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IPhone/iPad apps for language learners | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| Asiafeverr Diglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6340 days ago 346 posts - 431 votes  1 sounds Speaks: French*, English Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, German | Message 1 of 50 26 May 2010 at 5:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Since the devices are quite popular and have a lot of apps available, I thought it
would be a great idea to create a thread about them. If you found any great app, please share your feedback with the rest of us. Here are my favorite language learning apps so far: iFlipr: SRS flashcards program that already has a vast library of user generated cards. I have tried many different flashcards applications and this is my favorite one so far. It is an iPhone app and costs $2.99. Pleco: The best Chinese learning app I found so far. It includes many dictionaries, a flashcard application that also lets you write the characters, a web browser that translates and saves words, a talking dictionary that actually says complete words instead of syllables and some other functions. It will cost between $0 and $99.99 depending on what version you get but it is the most complete app so far, it is far better than any physical electronic dictionary. The app includes an iPhone version and an iPad version. eStroke: A decent dictionary that also shows how to write each character in the proper order. The great thing about it is that it shows how actual handwriting should look like instead of computer fonts. The app also features Cantonese pronunciations of each characters, something that I haven't seen in other apps. The iPhone version is $6.99 and the iPad version is $8.99 nciku: Offline version of the nciku dictionary. Great because it contains a lot of sample sentences but the search engines sometimes has difficulties finding words. Still a great iPhone app (I bought it for $2.99 but since then they increased the price to $4.99). MyWords/WordPpower: Complete rubbish, a total waste of money. The translations are full of mistakes and the company hasn't updated it in 2 years. They do not listen to users feedback and outsource the translations since they cannot speak the languages they claim to teach. Both apps also have exactly the same content so I felt cheated twice. Edited by Asiafeverr on 26 May 2010 at 5:50pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5591 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 2 of 50 26 May 2010 at 6:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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wunder radio: listen to your target language anywhere you go. excellent app
youtube: watch video content in your target language. tippy tops translator (web app - so google it): mainly for romance languages with chinese (i think). One of the best hassle free translators ive seen for the iphone. skype: chat with natives on your phone. Also has text chat capabilities. Online newspapers: I won't be too specific but many countries leading papers have apps for the iphone. I've been using gazetta dello sport and it is great. collins dictionaries: Mine is Italian-english nd its very good. You can conjugate verbs, theres a dicionary and the design and content is good. lonely planet/last minute.com phrasebooks: for beginners and has some mistakes but could be useful for the casual learner/beginner. There are so many others but I have tried not to be language specific and of course a lot of apps are language specific. A final few include anki and byki. Flash card apps for the iphone. Also, I believe there is a sample michel thomas free app on the app store now which seems to have intregated flashcard-esque capabilities and some other undesirables into its app. There, I hope that helps Tom 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5694 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 3 of 50 26 May 2010 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A native Anki client for iPhone/iTouch was submitted by the author a couple days ago. I
can't wait until it's approved! I second the Pleco recommendation too, as it has served me well. However, I will say that it was much nicer using it with a full keyboard on my old palm centro than my iPod's virtual keyboard. Finally there are a bunch of free/cheap dictionaries in various languages that are always nice, for want of not lugging around heavy books everywhere. What I will not recommend is the bevy of so-called foreign language learning apps, that translated a couple touristy phrases for hundreds of languages in batches, and want you to actually pay money for it. An example of which was recently advertised here (and thankfully promptly deleted). Edit: I wanted to add, that the Deutsche Welle app is also quite useful, streaming news both textual, video, and audio in many languages. Edited by egill on 26 May 2010 at 11:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| TheGBiBanana Newbie United States Joined 5306 days ago 16 posts - 16 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Arabic (classical), Arabic (Iraqi), Arabic (Written) | Message 4 of 50 27 May 2010 at 5:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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If you are studying Arabic, do yourself a favor and download the free Al-Jazeera Arabic app. It streams in excellent quality when connected to Wi-Fi or when you have strong 3G signal. Very nice to have when you want some form of immersion to compliment your studying and practice.
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| Asiafeverr Diglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6340 days ago 346 posts - 431 votes 1 sounds Speaks: French*, English Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, German | Message 5 of 50 27 May 2010 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Here are some TV stations and video streaming websites from various countries that also
have free apps: China: YouKu, 凤凰网, CCTV, Sina, RumTel (this one lets you stream a lot of different Chinese channels) USA: TED, ABC, NPR UK: BBC 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Risch Groupie United States Joined 5587 days ago 49 posts - 71 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 50 29 May 2010 at 5:07am | IP Logged | |||||
Looks like it was approved. Although I haven't downloaded it yet because it costs $25 USD. It might be worth it if it worked as smoothly as the desktop app, but it sounds like it still needs some work. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6468 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 7 of 50 29 May 2010 at 10:26am | IP Logged | |||||
I got the iPhone app (AnkiSRS) yesterday, and I won't review my cards any other way. It works very smoothly, and synching is much easier than with iAnki. However, it's not stand-alone, you still have to add or edit your cards using Anki Online or a desktop client. This will be fixed in the next version. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Asiafeverr Diglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6340 days ago 346 posts - 431 votes 1 sounds Speaks: French*, English Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, German | Message 8 of 50 29 May 2010 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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WOW! Looks like I have a new favorite SRS app :)
1 person has voted this message useful |
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