, Arabic, Persian, Indonesian are easier to find.

!! https://getcaption.co/

For downloading subtitles. You can add websites on your own. It is open-source.

!! https://bonigarcia.github.io/dualsub/index.html

It can help to merge two subtitles. It may crash at the second time. It is open-source.

!! https://www.smplayer.info/

If Dualsub can't run since the second time, you can try this player, which can display two subtitles. It is open-source.

What a good name of this program.

!! http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/

Turn subtitles into flashcards. It is open-source.

A video about it.

News

!! http://www.abyznewslinks.com/

Links to news websites.

Some TV have shows for free, some of which even with subtitles.

https://liveuamap.com/

Instant news about hot spots from social media.

Radio & Podcast

!! https://www.radio-browser.info/gui/

A list of internet radio stations. You can find clients in “Apps”, some of which are open-source.

!! https://www.listennotes.com/

Search Engine of podcasts.

!! https://antennapod.org/

Podcast player with search engine for Android. It is open-source.

!! https://github.com/z-------------/CPod

Podcast player with search engine. It is open-source.

Live & Video

!! https://livetvcentral.com/

The most complete list of worldwide online TV channels.

Many links are dead, but the live stream is still available somewhere else in many of these sites.

!! https://www.squidtv.net/

Another list of TV channels, has fewer channels but contains details.

!! https://www.twitch.tv/

There are players speaking different languages. Its “IRL” section is people in real life. You can interact with them in their languages. Lots of slang to learn.

!! https://www.youtube.com/

No one can be richer in content than this. Heavy censorship, demonetization, weird copyright terms.

There are some open-source alternatives to it such as PeerTube.

There are many channels teaching languages and introducing cultures, which people may forget. However, YouTube is not the only source of such channels.

!! https://newpipe.schabi.org/

Watch YouTube videos without being watched by YouTube on Android. It is open-source.

Downloading YouTube videos violates YouTube's terms of service. What a great move of grabbing your videos and claiming them as their properties.

!! https://freetubeapp.io/

Watch YouTube videos privately on desktop. It is open-source.

There is a redirect plug-in, so you can always open the YouTube links with FreeTube. It is open-source.

https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/

Download videos with command line. It is open-source.

A tutorial about it.

Language Information

https://www.omniglot.com/

It provides information about basic knowledge of many languages. Many “Alphabet and Pronunciation” lessons on this site are from there.

https://glottolog.org/

Information of languages of the world. Not only languages, but also many varieties. It is open-soruce.

https://www.scriptsource.org/

Information of scripts.

https://www.muturzikin.com/countries.htm

Linguistic maps.

https://lingvo.info/

General knowledge about European languages.

https://iso639-3.sil.org/

Codes for every language and is still being updated. You can find the whole table.

General Knowledge

https://www.britannica.com/

A comprehensive encyclopedia.

Educational Resources

https://libguides.humboldt.edu/openedu/

Educational resources including geography, history and sociology. When you have learned such subjects, you will have insights on a culture or civilisation.

Map

!! https://www.google.com/maps/

It resolves the exotic sense. If you are careful enough, you can find trivia about a place.

From the maps you can only see the appearance, not inside the societies. Actually, people in somewhere looks rich maybe not so happy as people in somewhere looks poor.

!! https://www.openstreetmap.org/

Another map site. You can even download them. It is open-source.

There is a video about its modification with Inkscape.

!! https://marble.kde.org/

Alternative to Google Earth. It is open-source.

!! https://osmand.net/

Offline maps for mobile with OpenStreetMap data. It is open-source.

!! http://ontheworldmap.com/

Downloadable maps. It even includes cities. I don't expect them to be up-to-date.

https://www.geoguessr.com/

Guess where you are in a random Google Maps street view.

Culture & Travel

https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/

Introductions to cultures.

https://www.wikivoyage.org/

Introduction of the city and many details of countries. It is open-source.

The most important page for travelers is this.

https://www.everyculture.com/

Its information is old. There are details of peoples and countries.

http://culturalatlas.sbs.com.au/

It is about countries and in progress.

https://www.commisceo-global.com/country-guides/

It is mainly about some details about manners.

https://guide.culturecrossing.net/index.php

It is mainly about some details about manners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_subcultures

Subcultures, modern things.

https://travelhealthpro.org.uk/

Detailed information about health.

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/

Cultural heritages. There is also an interactive map.

https://ich.unesco.org/en/lists/

Intangible cultural heritages.

https://rammworldcultures.org.uk/home/objects/

Cultural Objects.

https://www.tripadvisor.com/

Guide of traveling cities.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world-factbook/

A formal publication of basic information about countries.

https://worldcultures.webs.com/

Links to other sites about cultures.

History

http://www.fsmitha.com/

Detailed articles about history.

https://www.ancient.eu/

Ancient history. Articles, images, videos, 3D images, podcasts and more.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.timleg.historytimeline

An app about major events of history.

https://histography.io/

It looks cool.

https://omniatlas.com/

It shows you some old news with detailed maps.

https://www.timemaps.com/

Maps of history.

https://www.wdl.org/

Items in the history.

http://geacron.com/

Map of every year.

https://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/History_n2/a.html

Looks old-fashioned, but it is not bad if you get used to it.

Philosophy & Religion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religions_and_spiritual_traditions

List of religions and spiritual traditions.

Not believing a religion itself is also religious.

https://www.philosophybasics.com/

The basics of philosophy, “by a layman for the layman”.

http://www.religionfacts.com/

Facts about religions.

Geography

https://www.youtube.com/user/GeographyNow/

Videos about world geography.

https://www.worldatlas.com/

Short articles.

!! https://gedevapps.com/flags/

Flags, capitals, currencies, some landmarks, in multiple languages. Dependencies included are not many.

!! http://worldmapquiz.qbisstudio.com/index.html

An app for practising world map in several languages. Dependencies are not all included. The form of address in Chinese version is a mixture of PRC's and ROC's, which is not good. For Chinese names of countries, go to Language/Mandarin-chinese/Vocabulary/Countries-and-Nationalities.

https://userbase.kde.org/KGeography

Learn Geography on Linux. Information is outdated, though it's still being maintained. It is open-source.

I am thinking about creating my own fork.

https://www.flagid.org/

Flag identifier.

Music

!! https://www.youtube.com/user/pupsibaerle1

All about traditional music.

!! https://www.soundhound.com/

Recognize music with recording or your humming. It has some advantages over Shazam.

!! https://www.shazam.com/

Recognize music with recording. It has some advantages over Soundhound.

Art

!! https://www.wikiart.org/

All kinds of artwork around the world.

Dance

!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic,_regional,_and_folk_dances_by_origin

Dances by origin. You can search for them on video sites.

Cuisine

!! https://www.allrecipes.com/

Recipes around the world.

!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cuisines

List of cuisines.

Folk Costume

!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_costume

List of folk costume.

Folktale

https://fairytalez.com/

Some faire tales.

https://www.worldoftales.com/

Some fairy tale books.

Festival

!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_festivals_by_country

Not complete, but still good.

https://www.world-festivals.net/

It includes more countries than the one above. I wonder if it is so difficult to gather information about festivals.

Name

!! https://www.behindthename.com/

Find the meanings of a given name.

Don't expect you can understand every Chinese name.

Astronomy

https://stellarium.org/

You can see the sky in different locations and times. There are starlores in different cultures. Some even have constellation art.

Living Standard

https://www.craigslist.org/

Living information. It's also on GTA IV.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/

Prices from the world. Sometimes inaccurate.

https://www.globalbrandprices.com/

The prices of the same products in different regions.

Statistics

https://www.statista.com/

All kinds of statistical data. Some are free.

https://ourworldindata.org/

It has detailed explanation on each data.

https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/

A research program by the World Bank. There is an article on Wikipedia about it.

Trivia Quizzes

https://www.jetpunk.com/

Trivia quizzes of the world. It is available in multiple languages.

Prepaid SIM Card

https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Prepaid_SIM_with_data

Details about SIM cards.

License Plate

!! http://www.worldlicenseplates.com/

Take a look if you are interested. It's so completed.

Fonts

!! https://www.google.com/get/noto/

It presents a lot of fonts in one art style. It is open-source.

!! https://unifoundry.com/unifont/index.html

No one covers more of the Unicode map than GNU Unifont. It is open-source.

Its function is limited, such as bad support for South and Southeast Asian characters.

!! https://www.fontspace.com/

You can go to its “stuff” and search by Unicode characters.

Optical Character Recognition

https://github.com/manisandro/gImageReader

It recognizes characters on the screen with Tesseract. It is open-source.

A video about training.

https://github.com/SubhamTyagi/android-ocr

It uses Tesseract 4 data on Android. It is open-source.

Language Identifier

!! http://www.polyglot3000.com/

It identifies languages.

Resource Links

Unlike this page, those are for some specific languages, and I am not responsible for their qualities.

https://www.lexilogos.com/english/index.htm

This one is in a great quantity that even GrimPixel's resource pages can hardly match.

https://www.ats-group.net/language-resources.html

This one has a lot of languages.

http://gratisglobal.com/

A comprehensive resource database.

https://www.openculture.com/

This one has various references.

https://www.lonweb.org/

This one has more languages with fewer links for each one.

http://lexicity.com/

This one focuses on ancient languages.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Free_media_resources

Free media resources.

https://www.alllanguageresources.com/

This one includes recommendations that are not free-of-charge without notice.

http://www.meta-share.org/

Repository for language researching.

https://nlp.stanford.edu/links/statnlp.html

Academic software. You may wonder why academicians are so dumb at design. That is because they are not so good at front-end and they don't have to learn much of it.

Internet Archive

https://www.archive.org/

Archive of the Internet since 1996. Really cool!

Examples: De Agostini 5 Language Visual Dictionary (practical) and The Firefly Five Language Visual Dictionary (comprehensive).

Virtual Private Network and others

!! mailto:get@psiphon3.com

Those who are hindered from accessing the world Internet, send an e-mail to it.

Official site: https://psiphon3.com/en/index.html

!! https://www.torproject.org/

For visiting Project Gutenburg and other sites, if some books are still not in public domain in your country. It is open-source.

It won't lead you to the dark web, if you don't know any such address.

!! https://protonvpn.com/

It doesn't allow torrenting on the free plan, but there's no volume limit.

!! https://windscribe.com/

They provide 10GB each month with high speed and multiple locations for free. Great for “immersive language learning”.

Endangered Language Protection

If you are capable and responsible, please do your part to protect endangered languages.

https://www.eldp.net/

http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/

-- CRITERIA --

Resources should possess at least one of the following characteristics:

  1. be rich in free content (not just a trial or not fulfilling the need in the free part), and the free content is mostly accurate, and the free content is not all covered by other free ones;
  2. be made with a unique good idea;
  3. has no better alternatives.

Resources must not possess the following characteristics:

  1. making use of the website as propaganda.

Resources with the following features will be given a little priority:

  1. available offline;
  2. available on multiple platforms;
  3. multilingual user interface;
  4. open source;
  5. privacy-friendly (including “registration not required”).

-- AUTHOR --

GrimPixel


Contributors

GrimPixel, Vincent, Maintenance script, 116.206.245.151 and 2a02:908:1266:ede0:6965:afc5:a137:765e


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