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Author name: Tanya

Tanya writes and edits her way around the world, trying to pick up new languages along the way. When not exploring new places or getting tongue-tied over pronunciation drills, she spends her time dancing and reading.

Learn Urdu

Learn Urdu Online – A Beginner’s Guide + Resources

Ask most people what they think about Urdu, and they’ll tell you it’s a beautiful language – one of poetry, politeness, and history. Ask them how to study it, and they might shrug and point you to a poetry reading or TV show. If you’re lucky, they’ll have some advice for practicing the Urdu script Nastaliq.

If you already know all the important aspects of learning Urdu and just want to go through our resource reviews and recommendations, check out the posts below:

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Learn Urdu Online – A Beginner’s Guide + ResourcesRead More »

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Yes, You Can Study Languages With Comics. Here’s How

Yes, You Can Study Languages With Comics. Here’s How

Comics, manga, graphic novels: whatever you call them, they’re fun, interesting and can be a great tool for learning a language.

If you raised an eyebrow at that last phrase, I understand why. Comic books might not come with homework or, in most cases, grammar lessons. They don’t feel like serious learning. In fact, you might even consider them a distraction from proper studies.

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Irakaslea Podcasts Mini Review: Improve Your Listening

Irakaslea

Price:

Free

Summary

Looking for listening comprehension activities in Spanish and Basque? Irakaslea, which means teacher in Basque, has two podcasts dedicated to this: Comprensión oral – Castellano and Ahozko ulermena – Euskera. Each channel features short, slowly spoken narratives in the target language: stories, mock news broadcasts, and more. The tone is humorous but at times cynical. Unfortunately, there aren’t any transcripts, but the text is slow enough that it’s fairly easy to identify what is being said and look it up in a dictionary. Many of the episodes are targeted at children in primary school aged roughly 5–11, and the audio quality can vary, so Spanish learners might find that they prefer other channels. For Basque learners, however, this podcast could be a useful addition to their study routine.

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Learn Greek Vocabulary Mini Review: Too Many Ads 

Learn Greek Vocabulary/Tobo Greek

Rating 3.0
★★★★★
Price:

Free

Summary

This flashcard-based app is designed to teach you thousands of Greek words. It’s got some interesting features, such as a game to help you learn Greek articles, but overall, we weren’t impressed. The main feature of the app is a set of flashcards. There’s nothing particularly innovative here: you view the flashcard, tap to see the definition, and then decide whether to mark them as remembered or needing further review. The games are more interesting – and fun! – but let down by the amount of ads. Every time you get an answer wrong, you have to watch at least one video ad. Want to continue the game? Either start from the beginning or watch another ad to keep your progress. While it incentivises getting the answers right, in the style of Pavlov and his dogs, it also seriously slows down your use of the game and can be dispiriting. This isn’t a bad app, but for flashcard-based Greek learning, we would use Learn Greek Vocabulary Free or Drops instead. They’re both more customisable and more engaging.

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To see all of our self-study guides, favorite programs, online subscriptions, apps, podcasts, and YouTubes for the language you’re learning, look for your language in the table below.

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Learn Greek Vocabulary Free Mini Review: For All Levels

Learn Greek Vocabulary Free

Rating 3.8
★★★
★
★★
Price:

$0.00

Summary

This Greek vocabulary app caters for beginners through to advanced learners, but what impressed us the most was the customizability. You can study 5,000+ pieces of vocabulary organised by level (A1–C1) or theme, plus there’s the option to add your own vocabulary. First, you’ll be introduced to a series of words and phrases. As well as the text and translation, there’s a picture and an audio file. Spaced-repetition reviews will also help you remember vocabulary, and you can adjust how big the gap between reviews is, too. Next stop: games. You’ll practise translating audio recordings, spelling the words, answering multiple choice quizzes, unravelling anagrams and more. These should better help you remember the vocabulary, compared to just doing flashcard-style tasks. Something not to your liking? Go to the settings. The types of games, the frequency of reviews, the amount of vocabulary you learn, the difficulty: it’s all customisable. That said, you’ll only ever learn vocabulary out of context, which means you’ll want to use the app alongside a course, textbook or lessons.

Visit Learn Greek Vocabulary Free

To see all of our self-study guides, favorite programs, online subscriptions, apps, podcasts, and YouTubes for the language you’re learning, look for your language in the table below.

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Learn Dutch Vocabulary Free Mini Review: A1–C1 Vocabulary

Learn Dutch Vocabulary Free

Rating 3.8
★★★
★
★★
Price:

Free

Summary

This Dutch vocabulary app has a wide range of words and phrases for all levels, and pairs a fairly extensive range of teaching methods with impressive customizability. The vocabulary is organised by level (A1–C1) or by theme (dating, slang, restaurants, opinions and feelings…). In total, there are 5,000+ words and phrases for you to learn. You can also add your own vocabulary to create personalised or specialised courses. Once you’ve selected your course or topic, it’s time to start learning. The app will introduce you to 14 pieces of vocabulary, with nouns accompanied by the definite article (de/het). You’ll see a picture, the text and the translation, while audio recordings from different speakers will help you familiarise yourself with the pronunciation. Then, you’ll do a series of games to reinforce your memory. These include matching the translation to the audio recording, spelling the word(s), multiple choice quizzes, anagrams and more. If you get a question wrong, you get extra attempts. Spaced-repetition reviews will help you remember words over the long term, and you can adjust how big the gap between reviews is, too. The most impressive thing about this app is the customisability. Want to work on your spelling? Go to the settings, and change it so that the only game is a spelling one. Want something a little easier? Switch it to only give you multiple choice questions, and reduce the amount of vocabulary you learn prior to doing reviews. Since this app only teaches you vocabulary out of context, it’s best to use it as a supplementary resource. However, it can be a decent, if dry, addition to your language-learning arsenal.

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Learn Dutch Mini Review: There Are Better Courses Out There

Dutch Listening & Speaking

Rating 2.3
★★
★
★★★
Price:

Free

Summary

Dutch Listening & Speaking/Learn Dutch is an app-based course with tons of lessons for you to work through. Unfortunately, it left us disappointed. It’s focused on memorising specific phrases and dialogues instead of building your own sentences. Each lesson begins with a dialogue. Next, you’ll listen to the phrases individually and get a chance to record yourself saying them. Now it’s time for the exercises. You’ll match the writing to the audio, put words in the right order, fill in the gaps and pick the right translations for audio clips. In most of these exercises, you’ll hear an audio recording with the answer before you do them. Finally, it’s time to recreate the dialogue – but don’t get too excited. Either you’ll listen to the correct phrase before selecting it from a choice of three, or you’ll see the correct phrase and then practise speaking it. With the latter, speech-recognition software means you’ll get some feedback on how good your pronunciation is. The most frustrating think about this course is the fact that you’re only taught set phrases from one specific dialogue, with no opportunity to customise them. For example, in the lesson “Where are you from?”, the only answer you learn is “I am from California.” You’re also unlikely to pick up a good understanding of Dutch grammar from these exercises. This app has an immense amount of content, with over 200 lessons at the elementary level alone, as well as listening tasks with short stories and news stories. But it comes across as quantity over quality. We would opt for Babbel (review) or DutchPod101 (review) over this course.

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Learn Dutch Vocabulary Mini Review: Not Our First Pick

Learn Dutch Vocabulary/Tobo Dutch

Rating 3.0
★★★★★
Price:

£3.29/month

Summary

This flashcard-based app will in theory teach you 3,500 Dutch nouns, adjectives and verbs. It’s slickly designed, but we found it slightly dull and demotivating. The vocabulary is broken into 50-word sections, some of which are only available via collecting points or paying for premium access. In each 50-word section, you’ll see a series of flashcards and choose whether to mark them as remembered/learned or needing further review. There are also a small number of games to support your learning: Hive, De Het, and Fallee. These are a fun addition and, if you ask us, the best part of the app. Frustratingly, though, you have to watch two video ads every time you get an answer wrong – or you can give up and start over again, in which case you just have to watch one video. This isn’t a badly designed app, but we would be inclined to just use it for the games. For flashcard-based learning, we would opt for Learn Dutch Vocabulary Free or Drops instead. The first is more customisable; the second is more engaging.

Visit Learn Dutch Vocabulary/Tobo Dutch

To see all of our self-study guides, favorite programs, online subscriptions, apps, podcasts, and YouTubes for the language you’re learning, look for your language in the table below.

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Bilingual Oxford Dictionaries Mini Review: Handy Apps

Oxford Dictionaries

Rating 4.2
★★★★
★
★
Price:

Free

Summary

Oxford Dictionary has published numerous bilingual dictionaries over the years, many of which are not designed to be comprehensive. While some are “complete” dictionaries, others are called “mini”, “concise”, “essential” or even “shorter”. Even the smaller ones are pretty thorough, however. The Oxford Mini Greek dictionary contains 40,000 words and phrases, many of which also contain multiple translations. It’s a lot shorter than the Oxford Hindi dictionary, at 100,000 entries, or the New Oxford American English Dictionary at 350,000 – but it’s still got a wider vocabulary than the average English speaker. You can purchase the books themselves, but most learners will prefer the convenience of the apps with their regular updates and learner-friendly features. Search Autocomplete, Fuzzy Filter, Wild Card and Voice Search help you find words you don’t know how to spell. Favourites help you save useful words and phrases, while Word of the Day will introduce you to new words. Some dictionaries also contain audio recordings and thesauruses. And the freemium Oxford Dictionary with Translator will translate words and paragraphs to and from 14 languages. For some languages, learners already have plenty of free, thorough dictionaries available to them. Spanish learners, for example, will probably prefer to combine the free apps SpanishDict and Diccionario RAE (Google Play, App Store). Mandarin Chinese learners will likely find Pleco more useful. But for some languages, these dictionaries may well be the most thorough and reliable ones available.

The rating is our best guess, but we haven’t yet had the opportunity to fully test and review this resource.

 

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