CNN utalk app

[Flickserve]

As per title,

They are having a discount offer this week and you can choose six.

Has anybody tried it?

Any opinions on comparisons with other apps?

[Gordafarin2]

When I searched for 'CNN utalk app' this thread was actually the first Google result, so here is a direct link to what you're talking about: https://store.cnn.com/sales/utalk-langu ... -languages

I'm impressed by the huge range of languages that they offer, but that makes me slightly suspicious that possibly each language hasn't been given a lot of individual attention? Just a guess; I haven't heard of this before, but I'm thinking of sites that offer tons of languages often don't have the best quality control.

..."Cockney" is a language option!

[Gordafarin2]

There is a demo on the website, and it looks very Rosetta-Stone-esque (matching audio to photos)
https://demo.utalk.com/

[Brun Ugle]

I got a very cheap subscription to UTalk during the Polyglot Gathering, so I can explain a little about it. It is basically a series of flashcards, some with sentences and some with individual words. Each card has a picture and a sentence or word. There are various games to play with the flashcards, like “memory” which are surprisingly effective for learning. All the languages have the same modules with the same words and sentences, and there are an awful lot of sports-related modules like winter sports, summer sports, Olympics, skiing, sailing, golf, etc. There are also a bunch of military-type modules and you get to learn useful phrases of the “Stop or I’ll shoot,” and “My family was killed” variety. Of course there are also lots of more normal and useful modules related to ordinary things you might find around the house, school, work, social phrases etc. There is no grammar taught. Generally, I would say the app is not great and not worth spending much money on if the languages you are interested in are the commonly taught ones like French, Spanish, German and so on. However, it has a lot of unusual languages like Setswana, Tigrinya and many others for which materials are almost impossible to find. And the recording quality is very good. Each word or sentence is recorded by two speakers, one male and one female, and the recordings are very clear.

[ilmari]

Generally, I would say the app is not great and not worth spending much money on if the languages you are interested in are the commonly taught ones like French, Spanish, German and so on. However, it has a lot of unusual languages like Setswana, Tigrinya and many others for which materials are almost impossible to find. And the recording quality is very good. Each word or sentence is recorded by two speakers, one male and one female, and the recordings are very clear.

I agree. The quality is surprisingly good for this kind of app.
You can find a nice explanation of their approach here:

[Brun Ugle]

One of the things I forgot to mention was that since it’s the same for all languages, you can get rather lopsided translations. For example to teach the words brother and sister, they have a picture of a boy and a girl together. The boy is a little older. In the card for brother, there is a circle around the boy and on the card for sister, there is a circle around the girl. That’s fine for English and a number of other languages, but in Japanese, for example, the word brother gets translated to ani, older brother, and the word sister gets translated to imouto, younger sister. You miss out on the words for younger brother and older sister, and if you don’t know from another source how the language works, you might not even know the limits of the translation. It means you have to be careful to check other sources to find out the exact meanings of the words. This is more of a problem in rare languages than in Japanese, of course.