What do you find most useful in a language learning app?

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BaneDaymare
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What do you find most useful in a language learning app?

Postby BaneDaymare » Tue Mar 28, 2023 8:43 pm

Hi there! I'm currently learning a new language and I'm using a language learning app to help me. I'm curious to know what you guys find most useful in a language learning app? Is it the user interface, the pronunciation exercises, the grammar explanations, the vocabulary exercises, the gamification elements, or something else entirely? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below. Thanks in advance!
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Re: What do you find most useful in a language learning app?

Postby Iversen » Tue Mar 28, 2023 9:05 pm

I'm curious about what the anonymous language you study might be... I don't use apps myself, but the things you want in such a thing could depend on the language (and its relationship with other languages you already know). Even without going into details I would want the app the be free, but that may be too much to hope for ...
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Le Baron
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Re: What do you find most useful in a language learning app?

Postby Le Baron » Tue Mar 28, 2023 9:07 pm

BaneDaymare wrote:Hi there! I'm currently learning a new language and I'm using a language learning app to help me. I'm curious to know what you guys find most useful in a language learning app? Is it the user interface, the pronunciation exercises, the grammar explanations, the vocabulary exercises, the gamification elements, or something else entirely? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below. Thanks in advance!

Is it because you're actually looking to create or market such an app and as such you are surveying members here to find out what people would want? Be open.
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german2k01
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Re: What do you find most useful in a language learning app?

Postby german2k01 » Tue Mar 28, 2023 9:24 pm

1. Real audios of native speakers
2. Availability of Transcription.
3. My go-to feature is to have a bilingual translation of a sentence when I am watching something in my target language.
4. The availability of copying and pasting interesting sentences directly to another external app such as Anki.

FluentU https://www.fluentu.com/german/ is such an app that has offer these options but I think option 4 is missing. I do not like tts voices and fill-in-the-blank type exercises to learn grammar or repeating solo words without knowing how they can be used in context.
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Re: What do you find most useful in a language learning app?

Postby Henkkles » Tue Mar 28, 2023 9:50 pm

There really isn't any app with any kind of rigor. FSI like drills but automated with automatic feedback, whenever I'm learning a new grammatical pattern I want to see at least 20 sentences using it, then drill it in my brain. Apps are not made to be rigorous because that's horrible for user retention. People want to be served softballs and to be made to feel good about themselves.
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Re: What do you find most useful in a language learning app?

Postby iguanamon » Tue Mar 28, 2023 10:49 pm

Actually, I am surprised that our moderation team hasn't blocked this. LLORG is generally marketing-free- which makes it nice. If we don't stop this stuff, there will be more.
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Re: What do you find most useful in a language learning app?

Postby rdearman » Tue Mar 28, 2023 10:52 pm

We'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
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Re: What do you find most useful in a language learning app?

Postby Le Baron » Tue Mar 28, 2023 11:03 pm

rdearman wrote:We'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

I feel guilty now! All bitter and jaded. :lol: OP has probably run off.
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sporedandroid
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Re: What do you find most useful in a language learning app?

Postby sporedandroid » Wed Mar 29, 2023 5:07 am

I saw a pretty similar post on Reddit.
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Re: What do you find most useful in a language learning app?

Postby Sae » Wed Mar 29, 2023 6:35 am

A language independent app that isn't a variation of spaced repetition flash cards but offers more, something the user can provide content for and share with the community, like you can do with Anki, Quizlet and Memrise.

We are oversaturated in apps for the same group of languages. Some apps come out with legitimately useful tools and turns out they're only available for French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chỉnese and Japanese. But those tools could be available to a wider range of languages if made available to community creators or for learners to provide their own material. Anki, Quizlet and Memrise already do this, but they're variations of the same thing with a couple of differences to set each other apart.

There are plenty of people learning languages that aren't the core demographics that these apps try to accommodate and sometimes they'll throw in a couple less regularly used languages, but we don't really see many that try to resolve this with language independent tools.
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