Persian

Home Persian 6

Living Language Online Course

Quick Review

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

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

Thoroughness

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

Value

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

Languages: American Sign Language, Arabic, Dothraki, Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog, and Vietnamese

(more…)

By Alex Arabic Ainu Bosnian Cantonese Croatian Danish Dutch Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French German Greek Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Mandarin Chinese Maori Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Russian Samoan Serbian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Vietnamese

Drops App

Quick Review

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

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

Content

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

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

(more…)

By Alex Arabic Afrikaans Albanian Armenian Azerbaijani Balinese Balochi Belarusian Bengali Bosnian Breton Bulgarian Cantonese Chechen Cree Croatian Czech Dakota Danish Dari Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Georgian German Greek Haitian Creole Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Kalmyk Oirat Kazakh Khmer (Cambodian) Korean Kurdish Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luxembourgish Macedonian Malagasy Malay Mandarin Chinese Maori Mirandese Mongolian Nepali Norwegian Ojibwe Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Scottish Serbian Slovak Somali Spanish Swahili Swedish Tajik Tamil Thai Turkish Turkmen Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Wolof Yoruba Zulu

Transparent Language

Quick Review

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

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

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

Value

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

(more…)

By Alex Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Belarusian Bengali Bulgarian Cantonese Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Georgian German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Kazakh Korean Kurdish Latvian Lithuanian Mandarin Chinese Manx Mongolian Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh

Glossika

Quick Review

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

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

Thoroughness

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

Value

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. The monthly subscription costs $30 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

(more…)

1 … 5 6