These Foreign Service Institute language courses were recommended by a reader. I haven’t tried them, but the holdings are extensive and consist of older courses that are now in the public domain. They are also free, so the main risk of using them is to your time, not your wallet.

In February 2013, the site that had long been housing the Foreign Service Institute language courses went down, resulting in a couple of months of panic and anxiety for forlorn language learners across the web, but the courses are now back up on the website of the online language school Live Lingua, which has decided to host them in what strikes me as a rather brilliant marketing maneuver.