HelloTalk is a language partner app that I recently tried out for Russian, Romanian and Ukrainian (there are more than 100 languages to select from). The app comes as freeware and also as a premium version priced at €0.99/month or €8.99/year. The premium version offers, amongst other features, unlimited translation, transliteration, transcription, chat history and …
Busuu has an intriguing name being the name of a near-extinct language in Cameroon. Busuu, the company, on the other hand is world’s largest social network for language learning – the polar opposite in terms of daily users to its namesake. Busuu offers its courses as a smartphone app and as a web based desktop …
Memrise’s website carries the slogan “We make learning languages and vocab so full of joy and life, you’ll laugh out loud.”. Certainly a different claim to other learning software. Memrise does not just focus on helping learners with languages but has over 300,000 courses. Memrise offers its courses as a smartphone app and as a …
Duolingo’s website carries the claim that, according to an independent study, an average of 34 hours of Duolingo are equivalent to a full university semester of language education. Since a one semester university course usually takes more than 34 hours of work, this suggests that Duolingo is more effective than an average university language course. …
Assimil consists of a pocket sized book and 4 audio CDs and promises an intuitive method. I bought it for Romanian and read through a few chapters each day as each chapter is quite short. The book is based on a series of short bilingual dialogues. I bought the French version as there was no …
Rosetta Stone claims that its language learning product will create an immersion method allowing you to learn a new language effectively. On their website, they say that the sequencing of new information allows you to arrive at the right answers intuitively. So how effective did I find Rosetta Stone to be? The Method In …
Michel Thomas claimed that there was no such thing as a bad student, only a bad teacher. I discovered the Michel Thomas beginners courses at the time I became interested in learning Italian. I had just spent two fabulous weeks travelling around ‘Il Bel Paese’ when browsing through the language learning section of my local …
