11 messages over 2 pages: 1 2
Jeffers
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4914 days ago
2151 posts - 3960 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German
| Message 9 of 11 06 May 2013 at 12:21pm | IP Logged |
I quite like the Babbel app for Android. I wrote a review of it in another thread, which I will
reproduce here (with some edits):
Jeffers wrote:
The Babbel app for android is free (I have no idea about iPad), and it is pretty good.
The app differs from the online version in that it is entirely based around vocabulary
learning, but it also practices this using sentences.
Here are some pros and cons of the android app:
The pros:
*It uses multiple methods of testing the vocabulary: type the answer, multiple choice, sound, picture
recognition, fill in the blank, etc. (Incidentally, it reminds me a lot of BYKI.)
*It uses SRS, which they call the "Intelligent Review Manager".
*The first thing that happens when you get a new word is it shows a picture & the English word, and
speaks the TL word. Your task is to speak the word exactly as you hear it. (Unfortunately, it is too
strict, and so this is also one of the cons).
*There are a load of categories from "First words and sentences" to "Holidays", "culture", "Lifestyle",
"Environment", etc. Each category has from 6 to 16 lessons of about 10 words each. Some lesson appear
in more than one category. You download the sublessons as you want them.
*They claim to cover 3000 words, all with pictures, sound and example sentences. (Some languages have
less, e.g. Indonesian has 2000 words).
*Works well offline.
*There is no hardsell to join Babbel.com (there is a single link on the homepage).
*They have 11 languages, including some lesser supported languages (Spanish, French,
German, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Indonesian, English). I have only tried
the French version.
The cons:
*Fixed vocabulary. You have their words and that's it.
*The speech recognition is quite picky. And if the speaker makes an extra noise at the end (not
uncommon), you have to make that noise. However, it is quite simple to turn off the microphone
function if you want. Then you just listen to the word at that stage without having to repeat it.
*It doesn't teach grammar. Although there are example sentences for the fill in the blank cards, you
just click on the dictionary form of the word. However, the app is a vocabulary trainer, not a grammar
trainer.
*When reviewing vocabulary, you only get the type the word mode.
*It is slightly difficult to use a single app with multiple users. You have to log out, and log on as
the different user. So that isn't very child friendly.
So there you go. I think that it is quite a good vocabulary trainer, and it is completely free. If
you want a good SRS trainer, and don't have time to set up Anki for yourself, this is a simpler option.
You do have to set up a babbel.com account to use the app. I remember it being fairly painless,
without much hardsell.
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1 person has voted this message useful
| lorinth
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Belgium
Joined 4279 days ago
443 posts - 581 votes
Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin
Studies: Mandarin, Finnish
| Message 10 of 11 06 May 2013 at 3:51pm | IP Logged |
Apart from the excellent above-mentioned suggestions, I would also recommend:
- ACV for viewing comics
- ASC for listening to audiofile with looping
- Go keyboard, which I use to switch input between FR, EN, ES and ZH (pinyin and
handwriting)
And then, of course there are lots of language-specific apps.
For Chinese, someone recommended Pleco, which is the only piece of software you'll ever
need to help you learn that language, thanks to its dictionaries, reader, flashcards,
OCR, input method, all perfectly integrated.
HanPing pro is also very good for Chinese.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Medulin
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Croatia
Joined 4673 days ago
1199 posts - 2192 votes
Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali
| Message 11 of 11 06 May 2013 at 7:01pm | IP Logged |
I bought these dictionaries
(all of them are offline dic.):
Aurélio (L1 portuguese)
Michaëlis Melhoramentos (a pack of L1 Portuguese with an additional Portuguese-English)
Oxford Spanish (the largest one, I already have it in the book format, and as CD rom)
Collins English-Norwegian (it's only Bokmaal, and only EN-NO)
Hanping Pro (Mandarin)
ABBYY Lingvo (I got the application and Collins Spanish and Universal Spanish Dic,
and Collins Italian and Universal Italian, and a Spanish-Russian dictionary).
Free stuf:
Pleco (for Mandarin)
Quickdic (it installs all wiktionaries for your offline use)
Colordict
Edited by Medulin on 06 May 2013 at 7:18pm
1 person has voted this message useful
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