Linguno

[Cavesa]

I've seen this tool mentioned various times, so I've decided to give it a try. Here are my first impressions, to start the thread, but I would love to hear (and have my impressions corrected) by people, who have more experience with it.

What it is: a digital tool that is supposed to help with conjugation and vocabulary practice. SRS ith a few bits of gamification that are not overweighting the primary functions.

It is available only for these languages now: English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese (european and brazilian versions), but at least three more are in the development. I think Dutch, Polish, and Russian are being developped.

For now, it is in beta and therefore free. They are considering various options, perhaps freemium, perhaps ads, who knows. But it might be a tool worth paying for, if some stuff gets improved and the price is reasonable.

The conjugation practice tool seems to be the best developed part. SRS, cloze deletions with Tatoeba sentences, the best question answer style (question is the infinitive, person and tense, answer is the correct form in the sentence). Great! You get to move through ranks to add a bit of gamification. And the difficulty levels of the exercise seem to be well designed with regards to the CEFR.

I haven't tried the crosswords type of exercise yet. Also, you can practice the conjugations by level, or also by tense, which is good. I am just eager to explore, whether there are enough verbs and whether the sentences will be interesting enough (it looks like Linguno is really trying to make it less repetitive and more about real conjugations, not memorisation of a few examples)

The other part, vocabulary, seems to be an excellent idea, memorising wordlists based on the CEFR levels, collected from various sources. However, it is not really complete by far, it seems. The SRS is not a typing one (a huge disadvantage compared to for example Memrise, where I love the Difficult Words tool enough to pay), and it is not cloze deletion yet (a disadvantage compared to for example Speakly). And the word lists are extremely tiny. For levels up to C2, I would expect at the very least 10000 words, perhaps even 15000.

Yeah, I know I can add my own words, but that defeats the purpose of using anything but Anki. For now, it looks like the Linguno team is adding words, but not sure what is their idea of the endgoal for each language. But if Linguno managed to get decks of 15000 words sorted by cefr, and add typing and cloze deletion cards for it all, it would be one of the top services on the market in this area too.

Overall, thanks for pointing this out! I already really like the conjugation part (especially for languages with no Kwiziq), but the vocab imho really needs much more work in order to be worth it.

[Fortheo]

I like linguno a lot for practicing verb conjugations. My only complaint would be that I wish the sentences were read by a human and not a computer, but that's just me nitpicking, and it's not like listening is the main skill meant to be trained by this app anyways.