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Language Learning Apps | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4889 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 1 of 16 12 December 2014 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'd like to make a master list of language learning programs for mobile devices. If you have any to share, let me know and I'll add them to this front post.
Note: The list focuses on applications, but includes some on-line courses that work well on mobile devises. ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------ Stand-alone applications Headstart2 Headstart2 consists of two units containing ten modules each. Unit One (Sound and Script) teaches the basics of the target language in twenty interactive tasks. Unit Two (Military) consists of a total of fifty mission-specific tasks. These tasks are designed according to military training format and include scenarios covering public safety, medical situations, basic command, cordon and search, and even gathering intelligence. Interface: English Languages: Farsi, Dari, Pashto, French, Swahili, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Levantine Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Hausa, Somali, Cebuano, Kurmanji Kurdish, Baluchi, Punjabi, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tausug Cost: free Note: Associated with free on-line courses. Full courses require flash. Living Language Our online courses are effective, flexible and affordable, featuring exclusive interactive content, including games and quizzes to help reinforce the language. Interface: English Languages: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish Cost: $9.99 Anki Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it's a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn. Interface and languages: User generated Cost: $24.99 Note: Requires desktop program to manage decks Teach Yourself Introducing the first complete language course delivered in an app. Interface: English Languages: French, Spanish, German, Italian Cost: $12.99 ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------ Websites that work on mobile devices Lingvist Lingvist is the next-generation language-learning tool that helps you learn faster and more effectively. Interface: English, Estonian Languages: French (beta) In development: Spanish, Japanese, German, Italian, Russian, Swedish Cost: free (for now!) HTLAL connection: tiinah HTLAL discussion: New online learning programme (2014) Readlang Reading in a foreign language made easy. Languages: Supports 51 languages Cost: free; premium service $24 / year HTLAL connection: SteveRidout HTLAL Discussion: Readlang, my language reading site (2013) ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------ Applications that require an internet connection Duolingo The best new way to learn a language. Learning with Duolingo is fun and addictive. Earn points for correct answers, race against the clock, and level up. Interface: English, French, Spanish (more in development) Languages: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese Beta: Dutch, Irish, Danish, Swedish Incubating: Turkish (21 Dec 14), Hungarian (14 Jan 15), Esperanto (16 Mar 15), Russian (28 Oct 15), Ukranian (4 Nov 15), Romanian (2 July 21), Polish (25 Sept 21) Cost: Free HTLAL discussion: DuoLingo (2014) Memrise The Memrise community uses images and science to make learning easy and fun. Learn a language. Learn anything. Top languages: Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Chinese Cost: Free Skritter The write way to learn Chinese and Japanese. Interface: English Languages: Chinese, Japanese Cost: $14.99 / month Lingualia Lingualia uses artificial intelligence to adapt the course to your needs, increasing your motivation and helping you to progress much faster. Interface: Spanish, English. Possibly German (unclear) Languages: Spanish, English Cost: Free; Premium unclear ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------ Not sure yet how to categorize these Language Transfer The mind of any ordinary person is capable of amazing feats when we are stimulated to think instead of memorise. The Thinking Method takes us on a fascinating voyage through our languages, increasing our linguistic consciousness and stimulating us to think about the fascinating phenomenon of language in a new way. Interface: English, Spanish (limited) Languages: Greek, Spanish, Intro to Arabic Coming soon: Intro to Turkish (winter 2014/15), Intro to German (summer 2015) cost: free Pangaea Learning LLC Interface: English Languages: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Hebrew, Arabic Sample courses: Learn Spanish. Conjugation Trainer. Yiddish Slang. Sexy French. Cost: $9.99 for a "passport" Babbel Babbel offers thousands of hours of interactive courses that are fun and effective. Put your new language in context and stay actively engaged with relevant scenarios – from travel to work to hobbies to social situations. Interface: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish Languages: Spanish, English, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, Dutch, Polish, Indonesian, Norwegian, Danish, Russian Cost: Subscription; from $12.95 / month to $83.40 / year Busuu Our award-winning courses are designed by qualified language experts Interface: English, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Polish Languages: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Polish Cost: €15 / month to €70 / year Rosetta Stone Extend your learning nearly everywhere you go. Rosetta Stone® mobile applications for language learning, brain fitness and kids’ reading make learning experiences flexible and convenient. So you’ll find it easy to add them to your everyday life. Interface: English Languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dari, Tagalog, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Pashto, Farsi, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese Cost: $499. (2014 Christmas sale: $199) HTLAL connection: Occasional employees drop by and leave "reviews" without identifying themselves Fluenz Get inspired. Be fluent. Interface: English Languages: Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Mandarin Cost: $368 for full course, or $177 for one level LanguagePod101 LanguagePod101.com is the fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn a language at your own convenient pace. Interface: English Languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese Cost: $9.99 / month mobile, $24.99 / month premium Warning: Be prepared to get spammed if you sign-up for the free trial version Edited by kanewai on 17 December 2014 at 2:24am 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4889 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 2 of 16 13 December 2014 at 12:49am | IP Logged | ||
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and now for my editorial comments:
Lingvist is the one to watch - it really does feel like a 'next-generation' program. It's the closest of all the ones I've seen to being an actual language learning program. It was developed by a team in Estonia. Audio is very good to excellent. DuoLingo (Italian and French) is the one I've used the most. I enjoy it for light studying and consolidating. However - and this is a huge negative for me - if you put it aside for a couple weeks you end up needing to start from the beginning. You can test out of levels in theory. This is really frustrating, and it stops being fun or useful. Audio is average. Despite this, I still plan on downloading Turkish when it comes out. Babbel (Turkish) DuoLingo is more fun, but Babbel does better at presenting grammar and vocabulary. The price is good if you use it regularly, but a month or two was enough for me. Audio is good. I might use it in the future for Russian. It depends on what other resources I find. Living Language (Italian, Japanese) has games like you see in high school language books: word search, fill in the blank, pop the bubble, etc. It's a nice diversion, but I wouldn't use it for regular study. It's worth the $10. Audio is good. Headstart2 (Kurmanji) is a massive 500 mb file, per language. I figured it must be loaded with goodies. There are animations of square-jawed soldiers speaking each of the 750 phrases, both at a normal and a slow pace. Audio is excellent. I didn't see any grammar lessons - I think you need to do the online course for those. Basically, the US military has created the world's most high-tech phrasebook. Next time they should just contract out to Estonia. It also provides an insight into where the US has troops these days. There are a lot of Arabic dialects, smaller languages from the Philippines, and south and central Asian languages. I haven't figured out how to use Memrise effectively. I found a very good module on learning Cyrillic, but other modules were just lists of words, or links to YouTube videos. Word Reference is the most awesome on-line dictionary, and every HTLAL member should have it installed! Edited by kanewai on 13 December 2014 at 12:58am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5865 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 3 of 16 13 December 2014 at 3:58am | IP Logged | ||
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I found Duolingo pretty painful to use on a mobile device. I think the website is great, though.
Also, does lingvist.io have a mobile app? Can you point me to a link? I know they've mentioned wanting to develop an app but i didn't think they'd pop it out so quickly... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4889 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 4 of 16 13 December 2014 at 8:45am | IP Logged | ||
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I made a mistake - I thought Lingvist had an app, but I had actually just saved the online site to my home
screen. I'll edit the post on Monday. I also want to add info on Pod101 once I get a better sense of it (I signed up for the free seven day trial) Edit: it looks like I have a lot of editing to do. It turns out a couple more need an Internet connection to run. I think I'll split it up into stand-alone apps, apps that need an Internet connection, and mobile versions of websites. Note to self: add verb trainers, teach yourself, scritter to the list Edited by kanewai on 14 December 2014 at 3:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5009 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 5 of 16 13 December 2014 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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There have already been a few threads about the apps. Just a few notes of things I
remember having found noteworthy and some things to avoid. Everything on this list are apps I personally tried, at least the free demoes, not just copies of official marketing info by publishers. Nice: Anki -24 euros, if I remember correctly, but it runs and synchronizes with your desktop anki smoothly Memrise -free, not that good so far but with huge potential as the memrise team is focusing on it Scritter -expensive, app together with the desktop version. awesome idea, as soon as i have time to learn japanese or mandarin, i'm gonna use it many awesome dictionaries, for exemple those by iThinkdiff and movin'App are of good quality and they are for free verb trainers, free and paid. not that expensive and awesome is for exemple bordas-conjugaison. Basically a referene you can easily carry with you and easily search in, unfortunatelly not connected to srs practice (that is just a wild dream of mine) free book sources (mostly old books but some newer as well: Project Gutenberg -many of us know it, the app could be a little bit better but is still being improved and the awesome content is there Free Books -I like it even better than PG, there are books in several languages and it is a part of their content they are working on radio/tv apps France TV Pro, YES.fm (spanish radios), German TV, Tunein Radio (absolutely awesome! you can even choose a radio station based on language, including even Danish, Gaelic, Cantonese, Pashto,...you get the idea) Teach Yourself: Finally a publisher who has an idea about how to transfer their courses into apps. Paid but for quite reasonable price, looks like the same content as the paper version, well made. I think it was about 15 euros. But so far, they've got only two or three languages available. AVOID: Living language app: bad quality, I believe filling a foreign word in an English sentence can even harm the learning process. the exercises are obviously not meant to be primarily useful but primarily well marketable lots of flashcard apps, especially those with anksomething name -they do not have the srs functions usually but they are paid. I'm not saying all flashcards apart from anki are bad, no. But there are people who want to milk the good name of someone else's product Many course publisher's apps: -rather than just avoid: check first the quality. Some publishers are trying to sell just scans of their courses for quite a high price, considering the app is purely passive, you cannot write in the exercises, you don't have audio comfortable added etc. So, use all the demo versions you can before you pay, if I may be so bold to recommend. Kanewai, I am looking forward to your review of the pod101 as I consider using it. Edited by Cavesa on 13 December 2014 at 4:51pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4665 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 6 of 16 13 December 2014 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | ||
If you've signed up for the free trial, you'll know all about the spam :-) What you won't know is that it doesn't lessen much even if you pay for the premium service. It is easy enough to filter out though. I've only ever used JapanesePOD101.com and I have to say that it is the most extensive source of graded audio lesson + TL dialogue + text + translation that I've seen anywhere. So I don't mind the spam. I did have to edit out 120 seconds of "advert" in one of the Upper Intermediate lessons. but it was the only lesson out of the 25 in that season that I had to touch. From what I've seen of the Italian and French versions, they're quite comprehensive but not so rich as the Japanese site. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5865 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 7 of 16 14 December 2014 at 3:38am | IP Logged | ||
Also, the Skritter app is much better now than a few months ago. You can also continue your reviews offline and sync them to your account the next time you get back online which is really cool. And for students of Mandarin, there's Pleco, a super dictionary which can use your phone's camera to OCR Chinese characters and also comes with a powerful and very flexible built-in SRS system. It can also be used to read txt documents with a pop-up dictionary and a lot more. Lastly there's GoldenDict which basically turns your phone into the world's most comprehensive dictionary. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4889 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 8 of 16 15 December 2014 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I made some additions, and broke the list up into applications / mobile sites / applications that need an internet connection.
I'm still not sure how to categorize some of them. Any feedback is welcome. I gave Pod101 a shot with Russian (a language I've never studied), and found it incredibly frustrating. After about five minutes of trying to figure out how to use it I gave up. I was able to get Russian music to play, and there were some sound files with speakers speaking really fast. The dialogues required a pdf download, which ... to me .. defeats the whole purpose of "online" learning. Once I get a more complete list I think I'll open a poll to see which ones are recommended and which ones should be avoided. Edited by kanewai on 15 December 2014 at 11:45pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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