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Any opinions of Fluencia, Spanish learning site?

Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2015 10:40 pm
by Bjorn
Any opinions / experience about http://www.fluencia.com/ ?

Re: Any opinions of Fluencia, Spanish learning site?

Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2015 12:07 am
by iguanamon
Bjorn, I realize that mobile is the wave of the future, but I am suspicious of flashy, slickly produced graphics. I just clicked on your link and had a cursory look. My first impression when I clicked on "How It Works" was "Rosetta Stone goes mobile", then, I clicked on "Compare Us" and, of course, they use Rosetta Stone (RS) as their basis for comparison, go figure! Flashy graphics and pseudo-friendly computerized encouragement will not get you very far and is not worth the money you will spend. There are far more effective learning methods that are far more cost effective, even free. They won't be flashy but they will work.

My first advice is to have a look at the logs of Spanish learners here and at HTLAL.com. Some starter courses with an English base are duolinguo,com and memrise.com- both are free. More thorough courses are Assimil Spanish (paid, but can be found cheaper at other sites); and US Foreign Service Institute Spanish Basic Course which is a US government public domain course originally designed for diplomats that is highly effective and free. FSI is drill based and this really helps to develop "automaticity". If you complement FSI with a more fun course it can be a great combination. A fun course can be Destinos], which is a free 52 video based series originally broadcast on US Public TV. There are plenty of English base courses, Michael Thomas, Pimsleur, Learning Spanish Like Crazy, etc. Language transfer Spanish (free) has gotten rave reviews on HTLAL and it s free and legal as well. I suggest that you also consider a good Norwegian based course too.

Ultimately pick one or two courses and get started and keep going. You probably learned English at school in Norway and from TV, films and music. When you are learning your first entirely self-learned language it can be difficult at first. The main thing, again, is to get started and keep going- be consistent and persistent.

Everyone here who has learned Spanish has a different method and story for how they learned the language. Mine is here. Good luck!

Re: Any opinions of Fluencia, Spanish learning site?

Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2015 9:46 am
by Bjorn
Thank you for your valuable input and links.
Short wave and morse code to practice language, I'm impressed.

I do like mobile ways of learning, so I think I will test it a bit and think about it.

Thanks again.

Re: Any opinions of Fluencia, Spanish learning site?

Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2015 10:52 am
by Cavesa
There are nice and good quality mobile apps, even though I agree fluencia doesn't look that reliable. Or rather, it might be an average or even good course to let you memorise some things but that is probably all. What I consider suspicious about their presentation is the pure focus on having fun and no mention of real results, such as the level their tool should bring you to. And it compares itself with RS, which means setting the bar low and obviously targetting learners without experience, who are much easier to draw money from without delivering the quality.

Good alternative mobile tools:
anki
memrise (it looks like fluencia is basically something between rs and memrise but i havent tried the demo)
lingua.ly (get internet content based on your vocabulary, save words like in lingq and practice them either in normal flashcard way or while playing the snake)
spanishpod101 (lots of content, quite good quality. I prefered other sources in the end but I'd say this is a good choice for someone prefering the digital tools and learning on the go. Their app is really good, in my opinion)

Hmm, it intrigued me so I registered for fluencia. There seems to be over 500 "lessons" and I can try a few. In order not to lose much time, I chose one pronunciation, one grammar, one conversational.

There are ten levels. Grammar appears to cover a lot of things, which is great, really, I'd say quite anything you need for B1 theoretically, but I don't think you'll trully master it all. Vocabulary seems to cover all the beginner topics but, again, no idea how much vocab there is overall. In the early lessons you can try, there are like ten words per lesson (eight words, 2 phrases). No idea whether the other lessons have more or less content. The pronunciation lesson actually doesn't test much of a pronunciation, even duolingo has some speech recognition, even that RS has got something, fluencia doesn't. Here you get to listen to some words and fill in the gaps in words. The lessons are quite short, which might be nice for mobile learning but it actually makes me wonder how soon are you gonna finish the 500 lessons, how much you are gonna learn and whether you aren't gonna mourn the money spent on a too long subscription. Whether the later lessons are longer, I can't tell.

The good things: audio for everything, slow and beginner friendly. Theoretically lots of content, enough to get you through the beginner stages. Some kind of SRS implementation. Fluencia at least appears to have tried to be good resource, which is already more than most such apps can be proud of.
The bad things, you can get all that elsewhere for much lower price. And I don't think you could trully learn the curriculum content just with fluencia.

Prices: 2 Year-6.95 / month,Yearly-7.95 / month,Monthly-14.95 / month
You don't get to try any of the higher levels for free, you only have the 30 days money back guarantee, which I don't find to be enough. The price would be really good if there was enough content, if the lessons were longer, if you were sure to trully get to B1 (as that seems to be the goal, at least grammarwise). But as just a suplement to other paid resources, I'd say it isn't worth it.

Re: Any opinions of Fluencia, Spanish learning site?

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2016 11:17 am
by Makowki
First of all, yes, there is really always all knowledge somewhere in the internet for free. The beauty about websites like Fluencia, Duolingo, or Babbel is their approach to keep you engaged in daily exercises by offering home and mobile access, portioned units, and a smart system of personalized error repetitions. I signed up for Fluencia after a friend from Australia (that I met in Ocean Beach in a hostel that day) thoroughly impressed a group of Latinos. They said to me that he speaks like someone from their hometown in Mexico - pretty big compliment in my books. I just finished unit 1 (66 exercises) and feel I have learned much more than with the other tools already in regards to the content I can remember and use (!!!). I'm planning on utilizing Duolingo to broaden my vocabulary at a later point again.

Here is what I like:

- Best introduction to Spanish so far. Again, I feel I can use my knowledge already.
- A wide variety of voice actors from various Spanish speaking countries (emphasis mostly on Latin America, not Spain)
- Great mix of exercises
- Certain grammar concepts or cases get reintroduced at different points in time
- Greatly executed slow motion pronunciation feature
- 15 free exercises to try even though it really gets better later on
- Exercises get really challenging. They even mention that they received much better feedback on the difficult exercises early on.
- Sweet interface. A good interface shouldn't be suspicious, it should be affirming that these guys have their shit together.

What I don't like:

- A bit pricey. They only offer month-to-month, year, and two year rates
- Voice recognition. They do offer a beta version but it's still shit. To be honest though, all voice inputs are still sort of bad and useless at this point.
- Only about 700 exercises aka 10 units. Will keep me busy for a while though.

Just my 5 cents. I have to say that the first reply here is not only useless in regards to the initial question, it is also potentially damaging without any knowledge of the platform itself.

Re: Any opinions of Fluencia, Spanish learning site?

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2016 6:29 pm
by Tomás
Bjorn wrote:Thank you for your valuable input and links.
Short wave and morse code to practice language, I'm impressed.

I do like mobile ways of learning, so I think I will test it a bit and think about it.

Thanks again.


If you want a mobile app and have an Apple product, someone has chopped up the FSI course and made it very mobile-friendly. I would definitely buy that one if I wasn't tied to Android already. It looks really good:

http://www.dicendipublishing.com/

Re: Any opinions of Fluencia, Spanish learning site?

Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2016 3:45 am
by mjd550
Thought I would add to this discussion as I signed up for fluencia once. In my opinion, if your learning a language for fun and have no desire to get to a decent level go for it. Its nicely laid out and fun. But if you are like me and want to actually use the language and be able to understand books and TV programs there are much better cost effective solutions.
I have used a lot of programs starting off with rosetta stone and thought that there must be a better way of learning languages. Then I tried fluenz. An improvement, but after a few months I could still speak only basic pre-made phrases.
Then I done a bit of research on How to learn any language forum and discovered Assimil. I absolutely fell in love with Assimil and language learning became my main hobby. Fast forward six months later and I can now formulate my own sentences not just pre-learnt phrases and understand basic speech.

I have wasted a lot of money on rosetta stone, fluenz, fluencia and others. They are not cheap. Unfortunately Assimil is not advertised in the UK and unless you do a bit of research you will not discover it.

Bottom line - buy Assimil if you are serious. Others if its just a passing phase and your just doing it for fun.

Re: Any opinions of Fluencia, Spanish learning site?

Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2016 5:31 am
by Makowki
I have heard mixed things about the Assimil's Spanish course (the French one is apparently fantastic) and what you say, the things with the pre-made phrases, really contradict what I have experience up until now. Maybe all programs I used so far were really that bad in comparison, possible. I also love that the dialogs get longer and that they mix vocabularies by topic with similar sounding words (Cuatro, cuarto, ...). Thanks for the input though. I think I'll stick with it for now and see how far I'll get, for testing purposes. I'll try to update my post accordingly. I'm just still so impressed by what my friend learned in 5 months.

Re: Any opinions of Fluencia, Spanish learning site?

Posted: Thu Aug 25, 2016 3:05 pm
by jsega
Makowki wrote:I have heard mixed things about the Assimil's Spanish course (the French one is apparently fantastic) and what you say, the things with the pre-made phrases, really contradict what I have experience up until now. Maybe all programs I used so far were really that bad in comparison, possible. I also love that the dialogs get longer and that they mix vocabularies by topic with similar sounding words (Cuatro, cuarto, ...). Thanks for the input though. I think I'll stick with it for now and see how far I'll get, for testing purposes. I'll try to update my post accordingly. I'm just still so impressed by what my friend learned in 5 months.


How has Fluencia been working for you?

Re: Any opinions of Fluencia, Spanish learning site?

Posted: Fri Aug 26, 2016 7:10 am
by Seneca
Makowki wrote:I have heard mixed things about the Assimil's Spanish course (the French one is apparently fantastic) and what you say, the things with the pre-made phrases, really contradict what I have experience up until now. Maybe all programs I used so far were really that bad in comparison, possible. I also love that the dialogs get longer and that they mix vocabularies by topic with similar sounding words (Cuatro, cuarto, ...). Thanks for the input though. I think I'll stick with it for now and see how far I'll get, for testing purposes. I'll try to update my post accordingly. I'm just still so impressed by what my friend learned in 5 months.

Which Assimil Spanish course did you hear mixed things about? I have read to stay far away from the advanced course Using Spanish due to poor translations.

I have been using the current English-based Spanish version:
Image

I won't know until I am finished obviously, but it seems great so far. Interesting dialogues. I spent a little time editing the audio on Audacity to run quicker and now I can review all my lessons up to the current one in just a few minutes. Who knows what life will bring. Maybe I stop caring about Spanish entirely. Maybe I contract some sort of serious allergy to the paper stock Assimil is printed on and never touch it again. But the way things are going, I think this course is going to be the key to getting me through the very beginner levels. There is a ton of grammar baked in, and I find that reviewing that every once in a while along with reviewing the dialogues themselves has really helped me learn to pick things out from other sources already. I am legitimately excited to see how far I can go with this. I actually enjoy studying it each day, and it is such a part of my daily routine now that I will stop watching Netflix or tell friends I will be ~20 minutes late to meet them to make sure I fit it in.

No comment on Fluencia as I have never used it and really have no intention to, but I just wanted to chime in and say, at least as far as the current edition goes, this Assimil Spanish book seems great.