Tag: app

A screenshot of Lingvist in use, demonstrating its lovely, clean interface.

I Befriended a Lingvist (and It Was About Time) [Review]

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I gave Lingvist a whirl this week, a sentence-based language learning app from Estonia that had mysteriously passed way under my radar until now. The verdict: Lingvist, I’m glad I finally found you!

It’s a bit of a match made in Heaven, to be honest, given my love of mass sentence techniques. This app uses in-context, useful sentences to illustrate all of its vocabulary items, drawing on a massive library of items for each language. The sheer size of its libraries should keep even the most avid learners busy for a while, and it’s available in an impressive number of languages:, including Estonian (as you’d expect!), Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish and Swedish, as well as the other ‘biggies’.

It boasts a very smart, clean app design, using an eminently readable font (always an easy thing to overlook in a language app). It has a sensible, just-forgiving-enough approach to mistakes, particularly with accents. And – most impressively – it has the most user-friendly automatic voice input mode I’ve come across in such an app. Even more impressively, it allows Japanese input in all three writing systems.

A screenshot of Lingvist in use, demonstrating its lovely, clean interface.

In use, the app has an excellent approach to exposition and testing. Items, new and old, appear as gap-fill challenges as you perform sentence repetitions. That makes for an engaging routine, even when words you already know pop up – it’s not just learning, it’s practice. As such, it’s the perfect tool if you already know some of the language, but want to start filling in the gaps.

Not a Newbie? Not a Problem!

Talking of non-beginners, Lingvist also features a great placement test mode. For a start, it’s not overlong. Isn’t it always a bit soul-sapping when a new app makes you churn through a 10-minute test off the bat? Lingvist’s snappy check pretty accurately chooses a spot to skip you to very quickly.

To check it out, I performed the test in my strongest foreign language, German. It airlifted me about 85% of the way to the end of its mammoth list. And, proving there’s always something more to learn, the sentences were actually complex and interesting enough to challenge me. That bodes well for forging ahead it with it in my more nascent languages – you can reach a very decent level of language with it.

It tracks that gap-filling with what seems like a quite sophisticated spaced repetition algorithm. Despite that sophisticiation, you have at-a-glance access to all of those stats in a clear, unjargonised format, which  makes the spaced rep process understandable even if you’re new to it. Again, no wonder I love it, given my constant proselytising of the spaced repetition original, Anki.

Generous Trial Period

The best things, of course, are usually worth paying for. And true enough, Lingvist is a premium app, although its pricing is very competitive compared to the likes of Babbel and others, at just over £5 a month on an annual plan. But what’s striking about Lingvist is how generous the team have been with the free trial (at least on iOS). You get a whopping 14 days to try the software out. That’s significantly more than the usual seven days with most – if you’re lucky enough to get a trial at all.

I’m just puzzled over why it took the algorithms so long to push Lingvist in my path, especially since the App Store says it’s been around since 2016. I hope it’s not been such a hidden, under-the-radar app for others, as it really deserves to be up there amongst the best.

If it’s your first time hearing about it too, check it out!

Describe It! Speaking drill game for fun practice prompts

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I’m always looking new ways to make speaking practice fun. It was BBC’s Just A Minute that inspired me to put this basic drill activity together. From a bank of many random concepts – TV shows, celebrities, countries, landmarks – the program draws one each turn. You then have sixty seconds to describe and discuss it without pausing.

Describe It! Speaking dill game

Describe It! Speaking dill game

It’s perfect for adding into your pre-lesson warm-up routine. And you can tailor it to your own level and needs – simply make your descriptions / spontaneous monologues as simple or complex as you can handle. Try answering these questions about the topics that pop up if you’re stuck for words:

  • What is it?
  • What do you think about it? Do you like it?
  • Who does it involve?
  • What else is it connected to? And is it controversial in any way?

Click here to open the prompt applet in a new window. As an HTML5 widget, it should run across all sorts of platforms.

Help it grow!

I put this together originally for my own use, so some of the concepts might seem a bit UK-centric. However, if you have some good ideas for items to add to the data bank, please share them in the comments or tweet me! I’ll add good ones to the activity on an ongoing basis. I hope others find it useful (and appreciate the silly humour that drives it! 😄).

An owl, much like the Duolingo mascot!

Duolingo: Five reasons it’s a show-stopper for linguists

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I was quite late to the Duolingo party. It might be a wee bit of jealousy, perhaps; as an educational app developer, you look at software like Duolingo and think: wow, that is an educational app. But lately, I’ve bitten the bullet, and have become completely hooked on the green owl (a euphemism everybody should become familiar with).

As one of the most popular apps – let alone educational ones – the web isn’t short of reasons to love it. But here are a few of the very special things that make Duolingo the golden standard for me.

Perfectly paced

The Duolingo environment uses a health system, borrowed from video gaming, to monitor how well you’re performing in a topic. If you start making lots of mistakes, you deplete your health reserves and have to wait until later to continue.

Now, as frustrating as this sounds, it’s a brilliant way to stop language junkies like me from overloading the brain. We all have our limits, and when you enjoy what you’re doing, you can forget where the most efficient place to stop is. The health approach is genius at forcing breaks when learning falls below optimum.

Silly sentences

I’m a huge fan of silly sentences as a memory aid and motivator in language learning. Playing with words in funny ways builds flexibility in a way that learning set phrases doesn’t. And Duolingo embodies the spirit of this to a tee.

No, I hope I will not need to say “cats are not food” if I visit Korea. But having translated that in the app, I’m unlikely to forget the words ‘cats’ and ‘food’, remembered with a silly smile.

Incidentally, a whole Twitter feed has sprung up to celebrate Duolingo’s comedic bent!

Unique content per language

Duolingo avoids a cookie-cutter approach to language learning by providing unique content in each language. Proceeding in exactly the same way in each language might not suit every tongue; instead, each course seems to have been put together from scratch by separate groups of subject experts. It’s quite refreshing to have multiple, bespoke paths available across the (ever-growing) range of languages on offer.

Deductive learning

Duolingo breaks free from the traditional presentation-practice mode of language learning. Sometimes, questions will contain a word or two that you haven’t come across before. As such, it can seem a bit more challenging, like ‘deep end’ learning.

However, rather than frustrating the learner, it encourages a bit of deduction. Can you make an educated guess? Or can you research the mystery word elsewhere? If you’ve had to work to find out the meaning rather than have it handed to you on a plate, it may well be more likely to stick. It highlights the unpredictability of language and the need to experiment and think on your feet – skills that are missing in many more conventional courses.

The Duolingo Universe is growing

Finally, Duolingo wins just on sheer choice. From a few initial language offerings, the app has grown to take in many more, bursting out of the traditional French/German/Spanish bubble. Finding apps for learning Polish – let alone good apps for learning Polish – was tricky in the not-so-distant past. Given the Duolingo treatment, there’s now an excellent solution for learning the basics.

What’s more, the app keeps growing; new languages are being worked on, while existing languages are expanding with new topics. It’s Aladdin’s Cave for a language junkie, and will spark some polyglot roving for inquisitive minds of all ages.

Duolingo has set the bar very high for educational apps in general, and language apps in particular. That certainly keeps educational app developers on their toes. But as a model for digital, self-paced learning, it’s an inspiration for the industry as much as it is a gem for linguaphiles. I’m already looking forward to the next languages to be added!