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Tamil

PortalLearn Mini Review: Enjoy Learning Indian Languages Through Stories

PortalLearn

Price:

Free

Summary

Looking for an Indian language resource for intermediate level that’ll help you improve your proficiency? You should check out PortalLearn.

PortalLearn is an app that teaches 9 Indian languages and aims to help you learn these languages through interactive stories. The languages offered include Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Kannada, Marathi and Gujarati. With this app, you can dive into captivating narratives, learning vocabulary and grammar naturally through context. Through these interactive stories, you can grasp language concepts, making the learning process more enjoyable and effective. These interactive stories and lessons focus on helping you hone your listening, reading, and comprehension skills.

PortalLearn offers personalization, allowing you to choose your own learning path with topics that interest you, be it cuisine, tourism, or animals. Unlike rigid course structures that dictate a predefined learning path, the platform offers you the flexibility to start with the topics that you prefer. This promotes personalized learning and keeps you motivated by allowing you to pursue your passions while acquiring the necessary language skills.

With its gamified approach, you can earn gems for completing stories and lessons as you progress. This incentive ensures that you’re not only having fun while learning, but also encourages participation. It also provides a tangible reward for progress, ensuring you stay motivated. Furthermore, PortalLearn incorporates flashcards to help you learn letters of the specific language that you’re learning more efficiently.  

What makes PortalLearn different from the likes of Duolingo, Babbel and LanguageCurry is that PortalLearn helps you learn Indian languages through story context. This approach is based on Comprehensible Input method. 

While PortalLearn isn’t suitable for complete beginners and doesn’t have a writing practice feature yet, it’s still an awesome app to help you practice other equally essential language skills.

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Hindustani Tongue Mini Review: Engaging Resource to Learn Indian Languages

Hindustani Tongue

Price:

$299

Summary

Are you looking for an Indian language learning resource that’s comprehensive and immersive? Well, you’re in luck.

Hindustani Tongue is a language resource that aims to make learning accessible and enjoyable for you. It has comprehensive courses in multiple Indian languages, including Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and English. 

Hindustani Tongue offers a comprehensive curriculum that covers all aspects of language learning, including grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and cultural context. The courses are carefully designed to cater to all levels. The lessons are offered in video format, either individually or as a group. Whether you’re a beginner or advanced learner, Hindustani Tongue ensures that you find the program that best suits your learning needs and goals. With their structured curriculum, you can track your progress and see tangible results as you advance. 

Hindustani Tongue offers lifetime access to their Google Classroom. You’ll have access to a wealth of resources to support your language learning journey. Every class is recorded and uploaded to the Google Classroom, allowing you to review the material at your own pace and convenience. Study materials such as notes, worksheets, and practice exercises are provided for each class, ensuring that you have all the necessary resources to reinforce your learning outside the classroom. You can continue to learn and improve your language skills even after completing the course.

The instructors at Hindustani Tongue are native speakers and bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the classroom. Their deep understanding of the language, culture, and nuances of communication will provide invaluable insights, support and guidance where needed. They take a personalized approach to teaching, ensuring that you receive individualized attention and support. Whether you’re having trouble mastering grammar, expanding your vocabulary, or improving pronunciation, they’re there to provide assistance and ensure that you make progress and eventually reach fluency. This makes learning easy and enjoyable. 

Moreover, the platform provides an immersive learning experience. You’ll be fully immersed in the language you’re studying through the interactive lessons, cultural activities, and real-life scenarios. You’ll experience the rich Indian culture, while at the same time develop practical language skills that you can confidently use in everyday situations. With this approach, you’ll get a deeper understanding and retain more of the language compared to traditional language learning methods.

Although Hindustani Tongue currently offers courses in only 9 out of the 22 official languages of India, it’s still a well-structured and comprehensive learning resource to help you reach fluency.

Exclusive ALR Reader Discount: $20 off with code : ALR20

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AmazingTalker Mini Review: Not Our Top Pick for Web Classes

AmazingTalker

Rating 2.5
★★
★
★★★
Price:

From around $10 per 50-minute class

Summary

AmazingTalker is an italki and Verbling competitor that lets you book classes with language teachers and academic tutors of your choice. It has a lot of attractive features for students, but teachers complain about high commission rates and lack of support. It boasts a 3% acceptance rate for teachers and a 100% satisfaction guarantee. If you’re not happy with your class, they’ll rebook you another one for free. There are lots of teachers to choose from, or you can also use their AI Matching Service to find a tutor. The teachers’ profiles include videos, reviews, and their résumé. However, AmazingTalker doesn’t seem a great choice for teachers. It charges English and Japanese teachers astonishingly high commission rates of up to 30%. While these rates fall as teachers earn more through the site, they have to make $1,500 a month before the commission reaches levels comparable to italki and Verbling. Making it worse, there’s an additional 8% fee for payment processing and tax that all teachers have to pay, no matter what language they teach.  There have also been complaints on Reddit from teachers claiming to have been harassed by students and fellow teachers. However, we cannot corroborate these. Given all this, we’d recommend trying italki (review) or Verbling (review) first. Alternatively, check out our guide to the best platforms for online language classes.

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TeacherOn Mini Review: Lots of Teachers for Indian Languages

TeacherOn

Rating 1.6
★
★
★★★★
Price:

Classes from 50¢ to $80 per hour

Summary

TeacherOn is an italki competitor that allows you to book online or in-person classes with language and/or academic tutors of your choice. It can attract scammers and the tutor quality seems hit or miss, but for some languages, it’s probably the only platform with available teachers. The website started life as TutorIndia, and it still leans heavily towards Indian teachers. For example, it has around 4,500 Hindi teachers compared to italki’s 89. There are also over 300 Kannada teachers, 38 Assamese ones, and 42 Odia ones; in contrast, italk only has 4 teachers for Kannada and 0 for Assamese or Odia. You can contact the first three teachers for free. After that, you can either post your requirements so that teachers can contact you or pay extra to contact more teachers. However, you should be cautious when using the platform, especially if you’re paying off site or meeting your tutor in person. We were shown fake profiles, while TeacherOn publishes a list of people banned for being scammers. There are no student reviews, either. TeacherOn encourages students and teachers alike to do due diligence on people before contacting them, and we echo this sentiment. TeacherOn has plenty of issues. However, for certain languages, it’s invaluable. It may be the only way to study some of them from abroad.

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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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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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Learn Indian Languages Quickly With Alter Gyan: Mini Review

Alter Gyan/Learn X Quickly

Rating 3.2
★★★
★
★★
Price:

Free; watch an ad or pay to unlock some themes

Summary

Alter Gyan’s apps set out to teach you essential words and phrases in 13 different Indian languages. The series include Learn Hindi Quickly, Learn Punjabi Quickly, and Learn Bengali Quickly. What makes it even better is the fact that you can learn from other common Indian, East Asian, and European languages – not just English. Although Alter Gyan (also called Altergyan) has also made apps for European and East Asian languages, we can’t recommend them. Our score is solely for the apps for the Indian languages. This is because the biggest selling point of these apps is the variety of languages for which, frankly, there aren’t always many resources. When you open the app, you can view word lists for over 30 themes. You can drill them with flash cards, take multiple-choice quizzes, and even record yourself speaking and listen back. If you can find your language on something like uTalk (review), Ling (review), Simply Learn Languages (review), or Vocly (review), we would recommend studying with those apps instead. We find them more effective, engaging, and comprehensive. However, if these apps aren’t an option, or if you want to learn from Tamil or Telugu, Alter Gyan’s Learn Quickly apps could help you memorize basic words and phrases for essential situations.

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