Free sites and resources

First and foremost, it's important you know of the following resources:

Uusi kielemme
Grammar

Sanakirja
Single-word translations

Wiktionary
Look up more advanced grammar and translations

Now that that's out of the way, I want to point you to the documents where we are working on the Finnish course, namely our ever-growing google docs document that explains grammar as simply as possible, as well as the spreadsheet where we plan the structure for the course, build the vocabulary tables and keep a to-do list. This is all available to you for free and without caveats.

My anki deck
Anki deck I originally made for a friend, simple words and sentences for work

Clozemaster
Sentence mining^{limited free, costs 15€ / month}

Common Ear
Hear native speakers pronounce sentences and write what you hear^{limited free, montly subscription}

Yle Areena
(public service broadcast company, available if you live in Finland already)

LaeppaVika
Finnish youtuber and streamer, speaks clearly

finntop5
another Finnish youtuber

Duolingo
The Finnish course is very short and has a ton of mistakes.

Google translate
Not good for Finnish, use Sanakirja above instead

LLMs
Mix up alot with Russian for some reason, and only pretend to understand grammar. Speaking in another language with AI means you are really only speaking English through a layer of Google Translate.

LingQ
Useful for analytic languages, but for a language like Finnish where words are added onto other words instead of being separated it's not as useful. The subscription is also impossible to cancel at once and seems to require account deletion (which in turn cannot be done unless you manually delete all of your imported content)

Born from the language learning community's frustration with the ever-increasing greed of Duolingo, Lingonaut is a language learning app made by volunteer natives instead of professionals, backed by patrons instead of investors, and made completely without any AI or advertisements, i.e. completely the opposite of Duolingo's values in this day. It will also be completely free of charge. It has its own space theme but it's meant to have all the old features Duolingo used to have, like sentence discussions and the beloved tree structure.

It's now in its beta version on iOS and will be released to other platforms soon, all the while volunteers (like me) are hard at work on their language courses. If you would like to volunteer or know more about the project, check out the website lingonaut.app

If you are learning Finnish and would like to see a certain skill or topic being taught in our course, please send me a message on discord. We are always open to more ideas, both general and niche.