The Cyber University of Korea Mini Review: Comprehensive

The Cyber University of Korea

Rating 4.3

★★★★

★

Price:

Free

Summary

The Cyber University of Korea provides four levels of video courses that can be accessed for free on several platforms, including YouTube. Levels 1 and 2 cover basic communication about everyday activities and how to carry simple conversations around the city. Levels 3 and 4 cover casual conversation. At the end of level 4, the university hopes that students can achieve a 3.5 score on the Korean language proficiency exam (TOPIK). The videos have live teachers with slide presentations, dialogues, animations, and flashcards. They will quiz you on new concepts, get you to participate in the dialogues, and encourage you to practice pronunciation. New words are provided in different contexts so you know how to use them. Beginners should start with the Level 1 of “Quick Korean” playlist on YouTube. There are other Level 1 playlists in Japanese, Spanish, and Chinese, but levels 2, 3, and 4 are in Korean with English subtitles. For some reason, the third and fourth levels don’t contain any animations or images, and they seem slightly less engaging. Nevertheless, these video courses are an excellent substitute for the hundreds of dollars you might pay for a university class with the same content.

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LP’s Korean Language Learning Mini Review: Unorganized

LP’s Korean Language Learning

Rating 3.3

★★★

★

★★

Price:

Free

Summary

LP’s Korean Language Learning is a free website with grammar explanations, music videos with accompanying translations, YouTube videos, lessons based on the TV show, “Let’s Speak Korean”, and short audio lessons that explain specific grammar points. You can also download a full PDF with all of the grammar explanations on the website. All Korean words are written in Hangul, so you may want to have a grasp of the alphabet before reading the grammar explanations. You can use the audio lessons without reading, though, although they do not seem very engaging. The YouTube channel does not have many video lessons, and the ones that are available are basically videos of the narrator explaining different grammar points from the website. Overall, the site is a bit unorganized, but the grammar explanations are simple and have lots of examples. You can also check out How to Study Korean for over 150 step by step Korean lessons. These lessons are entirely text-based, but they will give you a solid foundation of the Korean language and writing system.

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DeerPlus Mini Review: Fun Supplementary App

DeerPlus

Rating 3.7

★★★

★

★★

Price:

Freemium; $8.99/month, $35.99/year, $59.99/lifetime

Summary

DeerPlus, also known as LingoDeer Plus, is a cute, gamified app from the makers of Lingodeer. It sets out to teach you words, phrases, and grammar through 11 different games, but it’s best used as a supplementary tool. You’ll drill vocabulary, build phrases, select the right particles, decide if a sentence is grammatically correct or not, do conjugation exercises, answer listening comprehension questions, and more. What you won’t do is learn the material prior to being tested like you do with LingoDeer (review), DeerPlus’ sister app. DeerPlus is a fun supplementary tool that would work well alongside most resources, but especially LingoDeer. However, it’s a shame that there aren’t SRS features in what is essentially a review app. A word of warning: you can study in a range of languages, but not all the games have been translated. We were shocked when we switched from studying Japanese via Spanish to Japanese via English and discovered grammar and “integrated” games in addition to the five vocabulary and phrase-based ones we had been playing.

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Sejong Korean Mini Review: Great Resources, Annoying Website

Sejong Korean

Rating 4.0

★★★★★

Price:

Free

Summary

Sejong Korean was developed by the King Sejong Institute Foundation in Korea. Their free, high-quality textbooks, mobile apps, YouTube channel, and comics are all excellent supplementary materials for your Korean studies. Unfortunately, the website has some navigation issues that cause some frustration. Sejong Korean’s mobile apps cover beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels on the topics of grammar, conversation, news, and pronunciation. Additionally, the website has many Korean comics with English translations on the side. These offer insight into Korean culture from Korean and non-Korean points of view. There is also a video section with embedded Korean YouTube videos that include game shows, K-Pop songs, and interviews. You can check out the three dozen high-quality textbooks with downloadable audio files available for free on the website. These cover speaking, writing, listening, and reading. Unfortunately, the books must be read online on a finicky interface. You may want to avoid the course section, as these courses are not easy to navigate on the website. You are probably better off following the lessons on their YouTube channel instead. Additionally, although they offer ‘beginner’ courses, these are only for students who have a solid foundation of basic Korean. Overall, Sejong Korean’s website may be frustrating to navigate, but the individual resources are worth the effort.

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StoryLearning Olly Richards Short Stories Mini Review: Practical

Olly Richards Short Stories

Rating 4.0

★★★★★

Price:

Kindle books start at $6.55

Summary

Olly Richards, the creator of I Will Teach You A Language, has written a series of short stories for high-beginners to improve their reading skills in several languages. He also has a 101 Conversations series, but this review focuses on his Short Stories. Most of the languages use the most common words in your target language, with natural phrases that you would overhear locals using while conversing amongst each other. In every language, the plot follows the same characters and adventures, with some adjustments for cultural differences. The intro to each book provides a practical overview of how to maximize your learning. At the end of each chapter, you will see a summary of the plot, a vocabulary list of new words (that are also bolded in the stories), and comprehension questions. The comprehension questions are simple, allowing you to find the responses directly in the text. Overall, the Kindle version of Olly’s short stories seems worth the investment for upper beginners to improve their language abilities. If you’re learning Chinese, check out the Mandarin Companion series. Also, A1 – A2 Spanish learners can enjoy several short novels in the ESLC and Read It! series.

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Lingo Mastery Short Stories Mini-Review: Lots of Unique Words

Lingo Mastery Short Stories

Rating 3.7

★★★

★

★★

Price:

Kindle Books cost $4.60

Summary

Lingo Mastery provides 20 short stories in a series of advanced beginner books (about A2 on the CEFR scale) for various languages. Each book has a vocabulary list, reading comprehension questions, and a summary in both English and the target language. If your primary goal is to acquire new vocabulary, then Lingo Mastery’s Short Story series may be helpful to increase your skills. Each chapter has a specific language focus, such as directions, verbs, nouns, or activities. These stories have a considerable number of unique words, so you may find yourself referring to the vocabulary list more frequently than in other graded readers. Keep in mind that the stories are not as engaging as a novel you might read in your native tongue, but the repetition is helpful to familiarize you with different concepts. Other graded readers, like those by Olly Richards, ESLC, and Mandarin Companion follow a single storyline — each chapter in Lingo Mastery, however, follows a separate storyline. Therefore, although the chapters are a manageable length, finishing one may not make you eager to move onto the next. If you do decide to invest in these readers, make sure to buy the Kindle version, which is about 20% of the paperback price.

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Internet Polyglot Mini-Review: Word Lists With Games

Internet Polyglot

Rating 1.3

★

★★★★

Price:

Free

Summary

Internet Polyglot is a website for memorizing vocabulary words in dozens of languages. It has 44 “lessons” that cover topics like cars, time, religion, politics, feelings, measurements, and more. Each lesson is essentially a word list with native speaker pronunciation, an English translation, and a link to a picture to help you remember each word. There are picture games, matching games, guessing games, and typing games, plus a word search and a slide show that reviews all of the words in the lesson. Given that none of the vocabulary words in Internet Polyglot are taught using example sentences or context, learning vocabulary using this site may not be the best use of your time. You are probably better off using Anki to curate personalized vocabulary lists and downloading native speaker audio files from Forvo to accompany your flashcards. Nevertheless, you may find it useful if all you are looking for is a site that already has lists of vocabulary words with native speaker audio. If you are looking for audio files for less commonly-studied languages in context, you can check out iLoveLanguages.

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Vocabulearn Mini Review: Unlikely to Teach You a Language

Vocabulearn

Rating 0.6

★

★★★★★

Price:

$29.99 on Amazon, free on Spotify

Summary

Vocabulearn has so-called audio courses for numerous languages on Amazon and Spotify. We don’t believe you’ll learn much from them, but they could help you practice your pronunciation. For this mini review, we tried out the Vocabulearn Swahili/English Level 1 course. It’s split into four CDs, each with its own theme, and then each theme is divided into four lessons. The themes are: Nouns; Adjectives, Adverbs, Prepositions, Conjunctions 1; Expressions; Verbs. In each track, we listened to long lists of words and phrases. First, it was said in English; secondly, it was said in Swahili. However, there were no grammar or contextual explanations, drills, or activities to help you remember the material. In short, we’re not convinced that you’d be able to make your own sentences or even remember the vocabulary after listening to these CDs. However, if you’re studying a language with fewer resources, we think you could use it to practice your pronunciation by repeating each word after the speakers say it.

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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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