No Slovak on Duolingo – what to use instead

Is there really no Slovak on Duolingo?

As of September 2026, no. Duolingo does not teach Slovak from English or from any other language. It does teach Czech, Polish and Ukrainian. We can only guess why, but Slovak has about five million native speakers, and Duolingo tends to build courses for the largest audiences first.

Should I learn Czech on Duolingo instead?

Only if you mainly want to understand. Czech and Slovak are highly mutually intelligible, so Czech will help you follow Slovak conversations, TV and texts. But you will learn Czech words and Czech grammar: Děkuji instead of Ďakujem, Jak se máš? instead of Ako sa máš? If your goal is to speak Slovak at work, at the doctor’s or with your partner’s family, learn Slovak.

Free: slovake.eu

The best free starting point is slovake.eu, an online Slovak course funded by the European Union and prepared with partners including Comenius University in Bratislava. It has courses from A1 to B2, grammar explanations, a dictionary and reading texts, and its interface is available in 16 languages, including English, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and German. It is structured and reliable; what it cannot do is talk back to you.

Apps that do include Slovak

If you like learning in an app, these currently offer Slovak:

• Mondly — short daily lessons, good for basic vocabulary.
• Ling — game-style lessons, similar in feel to Duolingo.
• Glossika — sentence-based listening and repetition, better once you know the basics.
• LingQ — reading and listening to real texts; much of the Slovak content is added by the community.

Babbel, Busuu, Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur and Drops do not offer Slovak, and Memrise only has word lists made by users. Whichever app you choose, treat it as vocabulary practice. No app will get you through a phone call to a doctor’s office.

Flashcards you make yourself

Anki, a free flashcard program for computers and Android, repeats each word just before you would forget it. Its real strength is that you choose the words: the name of your street, the phrases your colleagues use, the words on your rental contract. Add whole phrases, not single words — v práci, not just práca — and you learn the case endings along the way.

Listening: news, radio and video

STVR, the Slovak public broadcaster, streams its TV and radio online, and short news items are perfect listening practice once you have the basics. Watch something you already know in your own language with Slovak audio, or search YouTube for Slovak lessons for beginners. Listening alone will not make you speak, but it trains your ear for the rhythm and the endings.

A summer school in Bratislava

Studia Academica Slovaca is the summer school of Slovak language and culture at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava; its 62nd edition took place in the summer of 2026. It combines about three weeks of language classes with a cultural programme and suits you if you can take time off and want an intensive start.

A teacher: when it is worth it

Apps teach words. A teacher is worth it when you need to speak — at work, at the doctor’s, on the phone — and when you keep making the same mistakes with endings and verb pairs. That is where feedback saves you months. It also helps to learn from material built around real situations rather than tourist phrases.

At SmartSpeak we teach live Slovak lessons online, one-to-one or in small groups, built around your life and work in Slovakia, with original worksheets and, for many lessons, audio and transcripts. If you prefer to learn on your own, the lesson library is available as a membership from 9,90 € a month, and some lessons are free to download after registration — for example Where are you from? and Slovak numbers and saying your age.

A simple weekly plan without Duolingo

Wondering how much work Slovak really is? Read our honest answer to Is Slovak hard to learn?

The best Slovak course is the one that gets you speaking in the situations you actually face. Everything else is preparation.