Open Culture Review: Ideal for Rare Languages, Yet Limited in Depth

Having personally studied over ten languages, beginning with Hindi as a curious (and often bored) nine-year-old, I've frequently searched the web for affordable learning tools.

Open Culture addresses this need by offering a selected compilation of entirely free materials for 48 different languages. To test it, I attempted to learn Persian using only the resources they listed, having no prior knowledge of the language.

Understanding Open Culture and Its Functionality

Open Culture is a website that directs users to language learning resources. All listed resources are claimed to be free, with lists available for a total of 48 languages.

All language resources can be found on Open Culture’s “Languages” page. Each language has a dedicated section with resources presented in bulleted lists, each including a link and a brief description.

Advantages of Open Culture

Abundance of free materials

The most significant advantage of Open Culture is undoubtedly the volume of resources. I was struck by the number of materials compiled for so many languages—it felt like the list went on and on.

The Persian section listed four resources. This seemed like an ideal number to begin learning without feeling overloaded. I chose to use Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation as my primary tool and Easy Persian for learning the alphabet and grammar. I had intended to use the Learn Persian Farsi Easily, Effectively, and Fluently podcast for extra practice, but the podcast is no longer accessible.

The fourth resource was less appealing, so I decided against using it.

Some languages, such as French, English, and Chinese, have significantly more resources than others. While this means you'll need to be more selective, you can be confident that your choices will be very affordable.

Contains resources for uncommon and rare languages

What stood out to me even more than the quantity of resources was the variety of languages covered. Having previously studied rare and endangered languages, I believe Open Culture would have saved me considerable time in finding cost-effective and useful tools.

Examples of the less common languages featured are Amharic, Ancient Greek, Bambara, Lao, Luxembourgish, Māori, Serbo-Croatian, and Twi.

Features a diverse range of material types

One appealing aspect of Open Culture is the variety of resource types available beyond standard textbooks and online courses. You can also find links to podcasts, audiobooks, films, news sites, and more.

Provides resources for specific dialects

A distinctive feature of Open Culture is its inclusion of resources for specific dialects of certain languages. A prime example is the Arabic resources. On the “ Free Arabic Lessons ” page, you can find materials for Jordanian Arabic, Levantine Arabic, and Saudi Arabic.

Includes lists for resources beyond standard courses

In addition to the free course list, Open Culture provides other compilations where you can find media, podcasts, books, and more.

There's a film list with over 4,000 free movies. Not all are in a foreign language—many are in English—but browsing or using Ctrl + F to search for your target language will help you find relevant content quickly.

Here are some other lists you might find interesting, though they are not specifically for language learning:

• 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free
• 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities
• Online Degrees & Mini Degrees
• The 150 Best Podcasts

Disadvantages of Open Culture

Numerous links are non-functional

The most significant drawback is that many links on Open Culture are broken. Even their "about us" page, which still shows up in search results, is no longer available.

Within just a couple of minutes of browsing the language resources page, I encountered five broken links. This is particularly frustrating for less-studied languages, which often only have one to three links listed. For instance, Catalan has only one resource—a podcast/website called One Minute Catalan—but the link leads to a page that doesn't exist.

Resource distribution is uneven across languages

It's understandable that rare languages have fewer resources than common ones like French and Spanish. However, many notable, completely free resources that could be included are missing from the list.

For example, Open Culture lists Duolingo for many common languages. But Duolingo also offers courses for several rare languages that are absent from Open Culture, such as Hawaiian and Navajo, which aren't even listed.

Duolingo also provides a course for Czech, a language that currently has only one resource on Open Culture. So while Open Culture does offer many high-quality free options, a simple Google search might yield even more.

Omits some languages that have readily available resources

Since Open Culture is merely a resource page, it lacks several languages one might expect to find. For instance, I wanted to learn Tagalog for this challenge, but it isn't included despite the abundance of free online resources for it.

Open Culture includes endangered languages like Maori but not Hawaiian, despite the existence of a full Hawaiian course on Duolingo and many free lessons provided by universities.

The list appears outdated

I noticed early on that Open Culture's list seems quite outdated, and not just because of broken links or missing languages that should be easy to add.

Some resources have altered their offerings and pricing, meaning they are no longer free. For example, nearly all the Thai courses are either unavailable or not actually free.

In other cases, resources remain listed even though they've been unavailable for some time. The aforementioned One Minute Catalan resource, for instance, is an old Coffee Break Languages course that's no longer offered. I managed to find the lesson archives via Google, but the podcast episodes and study materials can no longer be downloaded.

The same issue occurred with the third Persian resource, the Spotify podcast I had hoped to use—the page loaded, but the episodes couldn't be played as they were archived. When I searched for the podcast on my phone instead of my laptop, it didn't appear in the results at all.

Not all listed courses are completely free

Open Culture promotes its page as a source for free language learning resources, yet many are now either entirely paid or only offer free trials.

For example, the main resource I used for learning Persian—Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation—is not a free resource. It doesn't even have a free plan; I simply used the 30-day free trial to its fullest.

Open Culture Alternatives

Innovative Language

Innovative Language provides a wide array of language courses, making it a strong alternative to Open Culture's resource directory.

There are eight "featured" languages—Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Russian, German, Korean, and Spanish—plus over 30 others. These include less commonly studied ones like Filipino, Persian, Urdu, Serbian, Nepali, and more.

Signing up for an Innovative Language course grants lifetime access to a free account, though with some limitations. They often provide a "Fast Track to Fluency" deal for $1 after sign-up. For the Persian course, this includes 30 days of Premium access, 50 exclusive lessons, one free product download, and a seven-day "Fluency Fast" course.

Lingflix

Lingflix is not a free service, but it offers a 14-day free trial during which you can study any of its available languages. There are currently 10 languages offered, including Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Russian, and others.

Lingflix provides lessons for all proficiency levels, from beginner to advanced. It uses authentic content to immerse learners in the target language from the start.

While watching videos—such as movie trailers, commercials, and TV show clips—you can click on unfamiliar words in the subtitles. This displays the word's definition, pronunciation, and example sentences. You can then add these words to personalized flashcard decks that use a spaced repetition system to help commit vocabulary to long-term memory.

17 Minute Languages

17 Minute Languages offers courses in many languages similar to those on Open Culture's list, including rare ones like Albanian, Amharic, Georgian, Malaysian, and more.

The program claims that learners can have their first conversation after three hours and achieve fluency in 50 hours. The name comes from the recommended daily commitment of just 17 minutes. It employs spaced repetition to teach the most important vocabulary quickly and features "superlearning technology" said to increase learning speed by 32%.

Final Outcome: What I Managed to Learn Using Open Culture

I finished two lessons from the two Persian resources I selected from the four listed on Open Culture (one of which was broken). My honest impression? I was surprised by how much I learned.

In one hour, I learned 10 letters and how to combine them (and write words from right to left) using the Easy Persian website, which is completely free. In 30 minutes, I completed two audio lessons from Chai and Conversation (including the exercises), learning a total of 33 words. My only complaint was that the Chai and Conversation site isn't free, despite being listed on Open Culture—I had to use a free trial.

However, Persian was not my first, second, or even third language choice; it was the only one for which I found more than one functional free resource. In my view, Open Culture did not fully deliver on its promise of free language learning due to the cost of some resources and the high number of broken links.

I believe Open Culture is a useful starting point for finding a resource or two to begin your language learning journey. However, it is unlikely to help you reach an advanced level. For some languages, a simple Google search might be more effective.