I’m wanting to start learning Spanish, and I’m looking for a free option that isn’t Duolingo.
I don’t like the gamey fomo aspect of it.
Anyone have a favorite place they found?
I’m wanting to start learning Spanish, and I’m looking for a free option that isn’t Duolingo.
I don’t like the gamey fomo aspect of it.
Anyone have a favorite place they found?
tbh if you just use the free version of duolingo i don’t think you can do many lessons now, the energy runs out after like 2-3 lessons max
im learning french so i use it just as a daily reminder to do something in french but outside of it, there should be loads of music and podcasts and audiobooks on spotify that you can use, i can’t be specific but there is things like news in slow french that surely must exist for spanish
if you have a decent video card with 8gb vram can look into lm studio with eurollm and run your own chatbot locally
https://eurollm.io/
can say things like, i am an a1 spanish learner, give me a word in English to translate to spanish and tell me if i get it right or wrong
give me a sentence in spanish to translate into english etc
mistral.ai is your best bet if you want something online, they are a french company but do a lot with european languages
hellotalk is good if you want to listen in on people learning to speak but the quality of audio depends on the persons mic quality so might be better for later in learning journey
there’s tons of stuff, best is usually just to seek out books/music/sites and do your best to spend as much of your day learning, the more time you do the faster you learn but it is tough! good luck!
My problem with LLMs for this use is that the language learner is not an expert and can be misled by a bot’s hallucinations
are you able to point some out on a1/b2 content on mistral for me? im interested to see if you’ve found some
They probably cant because they dient storend time using AI to learn a language their already proficient in. That exactly why is problematic. You can’t know if the explanations are good unless you get an actual human who knows the language to verify it.
so the irony is that you guys are hallucinating an answer confidently, AI is really good at translation and language
https://www.deepl.com/en for example is far better than google translate was because they leapt onto ML/AI earlier
If you don’t want to straight up use Mistral/EuroLLM which are trained on European languages:
https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/12/02/mistral-europes-ai-champion-releases-new-smaller-frontier-models-heres-what-to-know
If you don’t want to directly use a chatbot there’s also https://morpheem.org/ and https://languatalk.com/try-langua which uses AI but builds it around the games specifically, vs just straight up telling the AI bot what to do
AI is really good at translating, but not nearly as good at explaining grammar. I have tried before to get a mistral tutor explain to me when a verb takes the gender of the direct object or of the indirect object in Hindi. It gave me a wildly different answer than chatgpt.
yeah mistral is weak like that, I would say they’re at least a year away from chatgpt and claude but they just don’t have the compute
I would recommend to use AI for basic games like translate sentence, anki style flash cards, fill in the sentence, eg. unlike duolingo it won’t annoy the hell out of you with ads and energy
When I asked my teacher on italki it turned out that both mistral and chatgpt were wrong.
Learning a language from a chat bot that’s right only 75% of the time in the best case seems like a horrible plan.