Speakly Mini-Review: Speaking, Listening, and Writing Practice

Speakly

Rating 4.3

★★★★

★

Price:

10.99€/mo, 27€/quarter, 49.98€/half-year, 69.96€/year

Summary

Speakly focuses on reading, listening, speaking and writing to improve your confidence in your target language. It uses a Spaced Repetition System to help you push vocabulary into your long term memory, and teaches you the 4000 most statistically-relevant words in your target language. Before using the program, you can take a placement test to estimate how many of the 4000 most common words you already know. Then, you will be placed in one of 9 levels. You will start with a series of sentences, learning words within context and then filling in the blanks for recall. After learning several words, you will be presented with a LIVE-situation where you will recreate a dialogue with the recording of a native speaker. The dialogues are also short enough that you can listen to them repeatedly, practice speaking along with the recording, and quickly notice improvement. Besides flashcards and dialogues, there are also reading and listening exercises with interesting content. You can download the audio to study offline, which is helpful because Speakly encourages you to listen to the same exercise 3-5 days in a row to see improvement. One of few downsides to Speakly is that for the basic flashcard sentences, all of the narrations use automatic text-to-speech rather than native speakers’ voices.

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LingoHut Mini-Review: Good Intentions, So-So Follow Through

lingohut

Rating 2.0

★★★★★

Price:

Free

Summary

Kendal and Philipp, the creators of the LingoHut, are passionate about teaching languages. Their website supposedly helps A1 and A2 language learners develop their confidence in listening and pronunciation. All audio clips were recorded by native speakers so that beginners can get accustomed to natural pronunciation, and each lesson has a series of matching games for listening comprehension and reading. Unfortunately, the creators’ genuine intention to support beginners doesn’t seem to translate into their lessons. The lessons are essentially a series of phrases that are not adapted to each language’s culture; each of the 50 languages use the exact same set of sentences and lesson formats. This means that you will learn how to say ‘dumpling’ both in Chinese and Italian. There is also no section to learn the script of languages such as Korean, Hindi, or Arabic, nor are there transliterations to help beginners sound out the pronunciation. Furthermore, some sentences switch between formal and informal language without explanation, which would not be intuitive for an A1 learner. If you want a free resource to listen to native speakers’ pronunciation of hundreds of common phrases, LingoHut is definitely a free option. However, there are other resources that can help you learn languages more effectively.

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Lirica Mini-Review: Grammar and Vocabulary Through Songs

Lirica

Rating 4.2

★★★★

★

Price:

Free trial, $8.49/mo, $19.99/quarter, $24.99/year

Summary

Lirica is a paid app that focuses on listening comprehension, vocabulary, and grammar through songs in Spanish, German, and English. It also elaborates on important common phrases, explains colloquialisms, and provides interesting facts about the target language. Each song is assigned either Beginner 1, Beginner 2, or Intermediate, in addition to a specific learning goal, such as “Making affirmative sentences negative” or “expressing misunderstanding”. It’s surprisingly effective at supporting comprehension and memorization of various songs. Lirica continually expands its song library, with new songs added weekly, so a yearly subscription may be worth your time. Also, by purchasing the app you continue to support the artists, as Lirica has entered licensing agreements with each label. Check out their 7 day free trial! If you are looking for a free version that does not provide any vocabulary or grammar explanations, check out Lyrics Training.

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L-Lingo Mini-Review: Textbook Content, Depends On Your Style

L-Lingo

Rating 3.0

★★★★★

Price:

$14.95/mo, $75/half-year, $120/year

Summary

Each language on L-Lingo contains 105 lessons and 5000 words. The lessons seem to be the same in every language, and will teach you typical textbook lessons, such as booking a hotel reservation, naming different colours, or navigating to an airport. If you are looking for something that will help you communicate naturally with native speakers, this probably isn’t the resource for you. Similar to Rosetta Stone, L-Lingo plays an audio recording of a sentence or word, and then asks you to find the image that corresponds to what you just heard. Unlike Rosetta Stone, L-Lingo provides seemingly clear and concise grammar explanations of the concept you are about to learn. They provide three types of quizzes with every lesson, and also use Spaced Repetition Software to help you remember new vocabulary. There are currently some technical difficulties signing up on the website, but you can access their content on your mobile device. The program has mixed reviews on various platforms, but you can check out the first five lessons for free to see if it suits what you’re looking for.

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Flowlingo Mini-Review: Has Potential, Still Developing

flowlingo

Rating 2.6

★★

★

★★★

Price:

$19.99/month

Summary

Flowlingo allows you to browse websites and news articles in your target language while providing instant audio and visual translations when you tap on unknown words. They use an SRS based flashcard system to help you remember words you don’t know, and will automatically save flashcards from words that you translate. This does mean, however, that you have less control over what is recorded in the flashcard deck, especially with the possibility of accidentally tapping on words you already know. The free content on Flowlingo’s app allows you to search the web and have access to instant translations. With a premium subscription, you can watch popular TV shows and movies, and upload your own books. The app seems to still be under development, and it is unclear whether the flashcard system only records unknown words with a premium subscription, or if the app currently has a bug. Either way, this is probably a good app to look into at a future time, but there are currently more refined apps that provide similar content. Check out Yabla to learn languages through videos or Readlang for flashcards and translations from webpages and other texts.

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MOSAlingua Mini-Review: Memorize Phrases and Words

Mosalingua

Rating 3.3

★★★

★

★★

Price:

Freemium, App costs $6.99

Summary

MOSAlingua is an SRS flashcard app that provides useful phrases beyond the typical travel sayings you will find in other phrasebook apps. However, you will need need to use other resources if you are hoping to achieve fluency. After choosing your level or taking a placement test, you can learn through their bank of pre-made lessons and dialogues, or choose which flashcards you would like to focus on. As you progress, bonus lessons such as proverbs, quotes, jokes, and fun facts can inspire you to achieve more in your learning. To better understand new phrases, the app links to WordReference, Tatoeba, Twitter, and Google pronunciation to give you more context. If ever you are on the road and can’t look at a screen, hands-free mode will help you learn new phrases or review old ones by focusing on listening and repeating. All the content is offline, so you don’t have to worry about data or wifi for your studies. Overall, MOSAlingua seems like a useful app for learning new words and phrases. Unlike most other apps, upgrading to premium from the free content is permanent, although some bonus content comes at an additional cost.

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Ling Review — Gamified Practice in Less Common Languages

Ling

Rating 3.2

★★★

★

★★

Summary

Ling is a gamified language-learning app with courses on over 60 different languages. Practice happens through short themed lessons, making for convenient and entertaining study time. It isn’t the most comprehensive resource out there, especially for more popular languages, but it can make a decent way to get started with a less common language.

Quality 3.5

★★★

★

★★

The app is easy to use and visually appealing, but I found some mistakes in the material.

Thoroughness 3.0

★★★★★

There aren’t many explanations, and the materials are the same for each language, but practice is varied.

Value 3.0

★★★★★

For many of its less common languages, there aren’t a lot of viable alternatives, but the price feels high.

I Like

It uses native speaker audio.
The activities are enjoyable and don’t become overly repetitive.
It’s easy to use and is visually appealing.

I Don’t Like

There are very few grammar explanations.
There are no translations for individual words.
Some activities can be buggy.

Price

Monthly is $8.99, Annual is $79.99, Lifetime is $149.99

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Gamified learning is here to stay. The large pool of language-learning apps that leverage gamification in their courses is continually growing, and frankly, I’m happy about it..

…

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LingoHackers Mini-Review: Lots of Potential, Help It Grow!

LingoHackers

Rating 2.7

★★

★

★★★

Price:

Free

Summary

LingoHackers is a community centred site that helps language learners develop their writing skills. It is managed by a small group of volunteers who are passionate about language learning. Although it is relatively new and still in the development phase, joining the community can help it grow! You can choose to respond to a series of challenges and then receive feedback from others who are both learning that language and who are native speakers. A ‘challenge’ consists of responding to prompts, such as describing a photo, creating a story with 3 random nouns, conjugating irregular verbs, or writing in a daily journal. You can set personal goals for how many challenges you want to complete per week, and you are highly encouraged to provide feedback to others’ writing. By completing goals and contributing to the community, you can gain ‘reputation points,’ which allow you to create your own thread on the community forum. As the community is quite small at the moment, you will probably be more likely to connect with others on the site. If you want to be part of a growing community and contribute to the development of the site, you can join LingoHackers for free. However, if you are looking for a similar resource with a larger community, check out LangCorrect.

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Lingolia Mini-Review: Clear Grammar Explanations

Lingolia

Rating 4.0

★★★★★

Price:

10.49€/quarter, 20.99€/half-year, 41.99€/year

Summary

Lingolia is a reference site that supports you in understanding grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and punctuation for school or work; it can be used as a tool to support your language studies when you require clearer explanations of these concepts. English and German are currently the only languages that contain additional sections on vocabulary with listening and reading exercises, although it’s possible that the Spanish and French sections will develop these in the future. Each page provides a simple explanation of your chosen topic, and then an exercise (or more if you get the premium plan) to practice your comprehension. The best part about the exercises is that they give you immediate feedback about whether or not your response was correct, providing you with the opportunity to reflect on your mistake and correct it. If you don’t want to invest in a premium plan, you can use Lingolia’s free exercises and then check out other resources that provide similar exercises for free, such as SpanishDict or Conjuguemos. Unfortunately, there is no audio on the site to train pronunciation, but Lingolia does seem to fulfill its mission of providing simple explanations to support your learning.

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50 Languages Mini-Review: Basically an online phrasebook

50Languages

Rating 2.8

★★

★

★★★

Price:

Free

Summary

It is clear that 50Languages aims to make language learning accessible to anyone with an internet connection There is no signup required to use the site, so its resources are both free, and anonymous. You can find 100 free downloadable audio files of native speakers and ‘lessons’ in over 50 languages, in addition to vocabulary, alphabets, quizzes, and games. Unfortunately, none of these resources follow a cohesive learning path, nor does the platform help you memorize any of the information provided. Only one section, the Translation Trainer, aims to help you retain phrases. However, if you have saved phrases in multiple languages, all of them will be bunched together into one review without an indication of which language you should be translating into. The audio files and phrasebook lessons contain a series of phrases that do not seem to build on what you have previously learned; learning from this website is essentially like referencing a phrasebook you might buy for a trip to another country. 50Languages has a lot of information available, but it doesn’t seem like it can be used as a standalone language resource. Perhaps you can take phrases and vocabulary that interest you and compiled them into an Anki deck to help with retention.

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