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Android and language learning | ||
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| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6904 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes  5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 1 of 11 02 May 2013 at 5:56pm | IP Logged |
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Inspired by the thread on Ipad and language learning (which includes some information relevant for Android users as well), I decided to open a thread about Android apps for language learners.
This post is an attempt at making a (hopefully, quite comprehensible) list of the types of applications which may actually help in language learning. Based on my own experience, I tried to recommend/review some apps for most categories. I think it would be nice to use this thread for app reviews, recommendations, ideas, and I hope to learn about some interesting applications :). (On the list, I didn't include applications such as Skype, TweetCaster, messengers etc., although there is no doubt they can be a huge help in language learning.) ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------- SWITCHING BETWEEN LANGUAGES Android has the useful option of switching between languages, which affects the language of UI, apps, dictionary for sending texts etc. However, going to the settings menu everytime we want to change the language is pretty cumbersome, which is why an app for language switching turns out to be really helpful. There is at least a dozen of apps of this kind on Google Play, most of them free of charge. At the moment, my app of choice is Language Picket Widget. It's not exactly beautiful, it may clutter up your home screen if you switch between many language versions (there are 1x1 big white widgets, one for every language) and it has not been updated for over three years... but it does its job perfectly and I never ever had any problems with it. Still, I would appreciate recommendations of tested apps with a sleeker widget design (ideas?). All in all, switching to your target language makes pretty much any application (games included) a language learning tool :). AUDIO PLAYERS FOR LANGUAGE COURSES, AUDIOBOOKS, PODCASTS An Android phone / tablet may be used as a convenient audio player. There are a few options I find particularly important in a player app used for listening to language courses, audiobooks, podcasts etc. These are: easy rewind and fastforward (and pause), bookmarking, going back to the exact same stop of recording when you stopped listening. Unfortunately, the stock player is pretty much useless, as is Poweramp, my music player by choice. On Google Play, you can find interesting apps if you search for "audiobook player". I am still not sure which ones I'm going to stick with but right now I'm testing: MortPlayer Audio Books - free of charge, with all the above-mentioned options, a long lists of settings you can tweak to match your needs, nice file manager, clean and customizable interface, no ads whatsoever. Works great with any audio recordings, not only with audiobooks. Smart AudioBook Player - free of charge (basic version only). It has all the above-mentioned options (including easy rewinding/forwarding of 1 minute or 10 s). Excellent interface, very practical playback speed control, no ads. Very much audiobook-oriented (with nice features such as measuring the progress for the whole audiobook), perfectly usable for listening to language courses but not that suitable for listening to single files of podcasts etc. On the negative side, if you have separate folders for every CD of a course/audiobook, it's going to see them as separate audiobooks. Ambling BookPlayer - a dedicated player for audiobooks, available in two payable versions (Personal and Pro, both pretty expensive) and a free trial version. By far the best audiobook management (you have to manually 'help' the player to add the right files and folders but this pays off - all your audiobooks are correctly added. Rewinding and forwarding of 1 minute / 15 s, no playback speed control, unfortunately. Little banners of the company in a few menus, as the app serves also as the access to the audiobook store. Decent interface (the default version is quite different from what we know from most players but there is also a more 'conservative' option). There are also dedicated apps for podcasts (downloading/streaming, searching for them) such as DoggCatcher, Podkicker or Pocket Casts, to name just a few. I'm not using one at the moment so I won't give any recommendations. If I decide to use an app of this kind, I would look for one with the rewind/fastforward options, bookmarks, preferably customizable playback speed and a nice directory of podcasts from all over the world (do you know any app with these features? :)). EASY ACCESS TO TARGET LANGUAGE MEDIA There are hundreds of apps which give you an easier access to target language media (newspapers, radio, TV, podcasts etc.). The podcasts have already been discussed above, so let's move on to other kinds of media. Generally, one could divide apps of this kind into two subgroups: there are apps that provide you with an access to a huge variety of media (most often on-line editions of newspapers) in one or more languages, and dedicated apps for readers/viewers of a given newspaper, magazine, website, radio or TV station. In the first category, my personal pick is World Newspapers. It's free of charge has a huge (HUGE!) directory of on-line mobile editions of newspapers from all over the world, most of which work really well. The interface is nice and clean, with an easy accessible list of your favorite newspapers. There is also a built-in RSS reader, where you can add channels (a good option especially if there aren't many nice newspapers in your target language). You can save articles of your choice for reading off-line (the option does not work perfectly as good as it could be, though), add bookmarks and easily use Google Translate to get a rough translation. It's not perfect (sometimes ads appear, and I wish it had a better off-line mode and some integration with dictionaries) but it's pretty close, and highly addictive because of the number of media and languages you can access easily. There are also apps that take a completely different approach, such as PressReader, which gives the access to PDF versions of a huge variety of newspapers and magazines from all over the world. Obviously, you have to pay for the access to most of them but there is also a small number of newspapers available for free, such as "Metro". I've tested the app very briefly (I don't have a tablet, and viewing PDF on a 4-inch screen of a smartophone isn't exactly the kind of user experience I'm looking for) but it seems nice. There is a 24-hour trial for the payable newspapers, and a payable subscription with an unlimited access to all titles. The selection of newspapers is not bad but it tends to be better for some countries and languages then for the others. You can listen to some newspapers (speech synthetizer). I don't know if downloaded newspapers are accessible on the phone after the trial expires (mine has not expired yet). Zinio is another app of this kind. In the second category (apps dedicated for specific media), the choice depends on your target languages and for popular ones, it might be huge. The apps differ in terms of quality and features, though, and the access might be free of charge or not. There are official apps and apps offered by third parties. So far, I've given a try to just three French apps. RFI and FRANCE 24 for Android. They are not bad and offer nice direct streaming. However, they lack some essential features such as downloading podcasts/videos for listening off-line (which is perfectly possible if you use e.g. RFI website) and rewinding/forwarding. For this reason, I use these apps mostly to view/listen France24/RFI live, and to easily browse through programs/podcasts (if I find something interesting, I will probably listen to further episodes outside of these apps). I also looked for a nice app for reading lemonde.fr. There is a dozen of them on Google Play, and the one I've chosen is an unofficial one. It's has a elegant design and comes with nice widgets but the features are very limited (no off-line reading/bookmarking) and some articles are opened in your browser and not the app itself, which kinda misses the point. All in all, it seems much convenient to read the newspapers with a universal app such as "World Newspapers", and to listen to podcasts with a podcast app. This also allows the user to limit the number of applications installed, but there surely are some dedicated apps that do deserve our attention (which ones? any ideas?). Yet another option is to install an RSS reader and add all favorite websites (search for 'RRS' on Google Play). DICTIONARIES The times of electronic dictionary devices seem to be over, as a dictionary on your smartphone/tablet may always be at hand. There are at least four types of dictionaries for mobile devices: 1. Multi-language dictionaries which work with dictionary data in a variety of formats (StarDict format being probably the most popular one). How good they are, depends largely on the dictionary data you have. There are many good (and free dictionaries) available, so you may want to take some time to look for them. Be careful though, as not all available dictionaries are legit. I've tried two free-of-charge dictionary apps of this kind: ColorDict (which also allows to search Wikipedia) and Flexidict. ColorDict seems a bit more stable and has no ads, whereas FlexiDict has a nice pop-up mode (you can open the dictionary in a separate resizable window while having your e-book/Internet browser/other app open at the same time), which is useful especially on devices with large screens, and re-arranging the order of dictionaries is easier than in ColorDict. GoldenDict is yet another app of this kind, which supports multiple dictionary formats and has a free (with ads and a limited number of dictionaries) and a payable version. I haven't tested this. If you have good dictionary data, such apps are just amazing: you have an off-line and fast access to your dictionaries, and you can easily search in multiple dictionaries at the same time. Furthermore, such dictionaries can be used together with e-book reader apps (see below). 2. Multi-language off-line dictionaries with their own format (databases to be downloaded withing the app). dict.cc is basically an app version of the website. Most importantly, you can easily download databases for off-line use (for free). The available languages (in combination with English and German) are: Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish. The quality of dictionaries depends on the language but it should be enough for a simple look-up. The app works fast, you don't have to switch between the directions of a dictionary. Switching between different dictionaries is not very convenient, though, and you can't search in multiple dictionaries at the same time. There is a payable version of app with some additional (but not necessary) features. QuickDic Offline Dictionary is a free, ad-free and open-souce app with quite an impressive list of languages. It uses data from en.wiktionary.org and Beolingus, and the quality and size of dictionaries varies depending on the language. Switching between dictionaries is inconvenient and you can't search in multiple dictionaries at the same time. I use QuickDic for Swedish (EN<>SV and DE<>SV) when I'm on the go or in class, and I'm pretty happy with it, although I do miss plural forms, and it's sometimes annoying that one word is displayed twice on the list. Offline dictionaries is another app of this kind, and based on the review it seems definitely worth looking at. As it doesn't offer any language pair I would be interested in (which I don't have covered in another application), I haven't tried it. 3. On-line dictionaries for various websites There is a huge number of dictionaries for various websites, such as LEO dictionary, WordReference.com, Dictionary.com,PONS Online Dictionary or many RAE dictionaries. Such apps work on-line (which is not a problem when you have a good data plan but may become one if you go abroad). The main question you should answer before installing/keeping such an app is whether it works better/faster/in a more convenient way than the mobile version of the website it uses as a source. 4. Off-line bilingual/monolingual dictionaries, including those published by well-known publishers (often payable) The offer is huge, especially for popular languages. Quite many dictionaries are almost useless, though (slow, buggy, small number of words etc.). I use French Larousse dictionary (monolingual) which I can definitely recommend (great dictionary, additional information for some words (coniugation tables, expressions, synonyms etc.), audio recordings, search of history and list of favorite words which I use for words I want to remember/go back to. (5.) While discussing dictionaries, we should not forget Google Translate. The app is really good, with search history, list of favorite translations, speech synthetizer. As for input, you can use your finger/stylus and draw letters/symbols instead of using the keyboard, which may be really useful with languages using non-Latin scripts (no idea of how accurate that is, though). Most importantly, it can be used off-line! You can download data for the languages you need (the packages are huge, e.g. 160 MB for Swedish, so wi-fi use is recommended. (For those who use DroidWall: for some reason, the off-line mode won't work if you block the app in DroidWall AND your phone has the Internet access at the same time). WIKIPEDIA There is a number of apps that allow you for a quick and easy access to Wikipedia (e.g. Wapedia and the official app. I'm still looking for a Wikipedia app which allows to switch between language versions of a given article very easily and search multiple language versions at the same time - any ideas? CONJUGATION/DECLENSION I can't recommend anything specific but there are many apps of this kind on Google Play, and lots of them are free. Let me give you just one example (untested): While choosing the right app, I would first check whether it works off-line. Example: Le Conjugueur. E-BOOK READERS There is a number of e-book reader applications for Android. For instance, Cool Reader and FBReader are both excellent, highly customizable and free-of-charge. They both can work with dictionaries (e.g. ColorDict and FlexiDict mentioned above but also with other ones, including on-line dictionaries). For transferring e-books to the Android device and keeping them in order, I find Calibre Companion very useful. It is not free of charge but really worth every penny. It works with the desktop e-book management software Calibre. For PDFs, I am still looking for a perfect app. At the moment, I use qPDF Viewer (free) but I might switch e.g. to ezPDF (payable), which offers integration with dictionaries. Kindle for Android is another popular free option for those reading e-books (no review here, as I don't use it). VOCABULARY TRAINERS, SRS My personal choice is not very original: AnkiDroid Nevertheless, there are also other apps for vocabulary learning, e.g. FullRecall. LANGUAGE COURSES, VOCABULARY COURSES, PHRASE BOOKS AND GAMES There are more and more Android applications that provide you with language learning content. Some of them don't go beyond a short list of useful expressions, some are much, much more comprehensive. No recommendations/reviews from me here (do you have any?). (Let me know if any links are not working.) Interesting HTLAL links about Android apps: Android apps for language learners Android Apps Edited by Julie on 02 May 2013 at 6:11pm 14 persons have voted this message useful | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 11 02 May 2013 at 6:31pm | IP Logged |
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My long-term favorites are:
- AnkiDroid - TuneIn Radio - Podcast Addict - Larousse's monolingual dictionary - Google Translate - The Kindle app, but only for classic books available through the US store - The Chrome browser, for lots of online reading in French I've set the language to French permanently, and configured the keyboard to enable both English (US) and French (Canada). This allows me to change languages by holding my finger on the spacebar for a second and choosing the keyboard I want from the popup list. The Canadian keyboard is awesome, because it's a French QWERTY keyboard, and not the strange AZERTY layout used in France. I also use speech recognition in both English and French, and I type by gliding my finger from one letter of the word to the next, which is available in the latest Android versions. Overall, I may not use a lot of apps, but I'm extremely happy with Android as a language learning platform. I just wish it didn't take roughly a second to switch keyboard languages. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| nicozerpa Triglot Senior Member Argentina Joined 4327 days ago 182 posts - 315 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Portuguese, English Studies: Italian, German | Message 3 of 11 02 May 2013 at 6:54pm | IP Logged |
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Since Google Translate app now allows offline translating, it is a quite useful tool for
me, specially because mobile Internet (3G/4G, etc) is quite bad in my country. For example I can read PDF texts in my target language on the bus and check the app if I find a word that I don't know the meaning. In some devices, there is a Japanese keyboard in which you draw the characters instead of typing them using romaji. That's very useful to practise stroke order, for example. As I'm learning Italian, I've installed the RAI and RSI apps to get access to audio and video resources. (RAI is the Italian public broadcaster, while RSI is an Italian-language Radio and TV network from Switzerland) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 11 02 May 2013 at 7:19pm | IP Logged |
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I use Google Japanese Input, JED (a Japanese dictionary) and the kanji draw quiz mode of Obenkyo for Japanese, and Pleco for Mandarin.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| osoymar Tetraglot Pro Member United States Joined 4737 days ago 190 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English*, German, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Spanish, French Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 11 02 May 2013 at 8:56pm | IP Logged |
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Audible has a very nice audiobook app. You can't buy audiobooks from foreign audible
stores through the app, but you can buy them over the web, download them to your computer, then transfer via usb and listen using the app. If only the kindle store were so easy. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4848 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 6 of 11 03 May 2013 at 12:21am | IP Logged |
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What I use on my Android Walkman music player (like a smartphone, but without the phone):
- Google Translate (offline function now makes this my most used "dictionary") - Podcast Addict - QuickDic - Aedict (Japanese Dictionary) - Kanji Recognizer (draw any kanji you see and look up the meaning) - Google Keep (a notepad app where I can jot down words I come across, diary ideas, etc., and I can access them online at drive.google.com/keep) - Adobe Reader (for my DLI pdfs and bilingual texts) - Pocket (use with a Firefox addon on your PC, and you can save web pages and read them later on your Android) What I am really excited about now is an app I found yesterday: AB Repeat Player. You use it to play your foreign language audio, and you can set a point A and point B within the audio, and the player will play that portion of the audio in a loop over and over. The best part is that you can set a silent interval of a number of seconds between repeats. This is great for listen-and-repeat. It will play the sentence(s), then pause while you repeat the sentence out loud, then play it again, etc. Awesomeness on toast! EDIT: Forgot to add that with AB Repeat Player, you can make playlists as well. You can even use it as your main music player, although I prefer the standard Walkman app because of the equalizer. 2ND EDIT: All the apps mentioned above are free. Edited by kujichagulia on 03 May 2013 at 12:24am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Majka Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic kofoholici.wordpress Joined 4658 days ago 307 posts - 755 votes Speaks: Czech*, German, English Studies: French Studies: Russian | Message 7 of 11 03 May 2013 at 2:11pm | IP Logged |
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In addition to some above mentioned, here is what's on my phone. My tablet has most of it, but sometimes I am using different app on the phone and different one on the tablet.
Reader for PDFs - the best one is the free Ebookdroid - its ability to auto-crop pages, split pages (2pages spread in single pages) and perfect work with "picture" pdfs are a step above what the alternatives have. (Good on phone, better yet on tablet) It doesn't have "reflow" for pdfs, but there is another solution - ePUBator can convert pdfs into epubs. The output is very strongly dependent on the pdf layout - it cannot crop out headers or footers. Alternative I am using is pdftotext (under Linux or Cygwin, in my case) to get the text and convert it to epub manually. Text-to-speech: Ivona, currently free beta. If you are lucky enough that "your" languages are covered, it is the best I have found. FBReader TTS+ Plugin - is able to automatically choose languages depending on the ebook language. Voice Reading App - similar to the above mentioned TTS+ Plugin, but you can send many types of text to it. Switching languages is very easy. Audiobooks - Librivox downloader Keyboard - Hacker's keyboard Dictionaries: for my own - Fora (tried Goldendict and similar, stuck with Fora) Livio's offline conversions of Wiktionaries Browser - UC Browser and UC Browser Mini Some useful apps: Send to Dictionary, Send to SD card, Doc Converter, Txt2ePUB, ZArchiver Edit: corrected missing words ... Edited by Majka on 03 May 2013 at 5:11pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| pingvin10 Groupie Hungary Joined 6279 days ago 68 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Hungarian* Studies: English, German, Spanish, Turkish | Message 8 of 11 03 May 2013 at 2:41pm | IP Logged |
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Fantastic topic, Julie!
My favourites are already mentioned except these: JA Sensei: for Japanese learning, one of the best related apps out there. AnyMemo: an alternative to AnkiDroid and my favourite SRS app. Edited by pingvin10 on 03 May 2013 at 2:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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