Urdu

By Tanya Hindi Urdu

Darvazah

2.5

Price: Free

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Darvazah started off as A Door Into Hindi, before the Urdu-language version was launched. Both were funded by a grant from the US Department of Education and designed as a free equivalent to a year of Hindi- or Urdu-language tuition at a university level.

They contain an alphabet tutorial and 24 video lessons. You’ll need to use Flash to watch A Door Into Urdu, however, while the videos for A Door Into Hindi are now only available on YouTube. The videos for the Hindi and Urdu courses are actually identical: the authors don’t distinguish between the two languages.

Finding Hindi- and Urdu-language study materials can be hard, so a university-level course is a great option. However, we feel like it would be beneficial to have greater explanations of the differences between Hindi and Urdu. While grammatically and phonetically they could be considered the same language, Urdu has more Arabic, Persian, and Turkish vocabulary while Hindi owes more to Sanskrit.

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By Tanya Urdu

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Aamozish – 3.9

The sleekly designed Aamozish web app will teach you the Urdu script and pronunciation, and along the way, quite a bit of vocabulary. Don’t believe its claim that it will teach you Urdu in 7 days, however. You’ll learn the script, but there’s a lot more to the Urdu language than that.

The course consists of 26 modules divided into 10 units. You’ll be surprised by how quickly you progress: the modules fall under the category of micro-learning.

Each unit also contains quizzes. You don’t be able to move to the next unit until you’ve passed them, but that’s not hard. You only need to get two multiple-choice questions correct out of a total of four. In fact, it’s far too easy to get through the quiz without actually having learned the material – and, frustratingly, if you get a question wrong, Aamozish won’t tell you the right answer. I recommend using flashcards and other drilling methods alongside Aamozish.

This doesn’t mean Aamozish isn’t a useful Urdu-learning tool, though. The instruction is clear and thorough. Animations will show you how to draw the characters, while audio clips will help you with your pronunciation.

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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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Encore!!! Language Learning

1.5

Price: Free

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Encore!!! Language Learning allows you to listen to playlists of common phrases, vocabulary, conjugations, and dialogues. It varies in terms of whether it uses native speakers or automated text-to-voice.

The app is basically a phrasebook that allows you to practice translating sentences to and from your native language, or simply repeat after an audio in your target language. You can listen to a pre-made playlist, mute or unmute certain phrases within a playlist, adjust the number of repetitions of each phrase, or create your own playlist. You can also test your memory with the Test tool by reading prompts in your native language and translating into your target language.

The app seems to focus more on understanding grammar structures than other phrasebook sites like Optilingo or Lingohut. Technically you could learn something by repeating the phrases aloud, but there are many other free apps that provide a clearer learning path and have a more intuitive interface than Encore!!! Language Learning.

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Instant Immersion

2

Price: 1 level costs $29.95, 3 levels cost $44.95

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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.

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italki

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.

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 in the italki Community make it easy to ask questions, get your writing checked, and find a free language exchange partner.

I DON’T LIKE…

Community features are only available through the app.

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. Right now italki is offering a $10 credit with your first purchase.

BUY 1 ITALKI LESSON GET 1 FREE

*Use this link to purchase a minimum of $20 (US) of Italki credits and receive an extra $10 free! (Bonus added after completion of 1st lesson)*

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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

1.3

Price: Free

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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.

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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

2.5

Price: Free, Premium subscriptions cost $13.99/mo, $144.99/year

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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.

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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

2

Price: Free

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Kendal and Philipp, the creators of the LingoHut, are passionate about teaching languages. Their website supposedly helps 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. The lessons are essentially a series of phrases that 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. There is also 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. Furthermore, some sentences switch between formal and informal language without explanation, which would not be intuitive for an A1 learner.

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.

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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

4

Price: Freemium, Premium subscriptions start at $9.99/mo

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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.

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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

Quick Review