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By Tara Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azeri Basque Bengali Bulgarian Burmese Cantonese Catalan Chewa (Chichewa) Croatian Czech Danish Dari Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Greenlandic Gujarati Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Inuktitut Irish Italian Japanese Kannada Kazakh Khmer (Cambodian) Korean Kurdish Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luganda Luxembourgish Macedonian Malagasy Malay Malayalam Mandarin Chinese Manx Maori Marathi Mongolian Navajo (Diné bizaad) Nepali Norwegian Occitan Papiamento Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Quechua Romanian Romansch Russian Sami Sardinian Serbian Shona Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Swahili Swiss German Tamil Telugu Thai Tibetan Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek

Instant Immersion Mini-Review: No Longer a Good Investment

Instant Immersion – 2 

Instant Immersion offers programs in over 120 languages, narrated by native speakers. It claims to help you build your vocabulary, converse with ease, and perfect your pronunciation. It has interactive activities on the computer, interactive games you can play with your family on a DVD, and MP3 files for your car.

Their topics include food, shopping, restaurants, animals, numbers, etc. In other words, Instant Immersion will probably not help you if you are looking to have immediately applicable conversations

A common trend in many reviews is the lack of structure in these courses. While other courses build on what you have previously learned and help you learn vocabulary relevant to your everyday life, Instant Immersion seems to provide a large amount of information without transitions or a clear learning path. There is a lot of content, but this doesn’t necessarily mean you will learn a lot. Instant Immersion may have been a good investment several years ago, but now there are many other options for affordable, quality language learning.

Visit Instant Immersion

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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By Nick Arabic Afrikaans Aiki (Runga) Ainu Albanian Alsatian Aramaic Argentine Sign Language Armenian Aromanian Assamese Assiniboine Austrian German Avar Aymara Azerbaijani Azeri Bago-Kusuntu Bagri Balinese Balochi Bambara (Bamanankan) Banjar Barawana (Baré) Bari Basque Batak Toba Bats Bavarian Beja Belait Belarusian Bengali Berber (Tamazight) Bhojpuri Bislama Blackfoot (Niitsi'powahsin) Bosnian Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS) Breton Bugis Bulgarian Burmese Cantonese Catalan Cebuano Chavacano Chechen Cherokee Chewa (Chichewa) Chibarwe Chiquitano Choctaw Chukchi Chuwabu Coptic Cornish Corsican Cree Croatian Crow Czech Daakaka Dakota Danish Dari Daza Dela-Oenale Dinka Domari Dotyali Drehu Dutch Dzongkha English Erzya Esperanto Estonian Ewe Ewondo (Fang) Faroese Fijian (ITaukei) Filipino Finnish Flemish Fon (Fon gbè) French Frisian Friulian Fulah Fur Ga Galician Gallo Garifuna Georgian German Gikuyu Greek Greenlandic Guambiano Guarani Gujarati Gullah Haitian Creole Hakka Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hokkien (Taiwanese) Honduran Sign Language Hungarian Iban Icelandic Ido Igbo Indonesian Ingush Inuinnaqtun Inuktitut Irish Italian Ixcatec Jamaican Creole Japanese Javanese Judeo-Tat K'iche Kachin (Jingpho) Kalanga Kalmyk Oirat Kannada Kanuri Kazakh Kekchi (Q'eqchi') Kenjeje Khmer (Cambodian) Khmu Khoemana Kinyarwanda Kirundi Koisan (Tsoa) Konkani Korean Kurdish Kyrgyz Ladin Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) Lakota Lao Latin Latvian Lau Limburgish Lithuanian Litzlitz (Naman) Lombard Luganda Luo Luxembourgish Maasai Macedonian Maithili Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maldivian (Dhivehi) Maltese Mamuju Manchu Mandarin Chinese Mandingo (Madinka) Manggarai Manx Maori Mapudungun Marathi Marri Ngarr Marshallese Masalit Mauritian Creole Mazatec Mekeo Mexican Sign Language Minangkabau Mingrelian Mirandese Miyako Mnong Mon Mongolian Montenegrin Nahuatl Nambya Natchez Navajo (Diné bizaad) Ndebele Neapolitan (Napoletano) Nepali Neverver Newar Nigerian Pidgin North Efate (Nakanamanga) Norwegian Nubian Nuer Occitan Odia Ogiek (Akiek) Ojibwe Okinawan Oneida Oromo Pa'o Palauan Papiamento Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Qashqai Quechua Rohingya Romani Romanian Romansch Russian Sa Sami Samoan Sanskrit Sardinian Scots Scottish Sekani Sena Serbian Sfyria Shan Shanghainese Sherpa Shona Shoshoni Shumashti Sicilian Sign Language Silbo Gomero Sindhi Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Sotho Spanish Sundanese Swahili Swazi Swedish Swiss German Syriac Tajik Tamang Tamil Tatar Telugu Thai Tharu Tibetan Tigrinya Tlingit Toki Pona Tongan Tsonga (Xitsonga) Tswana Turkish Turkmen Tutong Twi Tz’utujil Ukrainian Urdu Uyghur Uzbek Venda Vietnamese Waray Welsh Wolof Wyandot Xhosa Yakut Yiddish Yola Yoruba Yucatec Maya Zaghawa (Beria) Zapotec Zarma Zaza (Northern) Zhuang Zulu

italki Review – The Good, The Bad, & The Just Alright

Quick Review

4.5 

Summary:

italki is the most flexible and affordable place to find a tutor for the language you’re learning. They have a huge number of teachers offering classes to students of over 100 different languages. As a learner, you’ll be able to find a tutor that best fits your learning style, schedule, and personality. Teachers are able to set their own prices and make their own schedule.

Teacher Quality

You’ll find everyone from long-time professionals to brand new teachers.

Platform

The overall platform has tons of useful features but also some room for improvement.

Value

Huge number of teachers, low prices, and flexible scheduling.

Price

The prices vary by teacher and language with some being as low as $4 and others as high as $60 per hour. Most will fall somewhere near the $10 per hour range.

Visit italki Now
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By Tara Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Basque Bengali Bosnian Breton Bulgarian Cantonese Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Italian Japanese Kazakh Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Malayalam Mandarin Chinese Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese

Sublearning Mini-Review: There Are Better Uses For Your Time

Sublearning – 1.3 

Sublearning is a very simple website that supposedly helps you learn languages through movie subtitles. You will be presented with 1 to 6 lines of subtitles from your chosen movie, and then you can reveal the translation after thinking about the response.

There are 62 source and target languages, which does make one wonder where the translations are coming from; be wary of Sublearning’s translation quality.

Just to clarify, the subtitles do not seem to be sourced from the most iconic phrases from your favourite movies; rather, they seem to be random lines from the movie, sometimes as simple as “I don’t think so”. If you’re just looking to reminisce about anything that was said in movies you have seen, you can go to Sublearning to pass some time. However if you’re interested in language learning, I recommend checking out some of the many resource reviews we have on this site.

Visit Sublearning

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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By Tara Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Assamese Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bengali Bhojpuri Bulgarian Burmese Cantonese Catalan Cebuano Croatian Czech Danish Dari English Estonian Faroese Filipino Finnish Flemish French Frisian Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hausa Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Korean Kurdish Kyrgyz Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luxembourgish Macedonian Maithili Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maltese Mandarin Chinese Mongolian Nepali Norwegian Oromo Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Sanskrit Serbian Shona Sicilian Sindhi Sinhala Slovak Somali Spanish Swahili Swedish Tajik Tamil Tatar Telugu Thai Tibetan Tigrinya Turkish Turkmen Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Xhosa Yiddish Yoruba Zulu

Bluebird Languages Mini-Review: Over 160 Languages Available

Bluebird Languages – 3.5 

Bluebird Languages has several types of lessons you can choose from, including a daily lesson, core vocabulary, essential verbs, creating sentences, powerful phrases, and conversation. Each topic seems to have a beginner, intermediate, and advanced lesson, although it’s not clear how advanced “advanced” is.

In each lesson, an English-speaking narrator will ask you to listen to and repeat translations of various phrases. The recordings in each language seem to use native speakers’ voices, which is quite the feat considering they have lessons in over 160 languages.

Bluebird Languages’ phrases don’t construct a replicable dialogue, so the phrases don’t seem to have a lot of context other than the topic at hand. Furthermore, the topics seem to be identical in all languages, so most of the phrases will not be culture-specific. They also don’t break down complicated pronunciation, but you can try to break it down yourself by slowing down the recording to 0.5x speed.

Bluebird Languages seems similar to Pimsleur but appears less organized and will probably not improve your communication abilities as quickly. Nevertheless, it may be a good free alternative for beginners, and the program will probably help you develop some confidence in speaking languages that have less challenging pronunciation. The conversation and personalized lessons require a monthly membership, but there is enough free content that these add-ons may not be necessary.

Visit Bluebird Languages

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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By Tara Arabic Albanian Azerbaijani Bengali Bulgarian Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Georgian German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Mandarin Chinese Mongolian Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Slovak Spanish Swahili Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese

FunEasyLearn Mini-Review: Build Vocabulary The Fun Way

FunEasyLearn – 3.2 

Not only does FunEasyLearn have a slick interface, high-quality recordings of native speakers, and a variety of activities to reinforce your learning, but it also allows you to learn from 61 mother tongues.

The lessons were developed by a team of certified linguists and acting teachers; they cover reading, listening, speaking and writing. You have the choice of learning individual vocabulary or common phrases, both of which navigate between various common categories such as “Describing people”, “General Conversation”, “ and “Transport”.

Unfortunately FunEasyLearn does not seem to provide a foundation for learning more challenging scripts, such as Chinese or Thai; luckily they have a special feature where you can choose to omit the writing aspect and see transliterations; this will allow you to focus on speaking and listening.

Ultimately, FunEasyLearn is a fun and easy way to develop some basic vocabulary, but it is probably not the most effective resource for hard-core language learners; you will need extra resources to help you learn conversational skills.

There is a lot of free content available for beginners, but with a super affordable premium membership you can access more levels and use the app offline.

Visit FunEasyLearn

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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By Tara Albanian Arabic Bengali Dutch French German Hindi Italian Japanese Korean Mandarin Chinese Persian Polish Portuguese Russian Spanish Swahili Turkish

Lingua Boost Mini-Review: Use Pimsleur Instead

Lingua Boost – 2.2 

Lingua Boost’s website presents a modern interface and emphasizes teaching everyday phrases in context. The lessons are about 10 minutes long; they are narrated by native speakers and focus on vocabulary within a specific topic. Although each lesson seems to contain something that resembles a dialogue, every phrase is spoken by the same person. Additionally, many of the lessons initially appear to be dialogues, but end up being a list of sentences. For example, the first line of a lesson might be, “what do you like to do?” followed by a series of statements such as “I like to read books,” or “I like to go swimming.”

Furthermore, for languages that have more difficult pronunciation, such as Russian and Hindi, the lessons do not break down pronunciation. In Pimsleur, for example, they use an excellent technique of working backward with each syllable in a word until you can say the whole word in one go. In Lingua Boost, it seems that you are expected to just listen and gradually catch on, even from the absolute beginner level.

Finally, each volume must be purchased separately, but you can test out the first 5 lessons for free on their website.

If you’re looking for a similar course that breaks down pronunciation, has interactive activities and helps you learn full dialogues in context, check out Pimsleur’s subscription plan.

Visit Lingua Boost

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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By Tara Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Belarusian Bulgarian Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Mandarin Chinese Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese

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

lingohut – 3 

Kendal and Philipp, the creators of the LingoHut, are passionate about teaching languages; they hope to pave “a new way to experience a language through the culture that formed it”. Their resources supposedly help 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. There is 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. Some lessons also randomly switch between formal and informal language without explanation, which would not be intuitive for an A1 learner.

Additionally, although they contain a bank of useful phrases, the lessons 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.

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.

Visit lingohut

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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By Tara Arabic Afrikaans Albanian Aramaic Azerbaijani Bosnian Bulgarian Burmese Catalan Cebuano Chewa (Chichewa) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Georgian German Greek Haitian Creole Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer (Cambodian) Korean Kurdish Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luxembourgish Macedonian Malagasy Malay Maltese Mandarin Chinese Maori Mongolian Nepali Norwegian Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Samoan Sanskrit Serbian Sign Language Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Xhosa Yiddish Zulu

Brainscape Mini-Review: Adaptive Flashcards

Brainscape – 4.5 

Brainscape is a flashcard app that uses a Spaced Repetition System, also often referred to as ‘adaptive flashcards’, to help you memorize new vocabulary and facts. It has a team of scientists, engineers, and education experts working to optimize their program for effective learning.

Brainscape is quite similar to Anki, but has a more modern and colourful interface. They also have Certified Classes, which are decks that seem to have been developed by experts in the chosen topic. The app adds what they call Intelligent Cumulative Exposure (ICE) to some of their Certified Classes; it seems to combine a Spaced Repetition System with gradually introducing new concepts, increasing the difficulty of the concepts, and providing context so you can build your own sentences.

It has several Certified Classes for various languages (and other topics), and many more decks created by users. Unlike Anki, edits that creators make to user decks seem to sync up even after you have downloaded the deck.

With the free version, you have limited access to premium decks but unlimited access to user-made decks.

Visit Brainscape

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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By Brian Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Burmese Cantonese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Georgian German Greek Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Kannada Khmer (Cambodian) Korean Lao Latvian Lithuanian Malay Malayalam Mandarin Chinese Marathi Mongolian Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese

Ling Review — Gamified Practice in Less Common Languages

Quick Review

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

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

Thoroughness

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

Value

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

Languages

Over 60 languages, including less common ones like Thai, Tagalog, Serbian, Nepali, Albanian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Finnish, and Khmer.

Price

Monthly $8.99
Annual $43.99
Lifetime $119.99

Visit Ling 

(more…)

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By Tara Albanian Arabic Armenian Bulgarian Cantonese Croatian Czech Danish Dari Dutch English Filipino Finnish French German Greek Gujarati Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Kazakh Korean Latin Malay Mandarin Chinese Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh

Dino Lingo Mini-Review: Use As A Last Resort

Dino Lingo – 2 

Dino Lingo is a language learning program for children, consisting of videos and games that they can play independently at home. Dino Lingo recommends their program for children between the ages of 2 and 12, but based on the video lessons available for testing, kids over 8 will probably not find it engaging.

The videos will fully immerse your child in the language, with audio pronunciation and spelling in the target language. The main characters are dinosaurs, but each lesson also consists of both live and animated clips that illustrate vocabulary words. The clips are probably effective at introducing new vocabulary to children, however, it’s possible that the children may misunderstand the meaning of the new words based on how incoherent the images are. At one point they may think they are learning “the dog is being vacuumed”, but in fact they are learning “this is a dog.”

If you are looking for a program to support your child in learning a language but can’t find anything else, they will probably learn something from DinoLingo. However, it does not seem like a high-quality program and is also not without several editing errors. You can try a 7-day free trial before investing in it, or try out some cheaper options like Duolingo Kids or Gus On The Go.

Visit Dino Lingo

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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