Polygloss - Android App

[Gordafarin2]

A friend pointed me to this a few days ago and it's a great little bit of fun, it fills the same sort of 'quick bites of gamified practice' niche as Clozemaster, Duolingo, etc. Polygloss on Google Play

It's a picture-guessing game, where you write a little bit of text describing the image and your partner has to choose which of the 4 pictures you wrote about. You're matched up randomly with your partner, who could be another learner of your language or a native speaker.

It's a very low-pressure way to get a little bit of writing practice. They market it as an in-between step before you're ready for a conversation partner - a little bit of active practice, but without the anxiety of holding down a full conversation.

I wish corrections figured a larger part into the app. There is a button to correct your partner's answer, but I've played several dozen matches and I haven't gotten any corrections, even when I match with native speakers. There is also a daily writing prompt where you write a short text on a topic and other people can vote on it and send you corrections - each one gets voted on for several days afterward, so maybe I will get corrections back from those when they're ready.

It supports a long list of languages which is great (even Persian and Esperanto!), albeit the user's experience depends on there being enough other people using these languages on the app. Every morning I wake up to a bunch of Spanish requests, while the Persian match requests I've sent out are slow to be answered.

I have no idea how the progression works because the app does not explain it to you (you have a certain amount of energy per day, to spend on ???. To unlock new lessons, you use stars, which you gain by doing ???.) which means I'm stuck describing animals over and over. On the flip side, getting the same topic multiple times motivates me to come up with more creative sentences.

Has anyone else used it? They seem like they have a responsive group of developers, so hopefully it will stick around for a while and keep improving over time.