Greek

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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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.

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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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Mondly Review – Made Significant Improvements in 2022

Mondly

Rating 2.7
★★
★
★★★

Summary

Mondly is a language-learning app that teaches basic vocabulary and grammar structures. It seems most appropriate for learners with little to no exposure to their target language.

The activities mostly rely on passive recognition of vocabulary and phrases, and therefore are not very challenging. However, they are varied enough that you probably wouldn’t get bored with short, daily practice sessions.

Although I wouldn’t recommend Mondly to anyone looking to seriously learn a language, it may be appropriate for individuals studying languages with less available resources, or for individuals who are preparing to travel abroad.

Quality 3.0
★★★★★

Both the interface and the course itself could be designed better. *Edited on Nov 22* It has made many improvements this year. We will update soon.

Thoroughness 2.5
★★
★
★★★

It’s decent for learning vocabulary, but I thought a lot of the material wasn’t explained very well.

Value 3.0
★★★★★

It’s fairly inexpensive.

I Like
  • Daily lessons, weekly quizzes, and monthly challenges – these functionalities encourage you to practice every day.
  • The vocabulary included is useful and drilled in an effective way.
  • It’s fairly inexpensive.
I Don’t Like
  • The content and exercises are the same for all levels and languages.
  • The exercises are mostly passive.
  • I don’t think the order of lessons and topics is very well thought out.
  • For me, the interface is not user friendly and the platform is visually unappealing.
Price

There are three plans… $9.99 per month for one language $47.99 per year ($4/mo) for one language and $99.99 for lifetime.

Visit Mondly
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Lang Workbooks Mini-Review: Thorough Writing Practice

Lang Workbooks

Rating 4.0
★★★★★
Price:

$5.99

Summary

For learners of languages that use unfamiliar writing systems, the Lang Workbooks series can be a helpful and practical way to master the intricacies of writing in their target languages. Among numerous other writing systems, the series includes the Korean, Russian Cyrillic, and Armenian alphabets; Persian and Thai script; the Hindi Devanāgarī abugida; Chinese characters; and Japanese Hiragana and Katakana. The series also covers languages that use the Latin alphabet with diacritical (accent) marks, such as French, German, and Portuguese. Many books in the series have been translated into other languages, such as Italian, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. The series also covers writing systems that may have fewer available resources for learners, such as Lao script and the Cherokee syllabary. Each book in the series presents its featured writing system with suggested pronunciations. The practice pages in each workbook have useful features for each letter, symbol, or character, such as a recommended stroke order, font variations, example words, and a “Trace and Learn” section. Each workbook is relatively inexpensive. In addition, the publishers of the series have granted teachers and students a license to make photocopies of the workbook pages for personal use, so you can get unlimited chances to practice. Considering the depth of information in each language’s workbook, the books in this series can provide great value for learners.

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LingQ Review – Extensive Reading Made Easy

LingQ

Rating 4.0
★★★★★

Summary

LingQ is a language-learning platform that focuses on extensive reading for over 30 different languages. You can import your own content or choose from the community library of books, articles, podcasts, YouTube videos, and more.

The app highlights unknown words across every lesson and makes them reviewable via different types of SRS flashcards. The more you read, the more accurately you will be able to identify content that is suitable for your level.

Although I did not find it beneficial for languages I had never studied before, I think LingQ can be helpful for upper-beginner to advanced language learners who enjoy reading. It is especially helpful if you struggle to find graded readers in your target language.

Quality 4.0
★★★★★

The LingQ reading app is enjoyable in most languages, easy to use, and can expand your vocabulary. However, I found the user content frustrating to navigate.

Thoroughness 4.0
★★★★★

With the import function, users can choose to study almost anything they want.

Value 4.0
★★★★★

Now that other apps provide similar functions, the monthly subscription may be a bit overpriced. However, the yearly subscription seems fair.

I Like
  • I can easily import almost any material I want to study.
  • I can use SRS flashcards to quiz new words from a specific page.
  • Each lesson in the library displays the percentage of known and unknown words based on my reading history.
  • There are many dictionaries to choose from for definitions.
I Don’t Like
  • Reviewing words is chaotic. Every word you look up gets added to a huge queue that quickly becomes unmanageable.
  • The extra features are overpriced and can be found other places for cheaper.
  • Very little of the content is original. Much of it was uploaded by users from other places.
  • The free version is extremely limited.
Price

Premium membership costs $12.99/mo, $71.94/half-year, $107.88/year, $191.76/2-years; single-language lifetime membership costs $199

VISIT LINGQ

When I first signed up for LingQ, I wasn’t very impressed. Its seemingly random lesson library, filled with custom cover photos and inconsistent title formats, made me want to click on just about anything to get away from that page.

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OPLingo Mini-Review: Community Driven, Non-Profit

OPLingo

Rating 3.5
★★★
★
★★
Price:

Freemium, Premium Subscriptions cost $6.99/mo, $60/Year

Summary

OPLingo is a community-oriented, non-profit language learning site. It essentially combines the functions of LingQ, LangCorrect, Readlang, iTalki, and HelloTalk. The free version gives you limited access to some functions, but by paying for a membership you support ethical causes — such as building a primary school in Tanzania. You can browse user-contributed texts or easily import your own YouTube videos, articles, or ebooks into the Reading Tool. OPLingo has also developed hundreds of audio conversations in several languages, including Tagalog, Cebuano, Thai, Swahili, and Russian. Within each page, you can read a transcript and get definitions and pronunciations of unknown words. By identifying which words you don’t know, the next passages you read will highlight the number of known or unknown vocabulary words. In their Write & Correct section, you can write in over 100 languages and exchange corrections with other users, although Spanish, French, and English learners have a better chance of receiving corrections than other languages at the moment. You can also practice a language by texting with fellow community members, or by hiring a teacher in your target language. OPLingo has a lot of potential and is a good alternative to LingQ, but it needs a community of learners to help it grow — so check it out!

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AmazingTalker Mini Review: Not Our Top Pick for Web Classes

AmazingTalker

Rating 2.5
★★
★
★★★
Price:

From around $10 per 50-minute class

Summary

AmazingTalker is an italki and Verbling competitor that lets you book classes with language teachers and academic tutors of your choice. It has a lot of attractive features for students, but teachers complain about high commission rates and lack of support. It boasts a 3% acceptance rate for teachers and a 100% satisfaction guarantee. If you’re not happy with your class, they’ll rebook you another one for free. There are lots of teachers to choose from, or you can also use their AI Matching Service to find a tutor. The teachers’ profiles include videos, reviews, and their résumé. However, AmazingTalker doesn’t seem a great choice for teachers. It charges English and Japanese teachers astonishingly high commission rates of up to 30%. While these rates fall as teachers earn more through the site, they have to make $1,500 a month before the commission reaches levels comparable to italki and Verbling. Making it worse, there’s an additional 8% fee for payment processing and tax that all teachers have to pay, no matter what language they teach.  There have also been complaints on Reddit from teachers claiming to have been harassed by students and fellow teachers. However, we cannot corroborate these. Given all this, we’d recommend trying italki (review) or Verbling (review) first. Alternatively, check out our guide to the best platforms for online language classes.

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