My Review of the MosaLingua App

[Valddu]

So I’m about a thousand hours into learning my L2 and somewhere in the lower B2 range. While I try to consume a lot of native content and have conversations regularly with iTalki tutors I’ve also supplemented my learning with apps and material for learners: Pimsleur, Anki, Clozemaster, Glossika, Brainscape Spanish, amongst others.

MosaLingua Spanish is the best supplemental app I’ve yet to find. While I’ve seen a few reviews online, I decided to throw in my two cents about it here so it might be useful for someone else and because I really believe it deserves the recognition that some other learning apps have received. The version I used was for iOS and was Spanish Premium version, however it seems that it has versions for numerous other languages as well (hopefully the quality is equal across the board).

What it Does:
Basically, MosaLingua is a SRS-system designed to help you learn new words and phrases everyday via flashcards . You assess your mastery of the words as you use the app, and the app brings back flashcards for review in increasing intervals based on how you strong you feel with the word or phrase.

Why it’s Great:
Emphasis on native audio. Every word or phrase that you want to learn is first introduced to you via pure native audio BEFORE you see it written out. I always felt that with Anki the sound was secondary to seeing the word, but with MosaLingua I like that sound is more heavily emphasized. When you first hear the word the app even has a button you can tap that lets you record yourself so you can compare your pronunciation. Awesome.

Lists of words based on topics or situations to help you quickly construct your own deck. MosaLingua has thousands of words you can choose from, just scroll through the different lists and tap on words or phrases you want to learn and it’s automatically added to your learning deck. This is great, since I have weird gaps in my vocabulary (I added words like fingernails, toaster, relieved, frying pan, web site, plum, and freezer, for example) . I put more than a 100 hours into Anki, and I absolutely hated creating my own cards. When I used pre-made decks I then ran into the problem of being exposed to words I already knew. This solves that problem in a time-efficient way.

Lists of sentences based on type of grammar. If you pay for the bonus packs you get access to this feature, which is golden. I can just go to the future tense, for example, tap a button and add 30 sentences using the future tense to my learning deck. I feel like I tend to overuse simple sentences while I speak, so I really like being to target my weaknesses and memorize example sentences that use more complex grammar that’s just outside of my zone of comfort.

Hands-Free mode. This feature is AWESOME. I’m on the road for almost 2 hours everyday. During that time I obviously can’t use Anki so I tend to rely on passively listening to podcasts and Spanish news. Now I can start my drive by turning on MosaLingua and it will randomly drill me on the words and phrases I’m learning. I’ll hear the word/phrase in English, and then have a second to say it in Spanish before I hear a native speaker say the sentence or word correctly. I always worried that learning vocabulary with Anki, or even silently reading, still left a disconnect between recognizing the word written out and being able to recognize the word in a conversation. I really feel like this hands-free mode eliminates that and makes the word feel more firmly locked into my active and passive vocabulary. I also feel that the hands-free mode is an excellent substitute for Pimsleur or Glossika. IF your deck consists of lots and lots of sentences then this mode will present you the sentences randomly over and over again in a way that’s identical to Glossika--however, unlike Glossika you will see/hear the sentence as part of your SRS review after 5 days so that it stays locked in your memory.

Add Your Own Cards. Unfortunately, you can’t import cards from what I saw. But, you can still manually add words and phrases if you like. What’s great is that the word will still appear in Hands-Free Mode, except it won’t be read out loud by a native speaker but by a computerized voice. Still useful.

Drawbacks:
The biggest weakness of the app so far is that when you learn new words for the new day it doesn’t select randomly from your deck, instead it picks from the most recent words/phrases that you indicated you wanted to learn. I hope they change this soon.

No way to see how many words you learned on a given day. If I want to learn 5 words in the morning, then 5 in the afternoon, and then 10 before bed, I have to mentally keep track since there’s no easy way for me to know using the app. Since I want to learn 20 words a day I’ve just gotten into the habit of just learning all 20 words in one sitting versus spreading it out throughout the day like I would with Anki.

Some typos in the cards. It’s easy to report a problem with a card, but I have no idea how long the turn-around is before a change is made. With Glossika I felt like reporting problems was pointless since I never saw any changes. I hope that’s not the case here.

Cost:
The MosaLingua Premium runs about 5 dollars (flat price, thank god) and cost me about another 10 bucks for the bonus packs that are more geared towards intermediate learners. Considering I paid 25 to buy Anki for iOS that’s not too bad. Glossika, on price, can’t come close to competing since that system now runs 30 dollars a MONTH. There’s a free version you can try out if you want to see how the app works.