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5 apps to help you learn a new language

February 26, 2018
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Whether you want to learn German, Russian, French, English, Spanish, or all of them, there is an app for that! There are a plethora of language apps that can help you learn a new language at your own pace. Best of all the apps that are on this list are all free to use!

Duolingo

Any person that is trying to learn a new language has tried a variety of different apps. Out of them all chances are they have tried this one. The main reason why is if you try to describe other learning apps to people you’ll more than likely get this question:

“Is it like Duolingo?”

Every list talking about language apps mentions this app and for good reason. With over 100 million users on this app, this app has become the staple for learning a new language. As for the app itself, it adds a combination of learning but also gaming making it highly addictive. Furthermore, the app encourages native speakers to contribute courses and lessons to the app making it very community driven.

Hello Talk

As much as Duolingo is helpful, one other common barrier that people face is practising the language in person. This is where Hello Talk comes in and shines. There are no games behind it, however, this can help people overcome the stress of having real-time conversations with people in different languages. Here you can talk to native speakers in a sort of WhatsApp-like chat message.

What’s also handy is users can correct one another’s messages giving you a sort of mini tutoring session.

Mindsnacks

Mindsnacks is similar to Duolingo, but also on a whole other level. It takes the gaming aspect and runs with it, however, it is limited in the languages it offers. You have access to only seven languages, however, through those languages, the app provides either or nine tiny games for you. These games are meant to help you out with grammar, vocabulary and your listening skills. The lessons are all short and simple but the app monitors your progress as well as your score too. From there you can tell whether you have fully mastered a certain skill and how close you are to finishing all the lessons.

Even when you have mastered them all, it is still nice to go back through and practice.

Busuu

Busuu is another app with a small language pool. It’s got 12 languages, however, these are full-fledged courses. This particular app is a Freemium app meaning that it is free to use, but a lot more is opened up to you if you invest $17 a month for the app.

The app is run much like a language course. There are simple dialogue and questions which include audio portions. They’re also topically themed so the skills that the course wants you to focus on is associated with the tasks given.

Babbel

A paid version of Duolingo, however, comes with the more free material than Busuu. There are 40 classes given to you through the free version, but by investing some money into it, you can get access to a fair amount of phrases through the 13 languages Babbel teaches.

Much like Duolingo, the classes start by giving you word and picture association. From there, the words are then used in relation to the phrases to create short dialogues. Those are also adjusted based on your skill level which is nice as you can quickly build conversation skills through the app.