MOOCs are one of the most popular online trends, and it’s not hard to understand why. MOOCs present the opportunity to get education from some of the best universities in the world, without having to go through a complicated and highly competitive application process and at a much lower cost. There’s also the advantage of being able to study without having to move.

 

Although MOOCs are normally associated with subjects like computer science and business, there are a number of MOOC language courses available. Two of the courses available through Coursera are First Step Korean and Mandarin Chinese 1.

 

First Step Korean comes from Yonsei University, which is a private university in Korea. The course costs $49 and has set dates for starting. The course starts with the Korean alphabet, and continues on to subjects like greetings, family, and time.

 

Mandarin Chinese 1 comes from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and lasts for five weeks. It costs $79 and also has set dates for starting. The course covers subjects like greetings, numbers, and talking about family. If you want to continue after the course is finished, there are three more courses that can be taken as part of a specialization.

 

Udemy also offers MOOC language courses. Unlike Coursera’s, they don’t have fixed starting dates, and they’re somewhat cheaper. Some of theie offerings are a 22-lecture Thai for Beginners course, a course in easy Chinese, and a course in Biblical Hebrew, along with courses in more commonly studied languages like German, French, and Spanish.

 

There’s probably a MOOC available for any language that you’re interested in studying, and it looks like they’ll become more common amongst the many different options for learning languages.