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Arabic Resources
Spanish Resources
French Resources
Italian Resources
German Resources
Mandarin Chinese Resources
Hindi Resources
Portuguese Resources
Korean Resources
Japanese Resources
Russian ResourcesThe Best Video Sites For Language Learning In 2024
Written byDonovan NagelDonovan NagelTeacher, translator, polyglot🎓 B.A., Theology, Australian College of Theology, NSW🎓 M.A., Applied Linguistics, University of New England, NSW
Applied Linguistics graduate, teacher and translator. Founder of The Mezzofanti Guild and Talk In Arabic.- Read time4 mins
- Comments12
Note: Also be sure to visit my Essential Language Learning Tools page where I’ve listed these and other quality language learning resources.
I’m a visual learner.
Even if I have an excellent audio resource to learn a language from, I still find it easier when I can see who’s talking.
Body language, visual cues and the environment make a huge difference to how quickly I and many other people pick up new vocabulary and expressions.
For that reason I love using sites that put an emphasis on quality video material.
I’ve started to compile a list of the best online resources for language learning using video.
A few of the sites listed below are for languages I don’t speak admittedly (like Portuguese) but I’ve included them because they’re extremely popular with learners who I talk to.
I’d really like you to help me expand this list by suggesting your favorite YouTube channels and sites as well.
I’ll periodically update this page with your suggestions.
LingoPie
LingoPie is new but hands down the best video site I’ve seen for learning languages in terms of quality.
They offer a massive library of the highest quality, popular TV shows where you can select your genre and watch interactive video.
The only downside is that there are currently only 6 (European) languages available.
See our LingoPie review.
Available in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, German and Russian.
FluentU
FluentU is an excellent frontend for YouTube that helps you learn and understand videos at all levels.
You can move the mouse over subtitles at any time which will pause the video, provide pronunciation of the word and a detailed definition.
It has loads of other neat features as well (I covered this in my FluentU review).
Available in Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Italian, Japanese and English.
Innovative Language
A great podcast course available in many different languages, the Innovative Language series includes lots of video lessons.
Some of them are excellent but also hit and miss depending on the language as to the quality of the videos.
Select the language you’re learning to see what they have:
Here’s a sample from the Portuguese version to give you an idea:
Yabla
Very similar to FluentU (but without YouTube), Yabla’s been around for ages and is a fantastic video tool (read my Yabla review).
Available in French, Spanish, Italian, German, English and Chinese.
Semantica Portuguese
Semantica Portuguese (Brazilian) provides lessons and detailed ‘breakdowns’ of their situational mini-series set in Brazil.
See this Semantica Portuguese review.
TalkInArabic.com
Our own site for spoken Arabic dialects provides video dialogues and conversations with English + Arabic subtitles and transcripts (review here and here).
Talk To Me In Korean
TTMIK is the best site in existence for Korean learners.
It’s a treasure trove of quality Korean videos (lessons and dialogues with subs) like this one:
Fleex.tv (English)
Fleex is another excellent site for English learners with a similar interface to FluentU and Yabla.
It uses video from services like Netflix and YouTube that are in English with dual subs (so it can also be useful for learners of other languages too).
Easy Languages
Or go directly to their YouTube channel here (sometimes their site takes forever to load).
I love this site and have used it many times for different languages. The Easy Languages crew take to the streets and question people in various languages, providing the videos with dual subs.
Very handy for listening practice since it’s so repetitive.
LingusTV (Spanish)
LingusTV provides a series of videos in Spanish at different levels, all accompanied by transcripts, translations and lesson notes.
Ranganna.com (Irish)
The online version of the excellent Gaeilge gan Stró series (see my video review here).
It has some outstanding natural dialogues in all levels of Irish with transcripts and exercises as well.
MandarinHQ
Angel Huang has done a phenomenal job with her videos on MandarinHQ.
They’re some of the best quality I’ve seen for any language site in fact. Hard to believe it’s free. 🙂
Great YouTube Channels For Languages
Extr@ Series – A comedy sitcom with simplified dialogues in various languages. Entertaining and very useful for listening practice (French, German, Spanish, English).
An Grá Faoi Ghlas – Very similar to Extr@ but more of a Big Brother style show in simplified Irish.
Learn Arabic With Maha (Palestinian)
Learn Arabic With Ali (Egyptian)
Deutsch für Euch (German)
Anything you’d add to this list? 🙂
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Donovan Nagel - B. Th, MA AppLing
I'm an Applied Linguistics graduate, teacher and translator with a passion for language learning (especially Arabic).
12 COMMENTS
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Christiaan Corthier
Love the list. Any other Spanish learning resources would be greatly appreciated.
Ig:capfan1
John Kirton
Although this site was primarily developed as a language reader and vocabulary enhancement tool, I think the potential for combining video and text, offers much more potential.
It is readlang 40+ languages, good free version, video, songs and very easy to use. Reviews here. It does what it says on the tin ‘Read, translate and supercharge your vocabulary.’
For example this resource is well spoken, interesting and backed by highly accurate text. You can copy the video from YouTube into readlang, upload the text, synchronize it and put it in the public area of the site for others to use. There are already lots of videos available in all the major European languages.
If you don’t know a word you can look it up on the dictionary facility or use the chrome extension and use the much better wordreference resource. The site is backed by a flash card system with spaced repetition to make vocabulary building more efficient and vocabulary is given in context which, of course helps learning.
If you love music it has lots of video with synchronised text and all the above facilities. You can load your own songs to the public area too!
Try it guys!! You’ll love it.
kamiel choi
Hi Donnovan,
Great resource, thank you. I’m a learning with discipline issues :) and looking for the best language learning stream that keeps throwing stuff at the learning, with spaced repetition and gradual increase of complexity. I believe learning by stream will be more and more the norm, as machine learning techniques make it easier to present personally optimized learning material to students; what’s your take on this?
Bharad
I’d add German with Jenny to this list. A fantastic channel and her website is also a treasure trove. She updates both very consistently.
Youtube channel.
Her website:
germanwithjenny.com
Eduardo
Yoyo Chinese
Zoé
Very useful material here! You should also check out Lingolistic, they have a long list of videos in various languages.
Ingvald Johansen
Here are some youtube channels.
Russian:
Lessons with history and culture insight.
Lessons in a vlog format.
Pronounciation lessons.
This guy starts each video with a short story, then asks questions about it, and then you’re supposed to answer the questions correctly. Very repetitive. Good for people who don’t have a large vocabulary.
Serbian:
Grammar oriented lessons. I used it supplementarily as I got started with my Teach Yourself Serbian course.
serkan
what about voscreen.com?
Alyxia
Great list, Donovan! Though, I would personally add Yoyo Chinese and Gritty Spanish to the list. They are both paid products, though Yoyo Chinese actually publishes quite a number of videos on Youtube, all of which are very informative. Gritty Spanish is like Semantica Portuguese in that it attempts to teach language through tv-like situations but it focuses mainly on Spanish Slang.
Alyxia
Oops, never mind! Gritty Spanish does not include video, sorry about that! Just completely disregard what I said about it above.
Suada
I agree. Yoyo Chinese is brilliant. I started learning Chinese just because of their courses. I highly recommend them.
Luciano Britti
May I recommend this youtube channel for Italian learning?
Congrats on your page.