Explore 53 Languages on LingQ

More than 500 million people speak Spanish as a first language, and the wider Spanish-speaking world passes 630 million. From Mexico City to Buenos Aires to Madrid, one language carries you across 20+ countries. Spelling maps closely to sound, so reading aloud comes early, though the subjunctive and the two verbs for "to be" take longer. The content side is deep: telenovelas, news podcasts, music and fiction. LingQ has 32,700+ Spanish lessons and 2,560+ hours of audio.

French is an official language in more than 25 countries, from Belgium to Senegal to Vanuatu, and it stays widely used in business, education and public life across much of West Africa. English shares a great deal of vocabulary with it — restaurant, déjà vu, entrepreneur — so you start with more common ground than you expect. Spelling and pronunciation don't always line up, which takes adjusting to. LingQ has 33,900+ French lessons and 3,280+ hours of audio.

Türkiye is one of the world's most-visited countries, and past the resort towns Turkish is simply what the day runs in — transport, markets, directions, the conversation after the transaction. It's closely related to Azerbaijani, though mutual understanding is far from automatic. The grammar is the work: meaning stacks up in suffixes at the end of a word and vowels shift to match. Almost nothing is irregular, though. LingQ has 20,200+ Turkish lessons and 1,460+ hours of audio.

If your work crosses a border, English is often the language it crosses in — the one a meeting falls back on when colleagues don't share a first language. It's the practical tool for clients, documentation, conferences and remote teams. The grammar is comparatively light; spelling, idioms and phrasal verbs are where the exposure has to go, learned by meeting them repeatedly, not by rule. LingQ's English library is its largest: 42,700+ lessons and 4,470+ hours of audio.

On the points route of Germany's Opportunity Card, B2 German earns three of the six points required, while C1 English adds one. The rules are only part of it: German opens local job listings, client conversations and everyday workplace talk in Europe's largest economy. It's closer to English than its reputation suggests, though compound nouns and case endings take sustained reading before they stop feeling foreign. LingQ has 26,600+ German lessons and 2,360+ hours of audio.

The largest economy in Latin America doesn't run in Spanish. Brazil is the region's biggest market, and Portuguese is one of Mercosur's official languages alongside Spanish — so the region many people prepare for with Spanish keeps its largest economy behind a different door. Spanish speakers get a real head start, then a long tail of false friends and a very different set of vowels. LingQ has 23,700+ Portuguese lessons and 928+ hours of audio.

At the end of 2025 Italy counted about 6.6 million citizens living abroad, the largest communities in Argentina, Germany, Brazil and Switzerland. For their descendants, Italian opens family records, letters and conversations that translation can't quite stand in for. Spelling maps closely to sound, which helps early on; the verb system asks for more patience. Italy's Antenati portal has put nearly 155 million digitised civil-status records online, free. LingQ has 14,700+ Italian lessons.

In 2021 Prudentópolis, in southern Brazil, became the first town in the country to recognise Ukrainian as co-official — more than a century after the first settlers reached Paraná. This diaspora is old, scattered and organised: the Ukrainian World Congress alone connects 132 member organisations across 52 countries. For a lot of those families the language thinned out one generation at a time. Cyrillic comes relatively quickly; the seven-case system takes considerably longer. LingQ has 12,600+ Ukrainian lessons.

Greece funds Greek-language education abroad: around 40,000 students are enrolled outside the country, taught in part by teachers the ministry posts overseas. That network exists because of the gap — in Australia alone some 425,000 people report Greek ancestry while fewer than 230,000 speak Greek at home, a figure that fell at the last census while ancestry didn't. The alphabet comes relatively quickly; cases and verb forms take longer. LingQ has 15,600+ Greek lessons.

Three writing systems. Thousands of kanji. A politeness system built into the grammar itself. Japanese isn't the easy choice — it's the rewarding one, with a cultural archive that runs deep: anime and manga, games, Kurosawa and Miyazaki, Murakami, centuries of poetry. Steve Kaufmann, LingQ's co-founder, built his Japanese while posted to Tokyo as a Canadian diplomat — daily reading and listening, no formal classes — and went on to use it for work. LingQ has 34,000+ Japanese lessons.

Hangul is remarkably systematic — it was designed rather than inherited, and its consonants are built from the shapes the mouth makes. 안녕하세요 (annyeonghaseyo) is simply "hello". The grammar is where the time goes: word order, particles and speech levels all work differently from English. What the script buys you is early access to subtitles, lyrics, webtoons and the K-drama and K-pop that bring many learners here. LingQ has 13,300+ Korean lessons.

Russian opens a large cultural archive directly — not only Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but twentieth-century poetry, cinema, song, criticism, and a working publishing industry that still puts out over 100,000 titles a year. Cyrillic is usually a smaller hurdle than learners expect. Verbal aspect is the real cost, because it isn't a rule you apply once: it's a choice you make in nearly every sentence. LingQ has 16,500+ Russian lessons and 1,740+ hours of audio.

Mandarin sits in the top tier of difficulty for English speakers — tones, characters, and a sound system unlike anything in Europe. The grammar gives something back, though: verbs don't conjugate for person or tense, and nouns carry no grammatical gender. The payoff is the world's largest community of native speakers. Steve Kaufmann started Mandarin in his early twenties as a Canadian diplomat in Hong Kong; it became his gateway into Asian languages. LingQ has 12,700+ Chinese lessons.

Modern Standard Arabic gives you books, journalism and formal media across more than 20 countries; everyday conversation runs in regional varieties like Egyptian or Levantine, so most learners end up working with both. The right-to-left script and the root-based morphology make Arabic structurally unlike anything in Europe — which is exactly what draws people to it. LingQ supports full right-to-left reading, with 13,400+ Arabic lessons and 753+ hours of audio.

Polish offers a serious grammatical stretch without asking you to learn a new writing system. Seven cases, including a vocative still in everyday use, and a masculine gender that divides into personal, animate and inanimate — a distinction that runs through adjectives, verbs and numerals alike. Numerals bring rules of their own. It asks less of you than Mandarin or Arabic and more than any Romance language, which is the point. LingQ has 10,100+ Polish lessons.