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OkyDoky App Mini Review: Interactive Lessons with Lots of Speaking Practice

OkyDoky App

Price:

$4.99/Month (7 day free trial), $29.99/Year (7 day free trial), $49.99/Lifetime

Summary

If you’re in search of a language resource that lets you learn at your own pace and gives you plenty of real-life conversation practice, you might want to check out OkyDoky.

OkyDoky is a language learning app that aims to make your learning process fun by combining interactive methods with customizable learning paths. It is suitable for beginners to advanced learners, and offers courses for a variety of languages. The lessons include different kinds of exercises to help you sharpen your listening skills and improve spelling. 

The app offers courses for 38 languages, including some that you won’t find on other apps, like European Portuguese, Icelandic, and Macedonian. You can also learn from any of the available languages if you prefer. This option makes it easy to learn your target language in a language that you already know, be it your native language or just another language you’re fluent in. With the Plus membership, you can learn as many languages as you’d like. The app is super flexible, so whether you want to follow a structured plan or tackle specific topics like verbs, nouns, or phrases, OkyDoky allows you to tailor the courses to your preference. There are also word-by-word audio and translations, along with simple grammar tips and transliterations for non-Latin scripts. If you want to practice speaking, the Live AI Tutor, simulates real conversations to help you practice. You’ll be able to use the vocabulary and grammar that you learn in actual speech and improve your overall language proficiency.

What sets OkyDoky apart from apps like Duolingo and Ling App is its focus on providing a wider range of language pairs, real-life conversation practice, and practical sentences in every course. The AI tutor also gives you the chance to practice speaking, and you get grammar explanations for each sentence, which is generally not found in these apps.

OkyDoky doesn’t offer an introduction to the script for languages with unique alphabets, and languages without text-to-speech support on iOS may have less accurate speech recognition on the Live feature. That said, it is a great tool if you’re looking for an engaging and adaptable language resource to develop or polish your language skills.

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Glosbe Mini-Review: Thousands of Languages With Some Errors

Glosbe Dictionary

Rating 3.5
Price:

Free

Summary

Glosbe is a dictionary that serves over 6000 languages. Most words have a list of definitions, conjugations, declensions, and similar phrases (although these phrases are hit or miss when it comes to how relevant they are to the initial entry). Many of the entries are created by community members, who can add and edit translations, example sentences, pronunciations, and images. Also, the site does not use text-to-voice pronunciation — as a result, some words may not have any pronunciation. It’s important to note that some of the content is not checked by the creators, such as the example sentences. Be careful if you are trying to learn new phrases from these lists, as although many of them are correct, there are a few that may lead you to learn inaccurate vocabulary or grammar. Additionally, less commonly studied languages may be listed as available, but only contain a few lines of content. Overall, Glosbe may be a helpful tool if you can’t find dictionaries that specialize in your target language. However, SpanishDict is a far more comprehensive option for Spanish learners, as is Pleco for Chinese learners and Kanji Study for Japanese. You can also check out Forvo, a dictionary resource for native speaker audio files that has strict rules on community contributions.

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My Language Exchange Mini-Review: Millions of Active Users

My Language Exchange

Rating 4.2
Price:

Freemium, Gold Memberships start at $6/mo

Summary

My Language Exchange has been growing since 2000. Although the website seems out of date, it still has an active community of millions of language-learners who speak almost 200 native languages (including less commonly studied languages). You can choose a pen pal by reading their bios, or there is a chat room available for you to instantly connect with a language exchange partner — note that if you create a Gold account, you can initiate chats with other users, but as a regular user, you will have to wait to be contacted. Using the Cormier Method, the website provides tools to help intermediate speakers effectively practice with other learners. It advertises a Chat Companion with lesson plans to accompany your exchange, or lesson plans developed by teachers (although the quality of these resources varies drastically).  You can also find language teachers on the site, but given that the transactions take place directly between you and the teacher, you may feel safer using a 3rd party platform like italki or Verbling Although there are outlines on how to participate in language exchanges, how these outlines are followed depends entirely on you and your partner(s). My Language Exchange will help you build connections with other learners, but it’s up to you to plan how to practice. The concepts can also be used with any language exchange platform, such as Lingbe, italki, Tandem, and Amikumu.

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Lexilogos Mini-Review: A Resource Bank For Dictionaries and Books

lexilogos

Rating 3.5
Price:

Free

Summary

Although Lexilogos seems to have entirely neglected its aesthetics, it holds more than meets the eye. If you click on one of the 130+ languages listed at the bottom of the page, you will find a series of resources to support your studies. This is especially useful for less-studied languages, like Marathi, Basque, and Pashto. Although the lists don’t provide recommendations for applications, they do provide a list of dictionaries, keyboards, news sites, books, and research papers. Additionally, if you switch to the French version of the site, there are even more languages and resources available for you to explore. Within each language’s page, there is also a dictionary search function. You will notice that more commonly studied languages will have dozens of dictionaries to choose from, while less commonly studied languages may only have one or two. Overall, Lexilogos is a great option for finding resources for less commonly studied languages. They regularly update their site, so make sure to check back if you don’t find what you’re looking for the first time around.

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Master Any Language Mini-Review: No Words To Describe the Nope

Master Any Language

Rating 0.2
Price:

Free

Summary

Master Any Language has a counterintuitive interface with activities that are frustrating to navigate. Its only perk is that it supports less-studied languages, but even if you do find yourself lacking resources in your target language, this website will probably detract from your learning. You will jump through hoops trying to find the audio recordings by native speakers, so you may want to try ilovelanguages or Learn101 instead; they have low ratings, but they won’t make you lose your motivation to learn altogether. Most of the activities on Master Any Language are matching games that require you to click on two identical characters, words, or letters: the purpose of this is unclear because it tests neither recall nor recognition. Another activity asks you to form or match nonsensical sequences of words (Ex. Find the sentence identical to “el el el el tchèque tchèque tchèque el el tchèque tchèque”….). Ultimately, you would probably be better off trying to decipher a page of text with absolutely no guidance than to even attempt to wrap your head around MAL’s activities.

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Verbix Mini-Review: Adequate for Less-Studied Languages

Verbix

Rating 2.3
Price:

Free

Summary

Verbix is a verb conjugator website and app developed by an independent non-profit organization. It conjugates over 100 languages, including Old English, Latin, and Yiddish The amount of information on the conjugation page varies depending on how common the language is. At its best, it will display nominal forms, most common verb conjugations, verbs that have similar conjugations, translations, synonyms, antonyms, cognates, and a section on etymology. Sometimes there are sample sentences (without translations) that seem to come from articles and books. The final section on additional information seems a bit random, and its purpose is unclear. To conjugate a verb in another language, you have to know the verb in its infinitive form. Unfortunately, although Verbix has a translation function, it doesn’t seem to cover all of the available languages, so you may not be able to find the verb you are looking for in the first place. A fun page to explore is Verbix’s list of over 6000 languages with a map depicting where each of these languages is spoken. Otherwise, Verbix seems a bit random and incomplete. It may be a helpful resource for less commonly studied languages, but check out Reverso Translation, Cooljugator, and SpanishDict first.  Also, if you want to practice verb conjugations in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Latin, check out Conjuguemos

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Tatoeba Mini-Review: A Community Writing Sentences in Context

Tatoeba

Rating 3.3
Price:

Free

Summary

Tatoeba is a sentence-focused reference dictionary, not word focused. Therefore, by searching for a word in any language, you are searching for examples of that word in context. The site is community-driven, but you don’t have to be multilingual to contribute to the site — it needs native-speaking writers to expand the example database and proofread user sentences. All of the translations are interconnected: even if there is technically no direct translation from Zulu to Chinese, an English translation for the same sentences in both languages will provide direct translations between them. Although Tatoeba supports about 388 languages, about 200 of these languages have less than 100 sentences, and about 58 have less than 10. Nevertheless, the database is continuously growing, and with more community members, the less common languages may have a chance to develop further. It is prohibited to use a translation tool or copyrighted sentences to contribute to the translation database. Unfortunately, some contributors write in a language in which they are not proficiently fluent. As a result, the site has grammatical mistakes and sentences that don’t sound natural. You may have to do some digging to figure out if the contributor is a native speaker or not. Because of the potential user errors on the site, you may want to check out WordReference, Pleco, SpanishDict, Kanji Study , and Linguee to find words in context for more commonly studied languages.

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Loecsen Mini Review: Immersive Resource to Help Strengthen Your Language Skills

Loecsen

Price:

Freemium; €15 – First Contact, €39 – Premium, €59 – Ultimate

Summary

Loecsen is a web based platform designed to make learning languages feel natural by offering immersive, bite-sized language courses that anyone can master. There are over 40 languages to learn including Arabic, English, French among others. It started out as an essential conversation guide for short stays abroad, but soon evolved to offer more comprehensive language courses.

Loecsen’s strengths are its nice visual aids to stimulate interest and encourage revision. It also uses clear, high-quality audio recordings and a voice recognition feature to help you practice and improve your pronunciation skills. By combining visual aids with clear audio pronunciation, Loecsen encourages you pick up the language naturally, just as you would through interaction with native speakers.

The material is practical, teaching languages as they’re spoken in everyday life and providing a more immersive experience. You’ll be introduced to real-life vocabulary and useful phrases, while also getting their grammatical and cultural explanations. In order to understand words better, you can integrate them into sentence contexts.

Loecsen provides you with an overview of the training content to prepare you accordingly. It uses a spaced review algorithm which adjusts to your learning pace to help you build vocabulary, as well as a looped repetition of exercises to help reinforce your memory. When you’re not actively learning, you can listen to full content in bilingual mode. Additionally, you can download content in audio and PDF formats so you can learn without your screen. 

For new courses, you’ll get detailed information for each word—etymology, synonyms, mnemonic tips and grammar points—as well as exercises to improve comprehension, speaking, writing and your overall language skills. Moreover, if you find something to be challenging while learning, Loecsen offers personalized feedback to explain any errors and provide guidance.

The platform is different from similar resources like Duolingo in that it’s more practical, stress-free and the illustrations appeal more to visual memory, therefore encouraging better understanding of the target language.

Loecsen isn’t available as a mobile App, and the voice recognition system only works on Chrome and Android only. But it is a great comprehensive resource to help you practice and hone several language skills.

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iLanguages Mini-Review: Almost Identical to Learn 101

ilanguages

Rating 1.3
Price:

Free

Summary

Learn 101 is almost identical to iLanguages; they have the same native speaker audio files, languages, and mostly identical ‘lesson’ layouts. The main differences are that Learn 101 seems to have added some grammar explanations and reformatted a bit, while iLanguages seems to have added some extra phrases. Since every one of the languages’ “lessons” has the exact same format, including the grammar section, you will learn how to say ‘and’, ‘but’, and ‘or’, in 107 languages, but you will not learn where these types of words fit within a specific language’s sentence structure. Every page is just a list of words with a translation (and sometimes an IPA symbol transliteration). This site could be used if you want to hear native speakers pronounce basic words in very rare languages, or if you want to look up the IPA symbols of a rare language’s alphabet — otherwise, you’re probably better off making flashcards yourself on Anki or trying one of the hundreds of other resources we recommend on this site.

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Learn101 Mini-Review: A Re-Formatted Version of iLanguages

learn101

Rating 1.3
Price:

Free

Summary

Learn 101 is almost identical to iLanguages, but neither of them seem to be very helpful; they have the same native speaker audio files, languages, and mostly identical ‘lesson’ layouts. The main differences are that Learn 101 seems to have added some grammar explanations and reformatted a bit, while iLanguages seems to have added some extra phrases. Since every one of the languages’ “lessons” has the same format, including the grammar section, you will learn how to say ‘and’, ‘but’, and ‘or’, in 107 languages, but you will not learn where these types of words fit within a specific language’s sentence structure. Although there are examples of various grammatical structures, the explanations for these structures are also identical for every language, which, practically speaking, doesn’t seem plausible. This site could be useful if you want to hear native speakers pronounce basic words in less-common languages, or if you want to look up the IPA symbols of a less-common language’s alphabet — otherwise, you’re probably better off making flashcards yourself on Anki, or trying one of the hundreds of other resources we recommend on this site.

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