These online language course sites offer free classes in a variety of foreign languages. These mostly skew towards beginners, as I’m yet to find a 0 to fluent course that is free.
If you’re just starting out with a language, then check these out:
1. Lingohut
Choose from 50 languages. You can choose your native language too, so you don’t have to learn from English. The lessons start basic and go to lower intermediate. You don’t need to create an account to do the lessons either, which is nice.
2. Loecsen
The site is old fashioned looking, but the content is good. You can learn words with their audio and take tests on what you learned. There are 51 languages offered.
3. Alison
This site hosts courses in many subjects, so make sure you filter by language. Then, you can filter by free. At time of writing, there are 288 free language classes. Opt-out of any certificates (they are pretty useless) so that you don’t pay anything.
4. Coursera
Another site that has a ton of classes. Unfortunately, most of those aren’t language ones. They have good language classes in Mandarin, Korean and French. Just audit the course to take it for free, you don’t need to pay here.
5. Edx
All courses on here are free to take. For languages, they have Arabic, Italian, French, Japanese, Mandarin and Korean. These are quality courses from real universities. If one of your target languages is in this list, I would start here. You’ll get better instruction than what the other sites on this list can offer.
6. Open University
Filter by language and “free course”. This site can be a bit tricky to navigate, but the free options are there. Right now they have 8 languages. The courses are very very basic though, so I would only look at this option if you’re just starting out.
Other options:
Some languages have great course sites that are specific to just them. Be sure to check out my upcoming language specific posts for more info. This list was made by all the sites I could see that aggregate several languages. These sites could add more languages over time, so be sure to bookmark them if your target language isn’t there yet.