Persian Archives - Page 6 of 6 -

Persian

An Honest Review of Living Language Online Course With Image of Man on Computer

Living Language Online Course Review – Not Very Good

Living Language Online Course

Rating 2.7
★★
★
★★★

Summary

Living Language provides numerous learning materials for multiple languages, including complete and essential courses that come with textbooks and CDs. They also have specialty courses covering business, travel, and several jobs. However, their standard online version isn’t very practical, and it’s difficult to tell if you’re actually learning or simply going through the motions. While the resource might be useful for those who want access to a large vocab list with grammar reading materials, there are better, cheaper options.

Quality 3.0
★★★★★

Though the information itself is useful, Living Language’s presentation reads more like a database than an educational/interactive tool.

Thoroughness 3.0
★★★★★

Again, a lot of the information is there, but it’s scattered. Additionally, some of that information appears incorrect.

Value 2.0
★★★★★

Cheaper options offer the same amount of content with more interactive features.

I Like
  • You can hop around between levels and topics, including Beginner and Advanced materials.
  • The subscription comes with a grammar guide, glossary, and forum access.
  • There’s a decent variety of games, including some games I hadn’t played before.
I Don’t Like
  • Although the games are fun, they get stale pretty quickly. It’s easy to guess at answers, thereby completing levels without really having learned.
  • The system doesn’t keep track of your mistakes, so it’s hard to know what areas you need to improve in.
  • I found several translation and presentation errors that made me question the rest of the material.
Price

An annual plan costs $150, and half a year costs $75. Three months is $50 and 1 month is $39.

Visit Living Language

An Overview of Living Language

Living Language offers you the opportunity to choose between over 20 languages. Once you pick your language, you’re taken to the home screen which has options for Essential, Intermediate, and Advanced categories. You can start with any of these options and jump back and forth between them.

…

Living Language Online Course Review – Not Very GoodRead More »

An Honest Review of Drops App With Image of Woman on Phone

Drops App Review – Decent As A Supplementary Resource

Drops App

Rating 3.9
★★★
★
★★

Summary

Drops is a phone app for iPhone and Android that covers 33 languages. Daily games test the user on thousands of vocabulary words, and many of these words are ideal for everyday use. Drops has an entertaining, user-friendly interface, but it also lacks grammar lessons, and it works better for some languages than others. For anyone looking to supplement their vocab lessons, this app is worth considering; however, the free version might be more worthwhile than the paid version.

Quality 4.0
★★★★★

Though cute and easy to use, some visuals are hard to distinguish.

Thoroughness 3.0
★★★★★

Drops will teach you thousands of words and phrases, from transport and hobbies to astronomy and spices. Some languages, such as Japanese, have extra modules for culturally specific vocabulary.

Value 3.0
★★★★★

The free app is a great supplementary tool to help round out your vocabulary, but the paid app doesn’t offer many useful extras.

I Like
  • The daily reminders keep me accountable.
  • If you already know a word, you have the option of swiping up and removing it from your lessons.
  • Though the app works better for some languages, the sheer amount of languages is a plus.
I Don’t Like
  • It can be difficult to tell certain images apart, which means you’ll likely identify them incorrectly during your review.
  • Some of the categories seem to include random, unrelated words.
  • In languages where a noun’s grammatical gender or case isn’t obvious from the article, you won’t learn that information.
  • Drops only teaches you vocabulary, not grammar.
Price

A monthly subscription costs $9.99, a yearly subscription is $69.99, and a lifetime subscription is $159.99. You can use the app up to five minutes every ten hours for free.

Visit Drops

I’d previously heard about Drops on Reddit, where it achieved rave reviews and some pointed criticism.

This was my first time using the app; I paid for the premium version and started off with 15-minute daily lessons. I quickly realized that 15 minutes was too long and that I wasn’t completing lessons on time.

When I switched to 5 minutes a day, the games (which include matching, bubble popping, and a crossword-esque word map) became much more entertaining and easier to focus on.

…

Drops App Review – Decent As A Supplementary ResourceRead More »

Transparent Language Review – Their Courses Are Awful!

Transparent Language

Rating 1.8
★
★
★★★★

Summary

Transparent Language markets itself as “the most complete language-learning system for independent learners.” While there are lots of different exercises for you to work through in their Essentials Course, I thought that the material wasn’t all that helpful and that it got very repetitive. Although the courses might not be all that useful or in-depth, with over a hundred languages on offer it might be worth checking out if you want to learn the very basics of a more obscure language such as Buriat, Kazakh or Turkmen. But, even then, I’d try to find other resources first.

Quality 2.5
★★
★
★★★

While the exercises are for the most part well-designed, diverse and easy to use, it is the core material itself that I found lacking.

Thoroughness 2.0
★★★★★

I hardly came across any explanations at all; practice was almost exclusively memorizing words and phrases.

Value 1.0
★★★★★

I would only consider using if it were free and I was studying a very rare language.

I Like
  • I really like the fact that they offer up courses in languages that are usually overlooked.
  • It’s pretty well-designed, easy to use and has lots of different activities to work through.
I Don’t Like
  • The core material is severely lacking in my opinion; it’s hard for me to imagine you’ll learn much grammar or how to form even a basic sentence yourself.
  • It gets very repetitive and so I didn’t find it that fun to work through.
  • You learn virtually nothing about the different cultural contexts of the languages you’re learning.
  • Their teaching methodology was the biggest issue for me, leaving you memorizing lots of words and phrases in isolation.
Price

There is a free two-week trial period for you to try it out. Otherwise, it is $24.95 per month or $149.95 for a whole year if you just select one language. If you want access to all of the languages it is then $49.95 per month and $249.95 a year.

Visit Transparent Language

To see all of our favorite programs, online subscriptions, apps, podcasts and YouTubes for the language you’re learning, look for your language in the table below.

Most Recommend Resources By Language
ChineseSpanishGermanFrenchItalian
PortugueseKoreanRussianJapaneseArabic
…

Transparent Language Review – Their Courses Are Awful!Read More »

Glossika Review – Overpriced But Fairly Useful

Glossika

Rating 3.2
★★★
★
★★

Summary

Glossika has learning resources for over fifty languages that impressively range from Armenian and Czech to Icelandic and Tagalog. While not suitable for absolute beginners, lower intermediates could use the resource to familiarise themselves with sentences in their language of choice using Glossika´s intuitive approach. Listening to native speakers and repeating what they say can help learners to improve their comprehension skills and spoken fluency. While it is amazing that so many languages are included, learners would have to use numerous other resources alongside it. The cost is unjustifiably high.

Quality 3.0
★★★★★

The audio recordings are well made but other aspects could be improved

Thoroughness 3.5
★★★
★
★★

Glossika covers an impressive number of languages but their method requires you to intuitively learn

Value 3.0
★★★★★

Polyglots may find the price to be fair but for most language learners it’s overpriced

I Like
  • There are lots of languages available, including many that are rarely covered by other resources.
  • The subscription gives you access to all of the languages making it possible to study one language and review another at the same time.
  • It will force you to speak the language which will improve your confidence and prosody.
I Don’t Like
  • As all of the languages cover the exact same material, the diversity of the languages and cultures are reduced to a simple formula with no cultural context involved in their teaching.
  • There are a fair amount of errors in the materials.
  • The cost is excessively high compared to other resources.
  • There are no explanations of grammar.
Price

You can try out Glossika´s learning method for free with their week-long trial. Their basic subscription is $16.99 a month. The monthly subscription costs $30.99 a month. The annual subscription costs $24.99 a month and will set you back 299.88$ in total.

Click the link below to save $5 on a subscription to Glossika.

Try Glossika For Free

Few resources cover as many different languages as Glossika does. Because of this, I was excited to try it out and see what it’s like to use.

For writing this review I decided to look at Italian, French, Dutch, and Swahili to see how they matched up across the board.

…

Glossika Review – Overpriced But Fairly UsefulRead More »