VerbSquirt Mini-Review: Use Conjuguemos for Free Instead

VerbSquirt

Rating 2.5

★★

★

★★★

Price:

Freemium, $0.99

Summary

VerbSquirt is a conjugation app for mobile devices that uses multiple choice questions and matching activities to test your knowledge. You can learn by verb group, verb tense, or build your own custom exercises. It also has a summary page that allows you to see how many points you score on average per day, week, and month.

The app doesn’t have a very attractive interface compared to other resources, but if you want to tap on answers to practice recognition rather than active recall, VerbSquirt may be a good option for you. However, you may want to use Conjuguemos instead — it provides free exercises that require you to use active recall and type out the answers. You can also try SpanishDict or Ella Verbs if you are learning Spanish.

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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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Glosbe Mini-Review: Thousands of Languages With Some Errors

Glosbe Dictionary

Rating 3.5

★★★

★

★★

Price:

Free

Summary

Glosbe is a dictionary that serves over 6000 languages. Most words have a list of definitions, conjugations, declensions, and similar phrases (although these phrases are hit or miss when it comes to how relevant they are to the initial entry). Many of the entries are created by community members, who can add and edit translations, example sentences, pronunciations, and images. Also, the site does not use text-to-voice pronunciation — as a result, some words may not have any pronunciation. It’s important to note that some of the content is not checked by the creators, such as the example sentences. Be careful if you are trying to learn new phrases from these lists, as although many of them are correct, there are a few that may lead you to learn inaccurate vocabulary or grammar. Additionally, less commonly studied languages may be listed as available, but only contain a few lines of content. Overall, Glosbe may be a helpful tool if you can’t find dictionaries that specialize in your target language. However, SpanishDict is a far more comprehensive option for Spanish learners, as is Pleco for Chinese learners and Kanji Study for Japanese. You can also check out Forvo, a dictionary resource for native speaker audio files that has strict rules on community contributions.

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Complete Language Lessons Mini Review: Almost Useless

Complete Language Lessons

Rating 0.2

★

★★★★★

Price:

$8.99 for the CD/$1.29 per track on Amazon, free on Spotify

Summary

Complete Language Lessons has audio courses for numerous languages on Amazon, Spotify, and Deezer. We tried out the Swahili audio course, Learn Swahili Easily, Effectively, and Fluently – and were extremely disappointed. The audio tracks we sampled consist of Swahili phrases repeated over and over again, with no translations, explanations, or anything in English. The audio quality isn’t great, either, and the occasional muted club music adds to the bizarreness. It feels to us like the audio tracks are supposed to accompany a textbook, but we couldn’t find one. If one existed at some point, we suspect it’s no longer available. If you already speak the language and are looking for native audio recordings to help you improve your listening and pronunciation, you might get some value out of Complete Language Lessons. However, if your aim is learn the language, we would skip these CDs.

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Vocabulearn Mini Review: Unlikely to Teach You a Language

Vocabulearn

Rating 0.6

★

★★★★★

Price:

$29.99 on Amazon, free on Spotify

Summary

Vocabulearn has so-called audio courses for numerous languages on Amazon and Spotify. We don’t believe you’ll learn much from them, but they could help you practice your pronunciation. For this mini review, we tried out the Vocabulearn Swahili/English Level 1 course. It’s split into four CDs, each with its own theme, and then each theme is divided into four lessons. The themes are: Nouns; Adjectives, Adverbs, Prepositions, Conjunctions 1; Expressions; Verbs. In each track, we listened to long lists of words and phrases. First, it was said in English; secondly, it was said in Swahili. However, there were no grammar or contextual explanations, drills, or activities to help you remember the material. In short, we’re not convinced that you’d be able to make your own sentences or even remember the vocabulary after listening to these CDs. However, if you’re studying a language with fewer resources, we think you could use it to practice your pronunciation by repeating each word after the speakers say it.

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Ilini Mini-Review: Limited Videos but Still Evolving

Ilini

Rating 3.5

★★★

★

★★

Price:

Freemium, Premium subscriptions start at $9.99/mo

Summary

Ilini is a website with real French videos for French learners. A free membership will give you access to videos, quizzes and 10 of your most recent vocabulary words, while the premium membership will give you access to unlimited vocabulary words and transcripts with worksheets. There are videos for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners that cover various topics: news, culture, music, entertainment, sports, society, and more. You can choose to focus on adding new vocabulary to your flashcard deck or taking a quiz after watching the video. You can also slow down the speed of the video and watch it with or without English subtitles (except when taking the quiz). Ilini is similar to Yabla, but it is cheaper and has different types of activities, like quizzes and worksheets, to train your listening comprehension. It currently has a more limited selection of videos than Yabla, though, so if you are an advanced learner, it may be better to use the free version until they have updated the site a bit more. You can also check out Caption Pop, which doesn’t have any comprehension activities but is a free service for subtitles and translations of YouTube videos.

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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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French Classes Mini-Review: Has Lots of Long Grammar Explanations

French Classes

Rating 2.7

★★

★

★★★

Price:

29.5€/year

Summary

French Classes is a website that contains French lessons with accompanying exercises, transcriptions with audio, and 120 dictation exercises. The thirty-six beginner lessons will take you through the basics and lead you to full immersion at the intermediate and advanced levels. There are also about 200 supplementary audio lessons about travel, news, society, and culture with accompanying transcripts and contextual notes to support your learning. Each lesson is divided into two parts. The first part contains a grammar lesson, while the second contains a series of exercises. Both sections have an accompanying audio file recorded by native speakers. Unfortunately, the website does not detect your mistakes automatically, so you will have to check your responses yourself for the dictation and grammar exercises. This also means that you have to grade yourself on your progress. Overall, French classes may not be worth the investment unless you truly enjoy reading and listening to long grammar explanations. Also, you probably won’t be able to advance through the lessons without the support of other resources, like a private tutor. As an alternative, learners of all levels can check out TV5 Monde, while beginners may want to try French in Action or Podcast Français Facile . These are all free resources that have dynamic lesson structures.

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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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Duolingo Review: Useful But Not Sufficient – 2 Language Learners Test It (With Video)

Duolingo

Rating 4.0

★★★★★

Summary

Duolingo is a super popular free language-learning app. It’s available for desktop as well as mobile and offers over 90 different language courses in over 20 different languages — there are currently 35 languages with English instruction. The Duolingo approach is gamified and easy to use, but the bite-sized lessons don’t offer much in the way of in-depth practice. The Duolingo tag line is “Learn a language in just five minutes a day.”

Quality 4.0

★★★★★

It’s easy and fun to use, but some pronunciation and grammar instruction is of low quality, especially for Asian languages.

Thoroughness 3.5

★★★

★

★★

The app works well for learning the basics, but there’s little speaking practice and grammar instruction is limited.

Value 4.5

★★★★

★

It’s a lot of content for free, but you’ll need to use supplementary resources.

I Like

The short lessons are ideal for quick, convenient practice
The game-like features make the exercises engaging and fun
The community aspect is motivating

I Don’t Like

There’s no opportunity to create your own sentences
Grammar instruction isn’t part of the lessons
Text-to-speech audio is sometimes low quality

Price

Duolingo is totally free. Duolingo Plus offers a few additional features and is available for:

$12.99/month (paid monthly) $6.99/month (12-month subscription)

Their family plan is $119.99 a year

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What is Duolingo?

Duolingo is one of the most popular language-learning programs out there. It’s been on the scene since 2012 and offers instruction in 35 different languages. It even offers courses in three constructed languages (perfect for brushing up on your Esperanto or High Valyrian).

…

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