Black Friday (2024) Huge Language Learning Deals [+ Gift Ideas]

First things first - Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend announcement:

This is always the best time of the year to take advantage of some heavily discounted language learning products online.

Here are the best 2024 Black Friday and Cyber Monday language learning offers (NOTE: some offers are active early, others start around Black Friday or Cyber Monday):

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Rocket Languages is again running their huge 60% off special on all their newly updated courses. They’ve added some really exciting improvements to the platform, new levels and course content this year worth checking out.

Use code: BLACKFRIDAY

They also sell gift vouchers for all language courses in case you need a gift for someone in your family who’s learning a language.

Select the language you’re learning from the list:

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StoryLearning (Olly Richards) is offering a huge 75% discount on all of his hugely popular Uncovered language courses (French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Latin, Korean, Portuguese and Japanese).

The regular price is for all language courses ranges from $297 to $397 so this Black Friday offer is a real steal.

For Black Friday only, you can grab any course for just $97 (or save on every course in one huge, discounted bundle).

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TalkInArabic.com is offering a massive Black Friday/Cyber Monday discount on Lifetime memberships that you won’t want to miss out on. A huge 50% off the total price (includes $80 worth of free bonuses + the audiobook for Egyptian Arabic: Easy Stories With English Translations).

Strictly limited to the first 100 members only so be quick.

Sign up and use code: BLACKFRIDAY.

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Innovative Languages is offering a massive 51% off all their many language courses for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Use code: BLACKFRIDAY2024 at checkout.

Select the language you’re learning from the list:

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Glossika is offering 50% off any of their excellent language courses (annual plans).

Their promotion starts November 20.

Use code: GBF24

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Mondly’s running arguably the largest offering here for all their language packages (41 languages). Lifetime access to all languages, marked down to just $89.99 (that’s a 96% discount!).

This includes all their current and future languages + free access to 2 of their other apps: Mondly Kids and Mondly AR.

This one’s huge and a popular seller.

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MosaLingua is offering a massive 97% discount on lifetime access to all their popular language courses/apps. There are 11 languages available: Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Russian, English, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Modern Standard Arabic (new).

This is about $5,345 in value for only $99.

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Pimsleur, the world famous and highly effective audio courses for many different languages, have a Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale offering both:

• Annual ‘All Access’ subscriptions at 20% off, and
• 50% off the first month of ‘All Access’ subscriptions

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Aimigo (Gymglish) have been kind to set up a special, exclusive Black Friday offer (40% off) for my readers on their personalized and extremely popular language courses. This offer is strictly available from November 24th to December 5th.

Must use this code: MEZZOFANTI-BFCM40

Select a language course to learn more:

• 🇫🇷 Frantastique (French)
• 🇩🇪 Wunderbla (German)
• 🇪🇸 Hotel Borbollón (Spanish)
• 🇮🇹 Saga Baldoria (Italian)
• 🇬🇧 Gymglish (English)

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Babbel is offering a huge 70% discount on all their language courses.

This includes the Babbel App and Babbel Live services.

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Ouino, a unique and highly popular French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German program, is offering a huge 70% off their courses (French, Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese).

Choose a language to learn more:

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Lingopie is a newly popular platform that helps you learn languages through TV shows with interactive subtitles. Right now they’re offering a massive 58% off their annual subscription for all languages.

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French Simplified is offering a huge 75% off their A1 and A2 French course bundle (produced by certified French Alliance teacher and influencer Joel Ackermann) for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

That works out to only $37 total for both courses.

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Rosetta Stone has taken over 60% off their 25 popular language courses (lifetime access).

That works out to be only $149 for lifetime access to all their language courses.

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Biblingo (which is basically the Duolingo of Biblical Greek and Hebrew) is offering 25% off everything for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

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Michael Schmitz from SmarterGerman is offering up to 50% off his incredibly popular German course bundles (starts November 29th).

Use code: BFLANG50

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French Today has taken a generous 40% off all their French course material.

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SpanishVIP is one of the best platforms for online Spanish tutoring. This year they’re offering 30% off 3 or 6 months of unlimited Spanish classes.

Use code: PROMOVIP50

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FluentU has taken 60% off the price of their extensive video libraries (10 languages).

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Yoyo is one of the most popular online resources for learning Mandarin Chinese. They’re taking a massive 40% off their Lifetime Learner plan.

This deal runs from November 26 to December 2.

Use code: YYC24BFS

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Lingoda is offering 50% off their monthly subscription.

Use the code: BLACKFRIDAY2024

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Busuu are taking 50% off premium subscriptions for most of Black Friday month. It’s a great platform with loads of language options available.

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Talk In Arabic is also offering 50% off their popular Arabic verb packs (Egyptian, Levantine, Saudi and Moroccan).

Use code: BLACKFRIDAY

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Ling is offering 50% off their popular language app (lots of different languages covered).

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Take advantage of these offers since they only happen once a year.

Black Friday is the one time of the year you absolutely should stock up on language learning products.

Buy the gift of online language lesson credits

Are you familiar with services that offer experience gifts?

These days there are lots of websites where people can buy experiences for people, as opposed to a normal wrapped gift.

It’s a fantastic concept in my opinion and a great last minute option for Christmas shoppers who run out of ideas or don’t have enough time to fight the chaos at the malls or wait for delivery.

Well, services like italki and Lingoda are the ultimate language learning equivalent of this.

Think about this scenario for a second:

Your friend tells you that she’s planning a vacation or an immersion stay in Paris, so you have this great idea to head out and buy her a book for learning French.

You wrap it up all nice and hand it to her, she thinks it’s a lovely thought and gets through a chapter or two, then starts to find it boring or overwhelming and eventually loses the motivation to continue.

Within a few weeks that expensive book you bought becomes just another ornament on her bookshelf.

It may even turn your friend off the language altogether.

I’m convinced that a real life, face-to-face session is one of the best presents you can buy your friend or family member if they’re learning a foreign language. It’s so easy to organize and will ultimately give them a very tangible experience that’ll help them improve and connect with the target culture.

Of course, you could go out and pay for some lessons with a teacher who lives locally (provided there is one) but it will most likely be a heck of a lot more inconvenient and expensive.

I’ve had online lessons before which were organized through other sites, friends and so on, but I must say I’m very impressed with the convenience that these platforms offer in connecting people, orchestrating times and facilitating payments.

It costs me about $9 a lesson on average which is pocket change (to give you an idea of the price difference, my one-on-one French teacher back home used to charge me $50/hr, plus all the fuel money I’d spend driving to see her each week).

A lot of these online teachers and platforms also have the option of packages, so you could buy say 10 lessons at a discounted rate and give that to someone as a present.

I encourage you to consider it as a Christmas gift alternative or even try it out yourself if you haven’t already:

• Lingoda (for German, French, Spanish and English lesson gifts)
• italki (for all other languages)

Christmas stocking stuffers for language learners and travelers

Need a quick gift idea or a stocking stuffer for someone who loves languages (or travel)?

If you don’t mind spending a few bucks, then I highly recommend a translation pen device. This is a pen-sized scanner that can read written text and provide an instant translation (e.g. scan menu items in a restaurant overseas and it’ll give you the meaning in English).

There are several brand options but here’s what I recommend:

• If the person’s learning Chinese or Spanish, go with the youdao pen (very high quality pen with real voice pronunciation, and I believe there are more languages on the way).
• For all other languages, get the PenPower model.

Or rather than get a pen translator for written text, you could get a pocket interpreter instead. These are handheld, pocket-size devices that allow you to communicate verbally with a speaker of another language and get an instant interpretation.

The quality of the interpretation depends on the model, but if I were to give a suggestion on the best one, I’d personally go with the Pocketalk model.

Looking for a cheaper idea?

For just under $20, I recommend the TravelFlips flashcard kits (10 different languages available). There’s a higher priced edition with a classy leather pouch too. They look fantastic as a small box gift.

If you only want to spend a few bucks on a stocking filler, then I recommend a good quality phrasebook.

My personal favorite when it comes to phrasebooks is the Collins Gem series.

Collins also have an excellent beginner grammar series called Collins Easy Learning, and these are also very cheap.

Another good gift option for less than $10 would be any of the StoryLearning paperback books (many different languages available).

If you want a gift that’s around $5, I definitely recommend keyboard language stickers.

A more effective alternative to a phrasebook (and great gift idea): Earworms Musical Brain Trainer

I reviewed Earworms MBT here a while back if you missed it.

For people who love music and use songs to learn a foreign language I’m sure they’ll be very impressed with this.

Earworms is one of the most innovative and promising concepts I’ve come across in a long time, and it’s based on solid research into how a certain part of the brain causes songs to get ‘stuck’ in our heads, applying the same process to foreign language memorization.

I got myself the French and Russian editions, and found them really effective.

The music’s very catchy and enjoyable to listen to as well so you don’t feel like you’re studying at all. It’s a brilliant alternative to a phrasebook for someone who’s about to travel.

It only costs a little over $15 for a hard copy or you can get the MP3’s through Amazon Music (they usually have a Black Friday deal each year).

The following languages are currently available:

Arabic, Portuguese (European and Brazilian), Cantonese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Polish, Russian, Spanish (European and Latin American) and Turkish.

Check it out here:

More inexpensive Black Friday or Christmas gift ideas for language learners

Is the person you’re shopping for a bit of a grammarphile?

I personally find the Schaums Outlines series to be excellent. I bought the Shaum’s Outline of Russian Grammar a while back and found it to be very comprehensive and clear (plus the pages have perforated lines so you can easily tear out different sections if you need to).

For a less comprehensive and more easy-to-follow grammar series, I also like the Collins Easy Learning books which are usually under $10. Rather than just getting someone a phrasebook, the Collins Easy Learning books are like a grammar/phrasebook/dictionary in one and nicely laid out.

Are you looking for something with more of a focus on dialogue material?

The Colloquial and Teach Yourself books are hit and miss for some languages – some of them are excellent and some aren’t good at all in my opinion.

You can’t really go past the Assimil series for quality dialogue material though (see my review here). Detailed explanations are in footnotes and the books focus on getting you to repeat useable chunks of real language with good quality audio.

Consider some noise-cancelling headphones. I recently purchased some myself and have found them invaluable for focused learning. The two most popular at the moment are Sony and Bose.

Just after something fun and silly?

Two book series that are perfect silly gift ideas for language learners or travellers are Dirty and Making Out books.

You can usually pick them up for under $10 and they’re full of slang, swear words, pick-up lines and so on. I actually found the Dirty Korean book very useful when I was living in Korea. 🙂

Also consider a Mondly subscription as a gift for someone.

A few gift ideas for Arabic, Irish and Korean learners specifically

A huge amount of the people who visit this blog come here via search engines looking for learning material in Arabic, Irish and Korean (since I write a lot about these languages).

It would take me weeks to write recommendations for all the other languages so I’m just going to make a few suggestions for these three in particular which some of you might find useful.

What to get Arabic learners for Christmas (if you missed Black Friday)

Consider a TalkInArabic.com membership (definitely use the Black Friday offer) or one of our Arabic Essential Verb Packs.

I always recommend the Kalimni ‘Arabi series for learning Egyptian Arabic which is the best book series currently available for this dialect. Nothing on the market beats it in my opinion.

Check out these book recommendations here and here.

Also check out my post on Levantine and Iraqi Arabic books.

Irish language gift ideas

First of all, I highly recommend Litriocht which is an online Gaeilge bookstore.

It’s a good place to order books in hardcover or paperback but they also have some good ebooks too (readable on Kindle).

There’s also Siopa.ie run by Gaelchultúr which is another good source of books (they stock an Irish version of Scrabble :)).

Gaelchultúr recently sent me a few review copies of their superior Gaeilge Gan Stró books and access to their courses at ranganna.com which I think would be a great gift idea for someone you know who wants to learn Irish (I’ll put up a review of these over the coming weeks).

My friend Eoin over at Bitesize Irish Gaelic (it’s had a lot of improvements since I reviewed it a while back) has put together a great 2-hour, conversational MP3 course called Learn Irish With Eoin which is available on iTunes for about €9. That’s definitely worth checking out for anyone wanting a good place to start with Irish.

Finally, I reviewed the Irish edition of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien and would highly recommend it as a gift to an Irish learner.

It’s good timing considering all the interest that The Hobbit 2 has sparked. 🙂

Korean language learning gift ideas

The recently-released Korean course by StoryLearning is on sale, and would be an excellent gift for somebody learning Korean.

TTMIK Store is a fantastic place for any Korean language-related gift.

For quick, inexpensive gifts related to Korea or the Korean language there are so many cool options on this site. I reviewed one of the TTMIK books that they have.

You can also find some bilingual readers, posters and keyboard stickers that are really inexpensive and fun gift ideas.

Dirty Korean (also available for other languages) is a fun little book I picked up too that doesn’t just teach you swear words, but lots of slang expressions that you hear a lot in everyday conversation.

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Are there any gift ideas that you’d suggest for a language learner?

Share your ideas in the comment section below. 🙂

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