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Hawaiian

An Honest Review of Cudoo With Image of Man Working on Computer

Cudoo Review — I Wouldn’t Even Use it if it Were Free

Cudoo

Rating 0.6

Summary

Cudoo is an online learning platform that offers courses in over 160 languages. The platform also offers courses teaching soft skills and other professional development courses. Certificates are available upon course completion, and courses are provided to libraries and non-profits for free. We feel that the quality of the language courses is quite low, and that the prices are relatively high.


Quality 1.0

It’s nice to have native speaker audio, but I personally found the course to offer very little learning potential.

Thoroughness 1.0

The course didn’t cover everything listed under “Course Content” and offers no explanations.

Value 0.0

This course is way overpriced in my opinion. I wouldn’t even use it if it were free.

I Like
  • Audio by a variety of native speakers.
I Don’t Like
  • I wanted more explanations
  • Practice opportunities felt severely limited
  • I found the material unengaging
  • Content doesn’t build on itself logically.
Price

Price varies by course, from $4.99 to $24.99, with language bundles costing up to $199.

This seems like a reasonable list of goals, depending on the meaning of “…and more!” even if it is a little bit light for the $25 price tag.

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An Honest Review of Speaky With Image of Girl Using Phone

Speaky Review: Better Than Other Language Exchange Apps?

Speaky

Rating 3.7

Summary

Speaky is a social language-learning app for people interested in language exchange. It’s available for iOS, Android, and the web. Users can chat with other language learners, share photos, leave voice messages or even have voice calls. The basic features on Speaky are free to use, but access to more than five translations per day requires a subscription.


Quality 3.0

There are some dedicated language learners on Speaky but not as many as similar apps.

Thoroughness 3.5

The platform is easy to use but lacks advanced features.

Value 4.5

Speaky is mostly free to use, extra features are available for a subscription.

I Like
  • It’s mostly free.
  • It’s easy to use.
  • There are a lot of users.
  • There are tons of languages
I Don’t Like
  • Many community members don’t actually seem interested in language exchange.
  • The web version doesn’t work well.
  • There are no extra social features.
Price

The basic features on Speaky are free to use. A premium membership is available for a subscription.

Speaky is a language exchange app. It facilitates exchange by allowing users to chat with others in the language they’re learning. Its function is pretty simple and straightforward — search for a partner with a reciprocal language combination and say hello.

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An Honest Review of Mango Languages With Image of Girl on Computer

Mango Languages Review – Pretty Good For Beginners

Mango Languages

Rating 3.5

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 4.0

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

Thoroughness 3.0

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

Value 3.5

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 $14.99 a month or 179.99 yearly.

Mango Languages has high-quality beginner to intermediate level lessons in tons of different languages.

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An Honest Review of Drops App With Image of Woman on Phone

Drops App Review – Decent As A Supplementary Resource

Drops App

Rating 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 4.0

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

Thoroughness 3.0

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 3.0

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.

I’d previously heard about Drops on Reddit, where it achieved rave reviews and some pointed criticism.

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Transparent Language Review

Transparent Language Review – Not Exciting, But Language Offering Is So Vast That You May Need It

Last Updated on December 13, 2023.

Transparent Language

Rating 2.3

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.


Quality 2.5

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 2.0

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

Value 2.5

I would only consider using if 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.

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