Language learning apps, sorted by the work they do
Updated 5 November 2026
The search for an alternative rarely starts with a complaint. It starts with a result: a long streak, a finished course, and a page in front of you that you still cannot read. The first question is not which app to switch to but which kind of work was missing, because an alternative that does the same work will produce the same result with a different colour scheme.
Three different people search for the same thing
One has worked through a course from the beginning and can answer the questions it asks, but has never read a paragraph of real text. The language arrived as a series of choices, and nothing tested whether it is understood.
One wants to read something specific — a novel, a news site, a religious text — and found that the app teaches the language but not that book. They do not need a new course; they need to start where they are trying to arrive.
One is leaving because of the ritual: the streak, the notifications, the rigged daily goal, the feeling that the app is being opened rather than used. That person is not short of a course. They are short of a way to spend twenty minutes on the language that does not feel like a slot machine.
Sort the options by the work they do
Alternatives are not ranked by quality, because they are not doing the same job. There are five kinds, and a good choice matches the kind to the gap.
A structured course takes you from nothing to being able to handle a first conversation. Its value is order and early confidence. Its limit is the same as the thing you are leaving: it decides what you meet, and it is not where you go once you can already read.
A story or graded reader gives you real text at your level, with help on tap. Its value is volume of comprehensible language. Its limit is that it does not teach you to speak.
A tutor's value is the one thing nothing else supplies — someone hearing you attempt a sentence and telling you what is wrong with it. Its limit is cost and scheduling.
A flashcard deck is a store of words and phrases to review. It is excellent at keeping words alive between encounters and poor at teaching them the first time, because a word in a list has no context to be remembered by.
Immersion material — podcasts, videos, shows, films — is where the language becomes ordinary. It presumes you are already good enough to follow it, which is why it is the last kind people arrive at most of the time, rather than the first.
If the gap is reading, choose a reader
This is the quiet majority of the people searching, and it is where the decision is easiest to get wrong. What you want is a tool that shows you text you can almost follow, and gets out of the way while you read it.
Tori is that kind of tool, and it is honest about it: original stories written for learners and ordered into a learning map by difficulty, sentence pairs so you can check a line rather than look up a word, narration sentence by sentence with the words highlighting as they are spoken, and a tap on any word for its meaning in the moment you need it.
Two things follow from that design. The first is that the words you meet are the words that come back — the sentences you read feed a spaced-review list, so the vocabulary keeps returning after the story rather than being learned once and forgotten.
The second is that reading position is remembered, so a session can be short and still count: resume at the last sentence, read two more, stop. That is the property that makes a habit survive a bad week, and it is the property a course cannot give you, because your stopping place in a syllabus is not somewhere you can meaningfully come back to.
What this does not do is teach you to speak. There is no speaking practice and no pronunciation feedback here. If the gap you are trying to close is talking to people, a reader is the wrong alternative and no amount of reading will change that.
The tests to apply before you commit
Ask any alternative four questions before you spend a month on it. Does it show me actual sentences in the language, in an amount I can read rather than decode? Can I find out what a word means without leaving the page I am reading? Does the vocabulary I meet come back later without me building a deck by hand? Can I see progress as things finished — sentences, chapters, stories — rather than as points?
A fifth question is harder and more useful: what does it do when I miss a week? The answer tells you whether it is built for a habit or for a streak. Something you can pick up two steps back is a tool; something that punishes the gap is a commitment device, and commitment devices only work while you are keeping them.
One more: can I leave? If your words, your place and your history are locked inside it, that is not a reading tool, it is a subscription with a reading theme. Custom books are worth checking for the same reason — if the thing you want to read is a public-domain text, a reader should let you bring it.
Switching without losing what you built
Do not start from the beginning again. The vocabulary you have met is real, even if it was met inside a game, and a reader is a better test of it than another placement quiz: open a story one level below where you think you are, and see whether you can follow it.
Keep the time slot, not the ritual. If the app you are leaving owned a particular twenty minutes of your day, put the new one there rather than adding a second slot — the schedule is the part that was working, and it is the part most often lost in a switch.
Expect the first week to feel worse. A course supplies constant small wins by design; reading supplies the ordinary feeling of following a story, which is less rewarding minute-to-minute and considerably more useful. That trade is the whole point of the switch, so it should be felt rather than smoothed over.
What an alternative will not fix
Switching apps does not add hours. If the language was going to take a year of daily contact, it still will, and the same twenty minutes split between two tools reaches half as far in each.
It does not fix speaking, and no reading tool does. Pronunciation and production develop against feedback from a person, and that means a tutor, a class or a patient speaker of the language.
It does not remove the need for order at the very beginning. If you cannot read a sentence at all, a course or a tutor is a reasonable first step, and a reader becomes useful soon after rather than instead.
Questions
What is the best free alternative to Duolingo?
The honest answer is that price is the wrong first filter and there are good free options in every category above. Filter by the work instead: a free graded reader is worth more to someone who cannot read a page than a free course that repeats what they already finished. Tori's own plans are on the pricing page rather than in this guide, because this page is not comparing other apps' prices.
What is the best app to learn Spanish for free?
The same answer as for any language, because nothing about Spanish changes which kind of app helps. If you want to read Spanish, a free graded reader that shows you real sentences and lets you check a line is worth more than a free course that repeats the first two hundred words. If you want to speak it, no free app replaces somebody listening to you. Start with the free tier of the kind of tool that matches the gap, and pay only when the free limit is the thing stopping you.
What should I use instead if I want to read books in the language?
A reader, not a course: something that gives you real sentences at your level, a way to check a line without leaving it, and words that come back. Start earlier in the map than you think you need — the first story should be a little too easy, because the goal of week one is a finished story rather than a hard one.
Can I use more than one alternative at the same time?
You can, but the hours do not multiply. A reader plus a weekly conversation session is a coherent pair because they do different work. A reader plus another structured course mostly duplicates the input half of the day and leaves the speaking half untouched.
Will switching make me able to speak?
No. Reading and listening build comprehension, and speaking is a separate skill that develops against a person listening. If speaking is the goal, the alternative you need is a tutor or a conversation partner, and a reader is a useful companion to that rather than a substitute.
How do I know an app is actually teaching me and not just keeping me busy?
Test it against your own past rather than against its dashboard. Open something that was hard a month ago and read it. A finished chapter and a climb in points look similar inside an app and completely different when you read a real page.