My annual subscription renews at just under $100 and I've been looking at what I got for last year's: a lot of matching exercises and a number that went up. I'm B1-ish in French, about 25 minutes a day, and I'd rather put that $100 toward a handful of tutor hours if free tools can carry the daily grind. What do people use that costs nothing and isn't just a crippled version of the paid thing?
Two things that are genuinely free rather than free-tier. First, spaced repetition software: the main one is free on desktop, Android and the web, with a one-off charge only on the iOS app. Second, your public library. A lot of library systems hand you a full language platform free with a card — Mango is the common one and covers 70-odd languages — and people renew $100 subscriptions every year without ever checking. It takes ten minutes to find out.
Mine had three different ones. The only catch is you sometimes have to re-authenticate with the card every 30 days, which is mildly annoying and still free.
I had no idea the library thing was a whole platform rather than a shelf of phrasebooks. Checking tonight.
The real cost of free tools is setup time. The flashcard route means you build or vet your own decks, and shared decks are wildly uneven — I lost two weeks to a badly made one before somebody told me to make cards from sentences I'd actually read. What paid apps sell you is 'don't think about it', and that's worth something if thinking about it is the reason you'd quit.
Then keep something with a streak and stop paying for it. The free tier of most of these still has the streak. What you're paying for is no ads and unlimited mistakes.
Fair. The streak was genuinely the reason I opened it at all on bad days.
Browser extensions that put dual subtitles on streaming video plus a free pop-up dictionary. That combination was the single biggest free upgrade I made, and it turned an hour of television into study without it feeling like study, which is the only way I get an hour of study.
One practical thing: the price of these annual plans varies by region and by whether you've cancelled. Before you renew at full price, cancel and wait a week. I have never not been offered a discount.
@mature_student_j · last mo.
At B1 French the free resource that matters most isn't an app at all, it's content. Learner-aimed podcasts at your level, then real podcasts, then the news. The app was carrying you at A1 because A1 is mostly vocabulary. At B1 the bottleneck is hours of input, and hours of input have been free for about fifteen years.
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