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In-Depth Reviews And Recommendations - Without The BS

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

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Quick Review
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.
I Like…
There are large numbers of teachers available even for less common languages.

You can find skilled teachers even at low prices.

The flexibility to schedule lessons whenever convenient. The huge number of teachers guarantees you’ll find someone to fit your schedule.

The extra features like answers, notebook, and language partners makes it easy to ask questions, get your writing checked, and find a free language exchange partner.

I Don’t Like…
You have to load money onto your account before paying for a class. You can’t simply pay one class at a time without buying credits first.

You may need to try several tutors before finding one that fits your learning and personality style.

It’s easy to not take classes as often as you should.

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.

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Lingvist Review – Less Fun But More Effective Than Duolingo

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Quick Review

Summary: Lingvist is a great language learning tool which relies primarily on flashcards. It is an intelligent resource which judges your fluency level in the language and accordingly sets the difficulty of the questions for you. It also has a separate challenges section that trains your reading, listening, grammar and speaking skills. While the resource is a simple one, it is quite addictive and fun to use. It’s only suitable for beginner or intermediate level learners.

Quality 

The app is designed exceptionally well with content that was clearly well thought through.

Thoroughness 

Easy to learn lots of new words and improve your grammar, but it won’t take you past the intermediate level.

Value 

A monthly subscription is rather expensive, but prices become more reasonable with longer subscription lengths.

I Like…

The flashcard system which ensures revision

The speed of the whole learning process

Use of external motivators

I Don’t Like

Lack of variety of exercises

Speaking skills aren’t prioritized

Limited number of challenges

Price: The free version allows access to most features but is limited in some ways. Paid subscriptions vary by length; the monthly plan costs $22.95, quarterly is $15.98 per month, and yearly is $7.50 per month.

Languages: French, German, Spanish, Russian, Estonian

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Alternatives: Babbel or Duolingo would be suitable alternatives. Beyond that, my recommendations would change depending on the language you’re learning.

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Mango Languages Review – Pretty Good For Beginners

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Quick Review

Summary: Mango Languages is a pretty good resource with numerous languages available along with their regional variations.  It’ll work the best for beginners or for those interested in studying a few languages at the same time. Anybody past the intermediate level won’t find Mango Languages very useful.

Quality

It is well designed, has a beautiful interface, and is intuitive to use.

Thoroughness

There are some gaps in terms of writing and grammar, along with a lack of materials for intermediate or higher level students.

Value

The price is fair and will give you access to materials for over 70 languages.

I Like…

It’s very easy to use and has a slick design.

The intense drilling of useful real life sentences and words during lessons will really help you remember them.

Cultural and grammar notes incorporated in the lessons are well-prepared to help you understand the language you’re learning better.

The subscription gives you access to over 70 languages.

I Don’t Like…

Most courses finish around the intermediate level with some less popular languages ending before that.

There’s not enough grammar practice.

During drilling, when a student is prompted to complete a task such as coming up with an appropriate translation of a sentence, the command is read out loud. Listening to someone repeat very similar commands over and over again is tedious.

The Google Translate plugin is a rather lazy and disappointing way to give students answers about words or sentences they’d like to translate.

Price: A subscription to Mango Languages costs $19.99 per month or $199.99 per year.

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Alternatives: There are lots of solid alternatives to Mango Languages but the best option will depend on which language you’re learning. Check out our other reviews of resources for Mandarin, French, Italian, or Portuguese.

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Glossika Review – Overpriced But Fairly Useful

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Quick Review

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.
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Alternatives: Speechling does much of what Glossika can do for free. In addition, for a lower monthly fee, you can get unlimited corrections on your pronunciation. Unfortunately, they offer far fewer languages compared to Glossika.

Save 10% on Speechling by using the coupon code “ALR123”.

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LingQ Review: It’s Alright – A Detailed And Honest Opinion After Using It For A Month

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Quick Review
Summary: LingQ is a language learning platform that makes it easy to read and listen to interesting content at varying difficulty levels. As you read, words will be marked as known and LingQ tracks the total number of words you “know”. The content comes from lots of different places with very little of it being original. They also make it very easy to upload your own content which has been my favorite feature.

Quality
Reading on LingQ is really easy though there are some features I’d like to see improved or removed
Thoroughness
Although there isn’t much original content, there’s still a lot of material to read regardless of your level
Value
The price is fitting for the value provided
I Like…
It’s easy to add your own content which makes reading more fun.

The content is quite diverse and comes from lots of different places.

 Looking up words is quick and easy.

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: A Premium subscription to LingQ costs $10/month.

Languages: Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, English, Korean, French, Russian, German, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Greek, Polish, Esperanto, Latin, Ukranian. There are also 11 additional languages in Beta.

Alternatives: If you’re studying Chinese, I’d recommend Du Chinese or The Chairman’s Bao. For most other languages, LingQ seems to be the best option for practicing reading.

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