This Site Offers Hundreds of Free Language Learning Courses

Pick up a few new words during your commute.

Whether you learned Spanish from Sesame Street or took French in high school, your skills might be have gotten a bit rusty over the years. Or maybe you work in an industry where it's helpful to understand Arabic, Korean, or Finnish, or you want to pick up some Italian to help research your ancestry.

Whatever the reason, if you'd like to learn a new language, there are plenty of free, online courses and resources to help get you started. Here's one of them, which offers courses in 49 languages.

Where to find free online language courses

The website OpenCulture.com is a remarkable repository of free online resources—from open-access movies and audiobooks, to public domain art, to countless educational courses. The site maintains a page with a running list of free online language courses.

Currently, there are free online lessons available, covering 49 different languages:

1. Amharic

2. Ancient Greek

3. Arabic

4. American Sign Language

5. Bambara

6. Bulgarian

7. Cambodian

8. Cantonese

9. Catalan

10. Chinese (standard)

11. Czech

12. Danish

13. Dutch

14. English

15. Farsi/Persian

16. Finnish

17. French

18. Frisian

19. German

20. Greek

21. Hebrew

22. Hindi

23. Hungarian

24. Icelandic

25. Indonesian

26. Irish

27. Italian

28. Japanese

29. Korean

30. Lao

31. Latin

32. Lithuanian

33. Luxembourgish

34. Mandarin

35. Maori

36. Norwegian

37. Polish

38. Portuguese

39. Romanian

40. Russian

41. Serbo-Croatian

42. Spanish

43. Swahili

44. Swedish

45. Thai

46. Turkish

47. Twi

48. Vietnamese

49. Welsh

There's a description of each language course, as well as what type of free materials are available—like mp3s, PDFs, videos to stream, and interactive modules. While many of the courses are introductions to the languages, others are more specialized, like medical Spanish for healthcare providers, Arabic in Jordan, foundations of French for global communication, and easy travel Japanese. There are also general courses providing tools for anyone looking to improve their foreign language skills.

For more information, you can find the full list of languages, courses, and resources on OpenCulture.com. And for additional language-learning tools, check out these previous Lifehacker posts on learning a new language while casually browsing the internet, and how to study a language so you actually understand it.