review

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By Nick Mandarin Chinese

Lingo Bus

Quick Review

4.8 

Summary:

Lingo Bus is an online Chinese learning platform specifically designed for children between 5 and 12 years old. Their immersive online lessons, well-designed curriculum, engaging materials, and excellent teachers would make them my top choice for anyone interested in helping their child learn Mandarin.

Quality

They have clear learning targets with materials designed for kids.

Thoroughness

The extra materials, both before and after the class, make Lingo Bus much more than just a tutoring company.

Value

It’s not the cheapest option, but the price is very fair when you consider everything that’s included.

Price

Each lesson costs $20 though discounts are available if you purchase lesson bundles.

Try a free demo lesson on Lingo Bus
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By Nick Mandarin Chinese

Coffee Break Chinese

Quick Review

4 

Summary:

Coffee Break Chinese offers a free audio podcast and a premium course. You’ll learn Chinese alongside one of the hosts, Mark, who’s learning himself with the guidance of Crystal, the Chinese host. Together they create a fairly relaxing atmosphere in which to learn Chinese. As Coffee Break Chinese is still producing their first season, only beginners would benefit from this course.

Quality

The lessons are well structured – building up from words to sentences to dialogues.

Thoroughness

As they’re still producing the first season, there’s a lot of material left to cover.

Value

It’s great that you can listen to the audio lessons for free but the paid course is a bit expensive.

Price

 You can access all of the audio lessons for free as a podcast. The premium course costs $124.

Languages: French, German, Spanish, Russian, Estonian

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By Alex Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Belarusian Bengali Bulgarian Cantonese Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Georgian German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Kazakh Korean Kurdish Latvian Lithuanian Mandarin Chinese Manx Mongolian Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh

Glossika

Quick Review

3.2 

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

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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By Alex French

Français Authentique

Quick Review

3.8 

Summary:

These audio lessons focus on teaching you authentic French that is used in everyday life. As everything is in French, it is not suited to beginners although it will certainly help intermediate learners gain fluency and improve their comprehension skills. Speaking and writing are not featured much but the listening and reading resources are generally very good. It will help you improve these skills but it is up to you to put in the time to practice the lessons.

Quality

Very easy to use with good content. Could maybe vary up the exercises a bit more.

Thoroughness

The vocabulary explanations in French are great though this approach means you learn grammar intuitively without any analysis of how it works.

Value

Very authentic and is worth checking out. Not everyone will be a fan of the heavy amount of repetition. Cheaper than a lot of resources.

Price

Divided into three bundles of courses that increase in difficulty:

Pack 1 costs 49 euros and contains 4.5 hours of audio.
Pack 2 costs 129 euros and includes 17 hours of audio.
Pack 3 is 149 euros and includes 14.5 hours of audio as well as 3.75 hours of videos.

All three packs together cost 327 euros and this includes 3.75 hours of video, 36 hours of audio, 355 pages of text and should take you over a year and a half to complete.

For a look at how Francais Authentique is taught and whether it fits your learning style, you can access a week of free lessons on the website.

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By Abheek Bhadury Arabic Cantonese Dutch French German Greek Italian Japanese Mandarin Chinese Polish Portuguese Russian Spanish Turkish

Earworms

Quick Review

2.5 

Summary:

Earworms is a unique language resource that relies on audio lessons mixed into music. The theory is that you will find the music catchy and thus remember your lessons easily.  The whole idea behind Earworms is the psychological theory of memory association. You would associate some information with the music and thus remember it easily. However, the music used in these lessons will not appeal to everyone, at least it didn’t for me. Moreover, the lack of visual aid and no exercises to assess your skills make it harder.  I would only recommend this for people who have failed to learn through other online resources or perhaps someone looking to learn a few phrases before a trip.

Quality

With a lack of exercises and visual aids, I can’t really say that it will prove to be a useful resource.

Thoroughness

All the lessons are comprised of various phrases that they think will be useful for anyone willing to learn French. Unfortunately, they’re too shallow and poorly structured.

Value

With such low utility, it is important to have a low-price tag. Fortunately, they have followed this idea and thus you won’t be losing out too much if you opt for this.

Price

Each volume can be purchased as an mp3 download for £8.32 or as a CD for £14.99. You can save a little money by purchasing bundles as well. You can also purchase via the app for £9.99 per volume.

Languages: Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese – European, Portuguese – Brazilian, Spanish – European, Spanish – Latin American, Russian, and Turkish

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By Abheek Bhadury French

Frantastique

Quick Review

2.8 

Summary:

One of the most simply designed resources on the web, Frantastique is more than meets the eye. It follows an ideology which believes in immersing the students in the language and culture while making use of AI. I would recommend it to people who know at least bits and pieces of the language and don’t care about spending the insane prices they’re asking for.

Quality

The immersive lessons force you to sink or swim but the design is lackluster.

Thoroughness

The content that is presented to you is based on where you lack in the language and their revision system is very well done.

Value

With the high price and a limit on the number of lessons you can access per week, Frantastique is terrible value for the money.

Price

Prices vary according to subscription length and plan. The one month and 3-years plans costs are as follows; $24 – $65 per month for the Basic plan, $36 – $98 per month for the Premium plan and $48 – $96 a month for the Pro plan. Progressing to higher plans gets you a few additional features but the number of lessons is limited to 5 a week in each case. There is also a standard 7 lesson free trial available.

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By Alex Portuguese

Semantica Portuguese

Quick Review

4.2 

Summary:

Semantica is an amazing resource for visual and aural learners looking to learn Portuguese by immersing themselves in Brazilian culture. Through their unique video lessons, Semantica does a great job in providing its users with real life scenarios that they will come across in Brazil. While some beginners may find it a challenge, those that respond well to this style of teaching will surely enjoy the lessons. There is a wealth of material to explore and a lot of room for students to progress.

Quality

The videos are very well produced and entertaining. The accompanying lesson materials, though useful, are not as good.

Thoroughness

Their coverage of real life situations is great but the grammar explanations are lacking.

Value

This is a unique product and definitely worth considering spending your time and money on.

Price

Semantica has a number of different subscription plans. Regardless of what plan you choose, all of the videos are accessible to you. The shortest option is to sign up and pay on a month-by-month basis which costs $20/month. After that it is $100 for six months and $180 for a whole year. Past that there is the option of paying $300 for five years, $500 for ten years and, remarkably, $900 for twenty years access!

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By Anca Italian

LearnItalianPod

Quick Review

2.2 

Summary:

LearnItalianPod isn’t a good resource in my opinion. There are some fun supplementary lessons, but I found the basic learning paths to be insufficient in all sorts of ways for someone who’s trying to learn Italian.

Quality

It’s a very limited tool. It can help you drill some phrases and useful expressions but, in my experience, you won’t learn to create your own sentences and speak.

Thoroughness

New structures and grammar units appear only in examples. There are virtually no explanations or rules. Apart from repetitions, there’s no practice.

Value

The tool isn’t expensive but I don’t think it’s worth the cost.

Price

LearnItalianPod has only one subscription plan. Their VIP membership can be purchased on a monthly basis at $14.95 per month or for the whole year at $149.50.

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By Nick Mandarin Chinese

HelloChinese

Quick Review

4.8 

Summary:

You won’t find a better free option for learning Chinese than HelloChinese. This app has a ton of content and engaging exercises that will have you practicing Chinese immediately. It’s great for beginners and covers a lot of material; including reading, writing, listening, speaking, vocabulary, grammar, and even parts of Chinese culture. Not only that, it’s actually fun to use.

Quality

The app is extremely well designed. Everything runs smoothly, looks great, and is very effective.

Thoroughness

It covers the beginner and elementary levels of Mandarin with a lot of depth.

Value

It’s extremely good and it’s free.

Price

The “Learn” portion of the app is completely free and includes a lot of material. The Premium plan costs $8.99/month, $19.99/3-months, or $59.99/year. The Premium+ plan costs $19.99/month, $89.99/6-months, or $149.99/year.

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By Nick Mandarin Chinese

Duolingo Chinese

Quick Review

2.5 

Summary:

Duolingo is one of the most popular tools for learning a language and they finally released their Chinese course. Unfortunately, it’s just not very good. They fail to provide a useful course in every area except one, motivating students to continue studying. If you’re serious about learning Chinese, don’t waste your time with Duolingo.

Quality

Duolingo is beautifully designed but the lessons are terrible.

Thoroughness

The material is covered very poorly without much for explanations.

Value

It’s free, but your time is valuable.

Price

It’s completely free. You can pay $9.99 per month to remove the ads and get offline access.

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