You can learn Georgian for free, and the free options are better than most people expect. They are just scattered. The big platforms never built a Georgian course, so the free landscape is not one app. It is a pile: a public-domain course the US government paid for, a handful of free lesson sites, a couple of YouTube teachers, reference pages, user-made flashcard decks, and the free tier of our own app. I went through part of that pile during three years of false starts in Tbilisi. This is the honest map of how to learn Georgian for free in 2026, what each piece actually gives you, and where free quietly stops being the fast option. (Our free tier is in the pile below. The paid side, where you learn Georgian online on one track instead of five, comes at the end.)
Can you really learn Georgian for free?
Yes. You can get the alphabet, survival phrases, core vocabulary, listening material, and a complete reference grammar without paying anyone. The genuinely free stack for Georgian in 2026:
- EasyGeorgian’s free tier. A 56-minute alphabet video (free in the app for anyone who signs up), the first lesson of both courses (no signup, no card), a free alphabet flashcard deck, and the first 100 cards of the 5,000-word frequency deck.
- The Peace Corps Georgian course. A public-domain beginner program, PDF plus recorded audio, built by the US Peace Corps for volunteers posted to Georgia.
- Free lesson sites. LingoHut has 125 free Georgian vocabulary lessons. 50 Languages has 100 phrasebook lessons, the first 30 free. Lingwing, built in Georgia, has a free tier.
- YouTube. Hoda-Georgia’s topic-based tutorials in English, plus a long tail of alphabet and pronunciation videos.
- Reference pages. Wikipedia’s Georgian language articles and Omniglot’s page on the script, both free, both solid.
- User-made Anki decks. Free spaced-repetition decks with real limits, covered below.
- Real people. EasyGeorgian’s own free Language Exchange, language-exchange apps like HelloTalk and Tandem, plus free exchange meetups in Tbilisi.
Every one of those is real, and every one has a catch worth knowing before you build a routine on it. That is what the rest of this post is for.
What counts as genuinely free
A quick note on how this list was filtered, because “free” means three different things online.
Genuinely free means the resource is complete and costs nothing. The Peace Corps course, LingoHut, Wikipedia, YouTube.
A free tier is a real, usable slice of a paid product. EasyGeorgian’s free lessons and free flashcards work this way, and so does Lingwing’s free tier. You get actual value for nothing, and the company hopes you will want more later. Fair on both sides.
A free trial is full access that expires, usually with a card number up front. Trials are fine, but they are not free resources, so none made this list.
One disclosure before we start: I run EasyGeorgian. I have tried to be exact about what is free in our app and generous about everything that is not ours. Judge the framing accordingly.
Free structured lessons and audio
Structure is the scarcest free commodity in Georgian. Word lists are everywhere. A sequence that takes you from zero toward conversation, in order, with audio, is what almost nothing free provides. Two things come close, and a third category helps around the edges.
The Peace Corps materials. The US Peace Corps started sending volunteers to Georgia in 2001, and the language program built for them is public domain. The core package is a beginner lessons PDF with recorded audio, plus a separate reference guide. You will find it hosted free on the Live Lingua archive and on the FSI course archive sites. One detail so the archives do not confuse you: as far as the archives show, FSI never published a Georgian course of its own. What those sites list under Georgian is the Peace Corps program.
What you get is real: dialogues built around daily situations, notes that explain just enough grammar to keep you moving, and recorded audio. What to expect going in: the audio coverage is thin next to a modern course, and the situations lean toward volunteer life. Some of the usage has aged. As a free structured text it still clears everything else in its weight class.
EasyGeorgian’s free first lessons. The first lesson of both our courses is free, no signup, no card. Lesson 1 of Speak Georgian in 50 Days is a complete 30-minute structured audio lesson, the same format as the other 49: a native dialogue you mostly do not understand yet, words broken down and rebuilt syllable by syllable, and prompts that push you to produce Georgian out loud before the speaker confirms it. By the end of lesson 1 you can say things like this from memory:
Those recordings are from the course’s flashcard deck, the same native voices you hear across the lessons. The first episode of Advance to Georgian Mastery, our podcast course, is free too. It is built for learners who already have a foundation, so bookmark it for later rather than day one.
The free lesson sites. LingoHut has 125 free Georgian lessons, no signup, each one a themed vocabulary set with audio and simple games. 50 Languages has 100 phrasebook-style lessons with the first 30 free and a companion app. Lingwing was built in Georgia, and its gamified Georgian course has a free tier with real Georgian-language sensibility in it. All three are vocabulary and phrase practice rather than courses that teach you to build your own sentences, so treat them as drilling material, not as the spine. We compared Lingwing, 50 Languages, and the paid options properly in our roundup of the best apps to learn Georgian.
Free ways to learn the alphabet
The alphabet is where the free material is strongest, and also where people burn the most time for the least return.
Mkhedruli is 33 letters, fully phonetic, with no capital letters. It looks like the hardest part of the language and it is closer to the easiest. What costs people two weeks is treating it as a memorization project, drilling charts until every letter is instant. You do not need that to start. You need rough recognition, which takes an afternoon, and everything after that firms up on its own through use. Our full Georgian alphabet guide makes the same argument with all the letters laid out.
The free material, in the order I would reach for it:
- The EasyGeorgian alphabet video. 56 minutes, free in the app for anyone who signs up, and not on YouTube. It introduces the letters inside English sentences first, so you are reading real words immediately, and it ends with actual Georgian street signs. Most people come out the other side reading slowly, which is exactly the goal. The free alphabet flashcard deck in the app locks in recognition over the following days.
- Wikipedia’s Georgian scripts article. The canonical reference on Mkhedruli and the two historical scripts that came before it. Good on history, not built for teaching.
- Omniglot’s Georgian page. The classic script chart with pronunciation notes and a recorded sample text. The right tab to keep open while you practice.
- YouTube alphabet walkthroughs. There are many, uneven in quality but free, and fine as a second pass.
Whatever you pick, aim to be reading slowly by tonight. Perfect pronunciation of the ejective consonants (the ones marked with apostrophes in transliteration, like k’ and p’) is a later problem. Chasing it in week one is the classic way to stall.
Free flashcards and vocabulary
This is the section where I have a story instead of a list.
Before EasyGeorgian existed, I tried to make Anki work for Georgian. Anki is free, open source, and its spaced-repetition algorithm is excellent. The tool was never the problem. I downloaded the user-made Georgian decks from AnkiWeb and hit the ceiling fast: the decks cap out around 1,000 cards, which is less than you need, audio coverage is patchy at best, and none of them have images. I recorded my own audio for the cards I cared about. It almost worked. I quit about a month later.
That ceiling is a Georgian problem, not an Anki problem. Spanish and Russian have mature, maintained decks with thousands of cards and full audio. The Georgian decks never got that investment, because the language never had the crowd. If you already live in Anki, the free decks are a workable start, and we wrote up exactly where they fall short in our piece on Georgian flashcards.
The free route in our app goes further: the alphabet deck is free, and the first 100 cards of the 5,000-word frequency deck are free for everyone. Those 100 are the highest-frequency words in the language, each with native audio, an image, and an example sentence, running on the same spaced-repetition system as the full deck. Frequency order matters more than people think, because the top 100 words show up in almost every sentence you will ever hear. The full 5,000 is paid ($19.95 on its own, free if you pick up a course early on), but the free 100 are the right 100.
Free grammar and reference material
You do not need grammar study in week one, and I would actively steer you away from starting there. But every learner hits moments where they want to look something up, and Georgian’s free reference shelf is better than the size of the language would suggest.
Wikipedia’s Georgian grammar article is dense, complete, and free, the place to check what the cases do or why a verb carries the prefixes it does. Omniglot covers script and pronunciation. The Peace Corps reference guide from earlier doubles as a beginner grammar written in plain language. For a beginner, that shelf is enough.
The part worth flagging is sequencing, not sources. Georgian grammar read cold, before your ear has patterns to hang the rules on, is heavy going, and it convinces people the language is harder than it is. The same pages read a few months into daily listening feel almost obvious, because by then the rules are naming things you have already half-noticed. That order of operations, input first and explanation second, is the core of the comprehensible input approach our courses are built around. Keep the reference shelf for looking things up. Do not start the language there.
Free speaking practice with real Georgians
The most valuable free resource for Georgian is not a website. It is that Georgians, as a rule, are delighted when a foreigner tries. The bar for being praised is low. A taxi driver will tell you your Georgian is excellent after one halfway-broken sentence, which is wrong but kind, and it keeps you talking.
The organized ways to get that for free:
- EasyGeorgian Language Exchange. Our own free matching service. Tell us where you are and when you are free, and we pair you one to one with a Georgian who is learning English and introduce you by email. One deliberate match instead of a feed of strangers, and it costs nothing beyond a free account.
- HelloTalk and Tandem. Language-exchange apps where you trade your English for someone’s Georgian over chat and voice. Both carry Georgian, and Georgians learning English are not hard to find on either.
- Exchange meetups in Tbilisi. Free, recurring language-exchange evenings show up on Meetup and around Tbilisi’s expat groups. Zero cost, and the Georgian you hear there is real.
- Daily life, if you are in Georgia. The bakery, the taxi, the market. Each one is a 15-second speaking lesson nobody charges you for.
The caveat that applies to all of these: exchanges pay out in proportion to what you bring. In week one you have almost nothing to trade, so the exchange runs mostly in English while you look up every word. Around month three, once you can hold up your end of a slow conversation, the same exchange becomes some of the best practice there is.
A realistic first month, all free
Here is how I would sequence the free stack if the goal is progress rather than a folder of bookmarks.
Day 1, afternoon. Learn to read. The 56-minute alphabet video if a free signup does not bother you, or Omniglot’s chart plus a YouTube walkthrough if it does. The bar is reading slowly, not reading well.
Day 1, evening. Lesson 1 of Speak Georgian in 50 Days, free, no signup. 30 minutes, and you will have produced your first Georgian sentences out loud. Not repeated after a recording, but retrieved on prompt, which is a different muscle and the one that matters.
Week 1. Download the Peace Corps beginner program and work through it a little each day. Open the free 100 frequency cards and learn a handful of new words daily. A handful that sticks beats a pile that does not.
Weeks 2 to 4. Keep the Peace Corps lessons and the flashcards daily. Add LingoHut sets on themes you actually need, food, transport, numbers. Sign up for the free Language Exchange so a match is on its way while you build vocabulary, and install HelloTalk or Tandem to start reading, then writing, short exchanges. If you are in Georgia, read every sign and shopfront you walk past.
A month of that, done daily, gets you reading Mkhedruli, gives you your first working vocabulary, and tells you whether Georgian and you are going to get along.
Where free stops working
Everything above is real, and I would defend any single piece of it. Stacked together, the free resources still leave three gaps, and naming them honestly is more useful than pretending free goes all the way.
No progression. Free resources are pieces, not a path. Nobody sequenced the Peace Corps PDF against LingoHut against your flashcard queue, so you become the curriculum designer on day one, in a language you do not speak yet. Most people quietly stop doing that job once the early momentum fades.
No feedback loop. Nearly everything free trains recognition. You see or hear Georgian and check whether you understood. Almost nothing free forces production, where a prompt pushes you to retrieve the sentence and say it before you hear the answer. Production under that mild pressure is what turns understood words into spoken ones, and it is the single hardest thing to extract from a pile of free material.
Patchy audio. Georgian’s free audio layer is thin. The Peace Corps recordings are limited, deck audio is inconsistent, and the lesson sites mostly cover single words and set phrases rather than connected speech. For a language whose sounds need real ear time, that is the gap that costs the most.
None of this is a knock on the people behind the free resources. Most of them gave real work away for nothing, and this post exists partly to point learners at them. It is simply what the free stack for a 4-million-speaker language looks like once you are standing inside it.
It is also, transparently, the gap EasyGeorgian was built to fill. Speak Georgian in 50 Days is the structured spine the free pile does not have: 50 audio lessons, one a day, around 30 minutes each, built on prompted retrieval with native speakers and spaced repetition woven through the sequence. It asks for your full attention, headphones on, not background listening. It costs $79.95, which works out to about $1.60 a lesson. The setup I would actually pick is the free stack wrapped around one structured spine: course daily, flashcards daily, Peace Corps and LingoHut for extra reps, exchanges from month three.
And you can test that premise without spending anything. The first lesson is free, no signup, no card. If the format does not click for you, this page still stands on its own and the free stack will still be here. The full sequence, free and paid, start to conversation, is laid out in our guide on how to learn Georgian. Day 1 costs nothing either way.
