Learn a language online: How to do it
Duolingo isn’t the only mode to study languages on your phone. The grade of any product will often change by the language you’re using for.
People have employed many of these services for multiple, but the best way to figure out if an app will work for you is to try it out yourself.
However, if you speak another language fluently, ensure you’re looking into additional options for speakers of that language.
In addition to these resources, you should ensure you’re looking into resources specific to your chosen language. Again, Reddit can be an excellent place to find these — many lingoes have specific subreddits where students can share what they’ve been operating.
PIMSLEUR
Pimsleur is an almost entirely audio-based course. Every day, you recreate through a 30-minute audio track. The track sets you in different roles — a tourist requesting directions, a customer ordering a beer at a cafe, a shopper haggling over a cost, a worker planning a lunch with a colleague — and has you play that role in a phony conversation. Your imaginary conversation partner speaks to you in the target vocabulary, you’ll respond in that language, and then a native orator will say the correct response, which you’ll sometimes repeat. The narrator will sprinkle new words and phrases for you to learn every so often, which you’ll also recite several times. As you learn more terms, the simulated conversations gradually grow more advanced.
Pimsleur is a practical option if you’re endeavoring to learn survival phrases for an upcoming journey. The first phrases Pimsleur guides you are common tourist phrases. However, it also leads you to a lot of words very quickly.
Pimsleur has a significant hole, though — reading and writing. The app has some supplemental reading exercises, but they’re pretty bare-bones. The Korean course also employs romanizations in some of its games, rather than Hangul, while pretty much any other Korean resource brings you away from romanizations as fast as possible. While this is a Korean-specific issue, it emphasizes that even Pimsleur’s written resources concentrate more on speaking than reading and writing. Pimsleur’s natural resilience is an audio tool — if you’d like to understand reading and writing, you should augment it with something else.
ROSETTA STONE
The best thing about Rosetta Stone is that it doesn’t use any English. Instead, it offers you pictures, relates them to your target language, and then keeps you practicing doing the same, thinning out the translation middleman. The course integrates speaking, writing, listening comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary. The elements have their separate lessons, and there are also cumulative lessons that include all of them. The classes vary in length — some take less than five minutes, while others can be close to the 30-minute mark.
DUOLINGO
Duolingo supports basic grammar and vocabulary through bite-sized lessons with a fun and colorful interface. You’ll know or practice a few words per lesson, read them, note them, and say them.
Duolingo used to be one of the favorite resources, but it recently put its review functionality behind the paywall, making the free version much less helpful. Earlier, you could do new tasks each day and also go back and review old studies. Unfortunately, you can’t do this with the latest version — a class is locked when you finish it. In addition, the review exercises are locked in a separate “Practice Hub” page, which you can’t access without a paid subscription. As a result, the free Duolingo now feels less like a comprehensive course than it does as a quick way to dip your toes into a language every day.
Duolingo’s usefulness varies highly by language. You are recommended to read reviews, check out your language’s subreddit, or speak to other learners you know to discover whether it’s a good choice for your target tongue — particularly if you’re contemplating paying for it.
ZOOM CLASSES
Zoom classes can be a fantastic way to learn a language online, particularly as a newbie. Many language learners will notify you that conversing with native speakers is essential to understanding your target language. But as a novice, that can be an extremely intimidating prospect — you may understandably be scared to enter a conversation with a native speaker where you may drive all kinds of errors and seem silly.
They show you an environment where you can speak with a fluent speaker, and being riddled with mistakes isn’t only acceptable but expected. So the practice is precious. Conversing with a teacher in a classroom imitates some of the pressure of a real-world crisis but lets you make mistakes with no effect. It also gives you many chances to practice asking real people questions like “Hello, what’s your name?” many times without looking weird.
HELLOTALK
A menu balances above one selected message, including chances for Translate, AI Grammar, Reply, Copy, Correction, Speak, Transliteration, Favorite, and More. Names and pictures have been blurred. HelloTalk isn’t primarily a study tool but is excellent for language learning. It’s an app that pairs up people discovering each other’s native languages and allows them to chat. So it would pair an English speaker who understands Korean with a Korean speaker who knows English.
The chat interface includes some valuable tools. In particular, the Correction feature lets you easily red-pen each other’s messages in real-time. There’s also a tool that will enable you to decode a message to your language with a single click, though you can only do this a few times a day with the free rendition. It will even transcribe voice messages, and it’s pretty accurate. You won’t want to use HelloTalk immediately - it’s most advantageous when you’re sure you can get through a basic preliminary conversation without confusing or offending anyone. Ensure you’re prepared to help your partners with English as well — it’s a two-way street.
QUIZLET
Quizlet isn’t a language practice, but it’s the best app you will find for learning flashcards. Specifically, if you require to brute-force yourself into understanding a ton of vocab in a short period, Quizlet is the one to use. In addition, it offers various ways to learn and rehearse the decks you create — there’s a “Learn” mode that toils you through your set a few words at a time, there’s a manner where you practice dictation, and there are some fun rounds where you can contest with other users, etc.
The primary downside is that Quizlet doesn’t have a review component like other flashcard services. You can review your sets whenever you want, but it’s not built into Quizlet’s infrastructure — the app won’t drive you to do it or even enable you to. That will be acceptable for students who need to study for different classes each semester but more of a problem for folks trying to learn and retain a language over time.
Quizlet recently put many features behind a paywall, making its free version much less helpful. For example, free users now only get four “rounds” of seven study questions for each set before they’re told they need to upgrade to get more. It isn’t tenable for people studying groups of 40-50 terms.
MEMRISE
This app is excellent. It’s very vocabulary-focused, offering both curated decks and user-created decks. You slowly work through whatever deck you choose, studying various words in various ways each day. You may transcribe or translate an audio or video clip, listen to a recorded conversation and answer questions about it, repeat a phrase after a native speaker and have your pronunciation evaluated, or simply flashcard through vocab with a mix of old and new terms each session. Many of these exercises aren’t available in the free version, and they make the paid version worth paying for if Memrise is going to be your primary thing — the free version feels pretty limited.
The app prompts you to revisit a certain number of words or phrases from previous decks with formats of your choice: quick multiple-choice, pronunciation, dictation, writing and spelling, etc. You can also choose to mix things. Words you get wrong are added to a “Difficult Words” list that you can work on separately afterward.