Resources

A short list. If a resource is on this page, I have personally used it for at least a year. If it is not on this page, it is not because it is bad; it is because I have not tried it long enough to recommend.

Dictionaries

• Cambridge Dictionary — clean definitions, good example sentences, has a Chinese-English mode. The first tab I open.
• Merriam-Webster — better for American English nuance and etymology. Their daily word email is one of the few I have not unsubscribed from.
• Oxford Learner's Dictionaries — learner-focused; good for collocations.

Listening

• BBC Learning English — "6 Minute English" is the unsung classic. Short, transcripts available, no fluff.
• VOA Learning English — slower pace, transcripts, useful when you are starting out.
• The Daily (NYT) — for more advanced listening on a normal speed. Transcripts available with a subscription, otherwise just listen.

Reading

• Aeon and The Atlantic — long essays in clean prose. Great for vocabulary in context.
• Paul Graham's essays — short, plain, opinionated. Excellent for picking up natural argumentative writing.
• Project Gutenberg — thousands of older books for free. If you can read a novel, you can read anything.

Tools I still use

• Anki — the only flashcard app I trust long-term. The trick is to keep the deck small and personal.
• Language Reactor — browser extension for watching shows with two-language subtitles. Genuinely useful, not a gimmick.
• A plain notebook — for writing down sentences I want to be able to produce, not just understand.

Tools I stopped using

Not naming names, but in general: anything that promises fluency in a fixed number of days, anything that gamifies vocabulary so heavily that you forget you came to learn a language, anything that needs to push notifications at you to keep you coming back. Real progress is quiet.

One more

The single most useful thing you can do for your English is keep a sentence diary — one or two real sentences a day, in your own life, written without translating from your first language. It is slower than any app and works better than all of them. Try it for a month before deciding I am wrong.