Jamie

Spanishdict Review: all Spanish learners need this!

January 11, 2022 by Jamie 2 Comments

As its name suggests, Spanishdict started out as (and continues to be) the best and most engaging Spanish to English dictionary on the web. In fact, I didn’t even know that they had expanded to lessons until a client told me! Since then, I’ve personally used Spanishdict to work on some of my own Spanish grammar points, so it’s only fair that I share this Spanishdict review with you.

While you can access most all of what Spanishdict has to offer for free, this Spanishdict review will include both the free version as well as a Spanishdict Premium review so you can make the best choice for your own Spanish language learning journey.

Spanishdict dictionary

If you’ve ever come across Spanishdict, it’s likely from Googling translations between English and Spanish – sure, Google Translate is fine, but Spanishdict is better.

If you’re not Googling translations, you can also go straight to the website and stick in any translation request, from individual words to phrases to whole sentences, right from the front page.

If you’ve used this search function before, your history will pop up. The last thing I’d looked up was “reverse psychology”, so I just clicked that for the sake of an example. As you can see, they don’t mess around!

You can listen to an audio clip of the word/phrase/sentence and, most importantly (in my opinion), you have some options for putting the phrase in context, which you can easily copy and paste into an Anki deck, Quizlet set, notebook, or any other collection of vocab that you use. Context is king, folks!

Looking for simple conjugations? Just hop over to the next link over at the top, type in a verb, and scroll down for all the conjugation lists your heart could ever desire!

Scroll down for conjugations in the subjunctive, imperative, progressive, perfect, and perfect subjunctive tenses. This format is pretty great – you get the verb conjugated in literally every way possible all in one place with pronunciation and context, but it’s not overwhelming about it. I mean, just the above screenshot will take you from total beginner to solidly intermediate.

Again, complete with audio clips, examples, and even the irregular conjugations highlighted in red! Seriously.

Now, until recently, that was the extent of my knowledge of Spanishdict. But this Spanishdict review is just getting started!

Spanishdict review: vocabulary

While there are plenty of places to find and practice Spanish vocabulary, Spanishdict truly excels in two areas: engaging vocabulary practice for beginners and those taking a formal Spanish class. Let’s start with the simple vocab.

Vocab lists

If you’re a beginner Spanish language learner, you may be going the route of starting with the 2-3,000 most common vocabulary words; this is an effective strategy for some…but it can also get boring. Without the right strategies, learning vocabulary is not only boring and unmotivating, but it also doesn’t work (if you don’t enjoy the process, it ain’t gonna work). Enter Spanishdict.

Spanishdict has tons and tons and tons of lists of vocabulary broken up into different categories. This is just a very small example. Not only is the website itself really smooth (rolling over these images causes them to shift up a little bit – it’s the little things!), but the lessons themselves are also way more engaging than just simple flashcards.

New vocabulary are accompanied by graceful, slow-moving videos to help illustrate the concept, like Memrise Pro’s vocab decks. If you get it right, you get a nice little tone to confirm, followed by an audio clip of the Spanish word. If you get it wrong, you get an audio clip, plus a prompt to check out some context. Then, you’re prompted again to translate that word.

If you didn’t know the word the first time or you get it wrong, you’ll type it out again a couple more times until you get it right. Woo, repetition! And also, woo active recall!

Eventually, though, you’ll get to a point where Spanishdict’s curated vocab lists are a little simplistic for you. Fortunately, there’s also a tool to create your own lists of words!

Í didn’t have a list of words handy, so “choose words” it is!

This bit is pretty awesome! If you add simple words, Spanishdict will stick a video on, so your personal flashcard deck will look just like the curated ones. Of course, there’s not going to be a video for “reverse osmosis”…but I just thought I’d give that one a shot. The platform is really gorgeous and really smooth, and I love that Spanishdict calls you out if you’re not using accents! Language learners tend to ignore accents, assuming they don’t matter, so I love it when a resource pushes you to learn them.

What I don’t like, though, is that it’s hard to add accents on desktop. The screenshot to the right was taken on desktop, and it led me to hold my finger over the letter that I wanted to accent. Obviously on a desktop, that don’t work. There wasn’t any clear way to add the accent on the page, and it didn’t even work when I tried to create the accented letter with my international keyboard. At the same time, it wouldn’t let me pass until I get the accent right. So…maybe stick to the app?

Textbook help

If you’re taking a formal Spanish class with a textbook, Spanishdict also has some curated content for you based on a variety of different Spanish textbooks!

All you gotta do is select the appropriate textbook and if Spanishdict supports it, you can search through the table of contents, find the chapter you’re working on, and take quizzes to test your understanding!

This is great for teachers who are looking for more interesting ways to manage their classrooms, or honestly even just independent Spanish language learners who want a touch of structure without it being too boring. Like Conjuguemos, you can sign up under your teacher, or you can use the resources for a little extra vocab/grammar help along the way!

I love this for Spanish language learners who have to take a formal Spanish class (for school, work, etc.) but find textbook work really boring and unengaging. Because, by definition, it is. This is an awesome tool to help make that textbook work just a tad easier, more entertaining, and (most importantly) modern.

Spanishdict’s grammar lessons

Here’s my favorite: the grammar practice! A lot of language learners struggle to find the balance between effective practice and entertaining practice. I love the Spanishdict approach, honestly. At least when it comes to simple memorization (not for everyone obviously, but it’s been super effective for me!).

Just like with the vocab section, you can either search for specific grammar concepts or find them organized by level of difficulty. Considering grammar is a bit more complex than vocab, there’s more to work with here.

You get tons and tons of examples with audio clips, plus a handful of interactive quizzes to, you guessed it, test yourself on these concepts! The quizzes start out with teaching videos, but you can also skip right past those if you don’t need them, and test yourself in the context of a story as told by a video clip.

You’ll get a combination of questions to keep you on your toes: multiple-choice, write-in, and simple listening practice. Definitely, definitely engaging. And considering there’s info and quizzes for all concepts from beginner to advanced FOR FREE? Geez!

Spanishdict Premium review

Suffice to say, the free stuff is top-notch. So what’s the deal with Spanishdict Premium?

Can I be honest? I don’t think Spanishdict Premium is worth it. Out of all the perks, the only one that I’m really personally interested in is supporting the company. At least for me, the rest of the perks really aren’t worth paying $13/month. But, you know, it’s there, so if you do want to try it out, you can start with the free 7-day trial.

These perks may be better for beginners, so don’t let me sway you from trying out Spanishdict Premium if it looks interesting to you.

Also, if you get to the bottom of most pages on the website, you’ll see a mention of Fluencia, which Spanishdict also created. I’ve reviewed Fluencia here, but I’m not sure if it’s just a passion project or what. Nonetheless, it’s another option!

When to use Spanishdict

I love Spanishdict, and I absolutely use it from time to time to work on my own grammar. It’s simple and engaging, and available seamlessly on desktop and mobile. Spanishdict Premium might be worth it for beginners, but the free content is already so robust that you really don’t even need to splurge. We love accessible language learning!

Spanishdict is pretty much the top of the top when it comes to vocab and getting your bearings on your grammar in a not-boring way. Obviously, it shouldn’t make up your entire language strategy, unless your goal is to have your vocab/grammar assessed and that’s it, but I only wish they could expand to other languages in the future. Gold star!

Click here to try out Spanishdict for yourself!

Quizlet Review for learning foreign language vocab

January 11, 2022 by Jamie Leave a Comment

Flashcards are an important part of any language learning strategy from time to time. One of the biggest problems with that, though, is how boring they can be; Anki’s flashcards are highly customizable and flexible, but it’s hard to learn to use them; Memrise’s flashcards are beautifully curated, but limited past beginner levels.

In this Quizlet review, let’s dive into this study app and website under the lens of what language learners need and don’t to see if Quizlet is a language learning resource that you need to be considering!

Quizlet review for language learners

When you first load up your Quizlet account (whether on desktop or mobile), you start out with kind of a blank screen. It took me a second to register what I was supposed to do first: either create your own study set or search for a specific term and study someone else’s terms. Not a great start for a Quizlet review, but I digress.

As a general rule, I say to avoid other folks’ sets because you can’t always be sure about their quality: if terms are accurate, themes are fully fleshed out, etc. But, considering I didn’t have my own set to start, I went ahead and searched for a French set.

This view is going to be the home for most of this Quizlet review!

As you can see on the left, Quizlet offers a bunch of different ways to learn its sets! The first option, Flashcards, is obvious: the term you’re learning on one side, the defining term or clue or whatever (with room for an image) on the other side. Next up we have “Learn”, and this is where things get interesting!

Learn

For the purposes of this Quizlet review, I opted for the 7-day free trial of Quizlet Plus (which I’ll flesh out more in-depth later). I was surprised by the next prompts I got when I went to “Learn” this set!

Okay, turns out Quizlet is pretty smart! Considering this particular set was the first 2,000 most common words in French, I assumed that I knew most of it already. But, of course, I had to try out that last feature: take a test to find out!

In that drop-down menu, you can opt to be prompted either with the term or the definition, so you can test either your active or passive understanding of the term (getting ready for a test, or do you want to be able to use these terms in conversation?).

I do like this feature, but I’m not in love with it. First, I’d love if there was an option to switch to fill-in-the-blank, especially for language learners. Multiple choice makes it way too easy to guess, and foreign languages don’t come with multiple choice in real life. Also, if you don’t know a term and want to skip it, it won’t let you move forward. So you HAVE to guess. Which means you run the risk of Quizlet thinking you know a term that you don’t know.

Next step is “proving” your knowledge with flashcards.

Again with the multiple-choice. Meh.

I could easily guess a lot of these multiple-choice terms, but I know I wouldn’t actually be learning them so I purposefully chose the wrong answer (choosing nouns for what were clearly supposed to be phrases, for example).

I was excited to see the little audio icon in the upper right corner, only to realize that it was giving me the audio of the English term that I was supposed to be translating. Unhelpful, especially for French where pronunciation is tough.

I’d had enough. Clicked the “options” button in the top corner. Apparently, the thing that I didn’t like was the Pro feature of “Guidance”?

With the “Guidance” feature, Quizlet dictated the type of questions I was getting. When I turned that off, all of a sudden I had the flexibility for some more active language learning. Specifically, I could choose from the following question types:

Flash cards
Multiple choice
Written!

Finally! Now, there’s nothing wrong with flashcards and multiple-choice at first, but as you continue with your vocab, you should definitely be opting for active recall. This is important not only to train your brain to actually recall the word (not just recognize it) but also to get used to spelling, accents, etc.

Now THAT’s more like it! This is a much more functional way to remember that I need that “l'” in there. If this were multiple-choice or a flashcard, I probably wouldn’t be learning that small detail, which can be important. And, if it’s not important to me, I can always just override the wrong answer there. YES!

And if you don’t know the answer? Literally, click the button that says “I don’t know” – it’ll mark it as incorrect, then tell you the correct answer for next time.

Of course, all of this can be accomplished by just going the “Write” route from the beginning. But it’s really worth mentioning that just going by “Learn” is really not going to be effective for using the language in real-life settings. Passing a multiple-choice exam? Sure. Actual conversational knowledge? Nope.

Spell

Speaking of active use of the language, next up we have “Spell”! I do like this – one of my issues outside of “Spell” is that while there is audio, the audio is of the word you’re trying to translate, so the English term. Might help with some accessibility, but not with language learning.

Here you have an audio clip of someone saying the French word, which is helpful for listening comprehension! I like how they provide you with the accents so you can practice actually spelling the word correctly, keeping you accountable for using accents that many language learners ignore and assume are unnecessary.

Active recall? Check.

Listening comprehension? Check.

Helpful corrections when you get it wrong? Check.

Spelling practice is where it’s at for some simple listening practice as well as learning to actually spell foreign language words!

Test

Finally, this section is a combination of all the options to help you test your knowledge. You get written, matching, multiple-choice, and true/false questions. Now, for testing, this is fine, in my opinion. If it’s SUPER important to you to truly test your active recall you may want to skip this and that’s your prerogative, but this section can be helpful to get a general idea of where you are.

My results for this test are an excellent example of why learning active recall is important!

Matching (especially when the words are so closely related)? Easy enough to lazily pick and choose the right answer. Written? Not so much.

BUT, I am glad that in this section, Quizlet allowed me to skip questions and just have them marked wrong. If you go into the options you can also mess with question type, the number of questions, etc. That’s nice, but what I would really like is to see some more practice stemming from these answers; so, for example, have Quizlet automatically test me again on the terms I missed.

That’s me being super nit-picky, keep in mind!

Now let’s try the “Play” options!

Match

“Match” is a pretty simple concept: you have a handful of terms and their translations on the screen. Competing against the timer, you match up the terms with their translations.

I imagine this would be more interesting/difficult with more difficult terms, but you get the picture!

You can play as many times as you want, competing against other users who have also played this game to this flashcard set. It’s not quite as competitive as Duolingo, but you also don’t run the risk of getting hung up on things that don’t matter, either.

Gravity

Just like “Match”, “Gravity” is really simple, of course. Very early-2000’s online gaming. (PS. if you like that idea and are at an intermediate level, allow me to introduce you to Clozemaster!).

“Gravity” is a lot more entertaining, and also a lot more active! In the beginning, you choose to either have to recall the term or the translation, but nonetheless you’re still writing stuff out.

Very engaging, very useful. You get one shot to get it right (press escape to skip the term and get the answer) before you get that term as a red asteroid. Get the red asteroid wrong and you lose the game!

I approve!

Progress

If you scroll down past all that fun stuff (everything mentioned so far is accessible from the very first thing you see, that image at the top of this post), you can also go ahead and scroll through the vocab itself.

This particular set is fairly engaging but remember: non-professional content is not the most reliable. I mean even from here, only one term has an image. So settle your expectations unless you’re willing to curate this stuff yourself.

What I don’t like: when you click the audio button on the right, it’s great that you get to hear the French term…but I don’t need to hear the English term as well. Again, this may be helpful for accessibility reasons, but for me? That’s just straight-up annoying.

What I do like: click the stars to have more control over which terms you’re studying! This particular set has 2,000 terms, which can definitely be overwhelming. This is a fairly simple system for taking it a little bit at a time and learning better!

And while these terms are organized between “Still Learning”, “Mastered”, and “Not Studied”, it’s not the most obvious to me at first, and especially wouldn’t be with ads. It’s the little things!

Quizlet Plus

Quizlet Plus is…a thing. If you’re happy studying others’ decks, it’s really just not necessary, not in my opinion. So, basically, unless you’re specifically looking for a high level of vocabulary or niche themes, you don’t need it.

I do have to say that if you want to use Quizlet to create your own decks. these perks may be beneficial to you: custom images/audio, diagrams, and scanning in documents, in particular. With Quizlet Plus you do get closer to a less overwhelming Anki. Not quite as flexible as Anki, but definitely getting there.

Nonetheless, Quizlet Plus is very reasonably priced! I don’t see any option to pay for it monthly which feels icky, but less than $50 for a year is a pretty solid price if it’s worth it to you. Quizlet Plus also comes with a free 7-day trial for you to test it out yourself, just like I used for this Quizlet review.

Quizlet review: in conclusion

To end this Quizlet review: I like Quizlet! It’s smooth (without ads – with ads it’s absolutely atrocious, but they do have to pay the bills!), it’s visually appealing, and there are several options to make studying vocabulary more engaging! So should you use it?

I think if you thoroughly enjoy Quizlet for getting in basic vocab, there’s no problem using it for free. There are a million and a half different ways to learn simple foreign language vocabulary, and if Quizlet is the thing that works for you, go for it!

If you want to use Quizlet to create your own decks, that’s when Quizlet Plus may come in handy. You can create simple flashcards no problem, and Quizlet’s features do make them more engaging as-is, but for all the bells and whistles you do have to loosen the purse strings a bit. And, if you’ve got $50 to spare/year, that’s a steal!

In conclusion? Quizlet gets my vote for digital flashcards!

LingoDeer Review: language learning app for Duolingo haters

January 11, 2022 by Jamie 2 Comments

LingoDeer is a popular app among learners of Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin, but they’ve been so wildly successful that they’ve expanded to several others! What made it so successful? This LingoDeer review will tackle just that.

Continue reading this LingoDeer review to learn everything you need to know about this super popular language app!

LingoDeer languages

As mentioned, while LingoDeer is known for Asian languages, learners of other languages shouldn’t necessarily skip it. LingoDeer offers:

Arabic
Chinese (Mandarin)
French
German
Italian
Japanese

Korean
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Vietnamese

Considering LingoDeer offers all these languages when they’ve only been in business since 2017, it really looks like the sky’s the limit!

Like Duolingo’s French and Spanish trees are generally the most robust, assume LingoDeer’s Asian languages are, too.

LingoDeer lessons

Once you’re here, LingoDeer is pretty simple: select the language you want to learn, and get learning!

Once you select the course, you’ll get a screen kind of reminiscent of the Duolingo tree. Then, like Duolingo, each lesson of the course is broken up into a handful of quick, easy-to-swallow mini-lessons.

You’ll start with the first lesson of the group, as Lingodeer won’t let you go straight to a particular lesson before completing the prior ones. You can always jump ahead to different checkpoints (as long as you successfully test into them), and you do have the option to switch lesson groups, a la pre-learning path Duolingo.

Nonetheless, I do like how the lessons tell you exactly what you’ll be learning, right down to the specific words you’ll be practicing. This way, you’re not stuck learning words and phrases that aren’t relevant to you.

And the actual strategy behind LingoDeer’s lessons? I really like what they’ve done with it.

Learning a language with LingoDeer

Based on the lesson above, LingoDeer’s focus is on comprehension; generally, the activities are either listening or reading comprehension, with a sprinkle of grammar tossed in. The vocab is largely image-based as well (though not entirely), which is excellent.

My favorite part of this LingoDeer lesson?

If you’re not sure about the answer, it’ll tell you…but you have to use your listening comprehension to do it.

And it’s not just robot voices, either. You can see in the above lesson that I got the question wrong because I was focused more on listening than what I knew to be “correct”; so although the correct answer was “estas”, a normal Spanish speaker will drop the “s” in a regular conversation. Best get used to it now!

While you’re learning the lesson, you can take a look at the mini grammar lesson as needed, and/or get some real-life practice with a conversation.

These reading and speaking exercises connect the more “theoretical” book knowledge to more active conversational knowledge, so you can see how they piece together a conversation (and you can contribute to that conversation, as well).

And let’s talk about the look and feel of the LingoDeer app.

First of all, it’s beautiful! It’s very smooth and is genuinely enjoyable to play around with. There are cute little sound effects, and the animations are really nice. The colors are super palatable as well. Even so, almost all of these features are totally editable! Go into the settings of any lesson to:

turn the sound effects or animations on/off,
change the background color, and
speed up/slow down the audio

Generally speaking, these lessons provide A+ exercise to all of the language muscles. It’s not a conversation, but LingoDeer provides you with a good baseline to start off with some confidence to jump into using the language in a variety of other ways.

I do wish one of the options in the settings were to turn the translations on/off, though. Especially at an intermediate level, I’d like to be pushed a bit, and not have any little handicaps like that forced on me.

While you may not be speaking (yet), you are being pushed to actively recall the words and grammar that you’ve been working with. So yes, while there may be a bit of multiple-choice here and there, you still have a ton of opportunity to really learn the language in a way that preps your brain for actual language use.

It’s your average speech recognition: you’re given a phrase, you’re led to repeat the phrase, and you tap on the bottom to finish and move on. What you don’t see in this screenshot, though, (for the sake of a readable review) is that at the upper left-hand corner of this screen is the word “Easy”. This is just one of the ways that Lingodeer allows you to take control of your language learning in this section!

LingoDeer review: prices

Surprisingly, LingoDeer’s prices aren’t the most obvious. I’ll chalk it up to a website-usability thing though, because a LingoDeer membership is certainly worth the price, in my professional opinion.

According to LingoDeer support, free LingoDeer users get alphabets, the first unit, Test Outs, Flashcards, and Reviews. Everything else is priced really reasonably, though!

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? If you’re thinking “wow, that’s a really ugly page considering how pretty the LingoDeer app is”, you are thinking what I’m thinking. Doesn’t make a single difference to the actual experience or effectiveness of the LingoDeer app, it’s just kind of weird.

LingoDeer review: who should try it

Okay, so this LingoDeer review has proved to me that I love this app. I’ll be honest. I have a few issues with it, but they aren’t make-or-break issues. The flexibility? The push for active recall? The whole experience? Beautiful.

But there’s still an important question to answer: who is LingoDeer NOT right for?

If you want to talk to a human, LingoDeer isn’t right for you. Like, if you need the personal connection of a language tutor or language exchange partner, there are other places to find that. LingoDeer will definitely get you started, but you’ll need to stretch your wings eventually.

If you want to be able to practice your language creatively, LingoDeer ain’t it. LingoDeer will give you plenty of phrases, words, and dialogues to use, but if you’re likely to feel stifled by that and would rather respond to a prompt, look somewhere else.

Other than that, this LingoDeer review has shown me an excellent, well-rounded language app that’ll flex your brain muscles in all the right ways!

Wanna give LingoDeer a whirl? Click here to get started!

Yask Review: can understand, but can’t speak?

January 11, 2022 by Jamie Leave a Comment

NOTE: Yask is no longer operational as of November 2024

Looking for an alternative to Yask? Read my Speechling review.

Do you want to practice writing or speaking your target language, but are afraid of making mistakes and forming bad habits? Allow me to introduce you to this Yask review…because I love the problem Yask is solving for language learners everywhere!

This Yask review will take you through an app walkthrough, pros, cons, and set your expectations so you know if this is the language learning app for you.

Yask languages

Yask is a small but mighty team, and their app supports quite a few languages, including:

Danish
Dutch
Finnish
French
German
Italian

Norwegian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish

When you create your account, you’ll be be prompted to share your native language, the languages you’re learning (as many as you like), as well as your level in your target languages. Yask will assume that you can correct submissions in languages that you’re at an advanced level and above, but you can always change that in your settings.

Yask app walkthrough

Yask is all about the language learning community helping to correct each other’s writing and pronunciation practice, and it does that in a couple of ways. Pressing the + button in the middle will give you a ton of prompts, and even the opportunity to just say/write what you want (as long as you’ve earned 250 XP – we’ll get more into that later).

There are 4 types of exercises:

Write
Translate
Read out loud (after 100 XP)
Freestyle (after 250 XP)
Speak (after 540 XP)

We’ll talk about this more later.

Just like Clozemaster, Yask sources their sentences from Tatoeba, so the opportunities are pretty much unlimited.

I had told Yask that I was at an advanced Spanish level, but this isn’t an advanced sentence. Usually I have a much bigger problem with this (definitely not the first time I’ve come across it), but I also know language learners: before we know any better, we tend to focus on passive learning, meaning being able to recognize and/or translate words/sentences back into our native language.

While that sentence is no problem at all for me to translate into my native language (again, a passive skill), like many language learners my active skills aren’t so sharp. So the sentences I get for Write prompts? Yup, those are right on my level.

So once you answer a couple of prompts, your submission is sent out to the Yask community where your work will be checked by the Yask Bot itself as well as your fellow Yask members.

In this example, I tapped the “Write” button on the front page, which presents you with a random exercise.

If you want more of a choice, tap the third button on the bottom toolbar (the one that looks like an emoji) to pick both your subject and your exercise!

The Yask Bot responds super quickly for the purpose of instant gratification, and then native or advanced-level speakers will check you as well. Why would humans spend their time correcting mistakes that a bot already corrected?

Remember that you can only access some features/prompts when you hit a certain level of XP? That’s why.

While you’re in the app, may as well head on over to the Home tab and quickly correct others’ exercises and earn some XP!

I seriously love the way Yask did this – the submissions are super short, so it takes only a couple of seconds to correct, and you see how they’re presented like Instagram Stories? Genius. They took the strategy behind casually tapping through social media, and rewired it to help strangers with their language learning.

Mind = blown! So addictive!

When you first start out, you can only really give simple responses: yes it’s good, no it’s not, skip, and maybe a pointer to work on a word or two.

As you can see, because you’re being corrected by the community (as opposed to specific guidelines with professionals), the quality of the feedback can be inconsistent.

As you respond to more and more submissions and earn more and more XP, you can do things like leave comments on submissions with more details, answer pronunciation exercises more precisely, and more. It’s an interesting system that creates a sense of community; I find that when I correct exercises, users tend to follow me so that we can correct each other’s stuff and build XP off each other. Plus, that notification that says “so-and-so followed you!” is another great little dopamine hit.

Okay, but how did Yask make language learning so much like social media, without inviting creeps to hit on feminine-presenting language learners??

I’ve seen a system like this on Lang-8 (which is no longer a thing – the company switched gears to create HiNative); Lang-8 was a community-driven site where you could post long-form texts and have them corrected by the community. In order to post more texts, you had to correct more submissions.

However, Yask is different in a couple of ways: it’s short-form, it’s digestible, it’s fun (Lang-8 was NOT fun), and it’s dynamic! Lang-8 was just a basic website with very little inspiration/motivation to keep you going. Not Yask!

And, of course, it wouldn’t be gamification without some sort of daily notification! Here’s what that looks like.

I love that the daily notification is personalized and funnels you into exercises that you can benefit from, but I don’t like the language of “daily mistake review”.

I know a lot of language learners struggle with the concept that mistakes are positive, that they’re opportunities to learn, but I can’t help but think it’s going to bring about those feelings of shame that we’re not perfect.

Regardless, it’s so easy to get sucked in! Tap the notification and do a couple of 2-second exercises to work on that concept. You can see how quickly the Yask Bot chimes in!

You have potential corrections literally immediately. It’s not long til you have real-life humans chiming in and double-checking the bot in return for that sweet, sweet XP.

Speaking of that XP, I’ve mentioned the types of exercises you can unlock, but that barely scratches the surface! Yask knows how to make you feel motivated to use the app, and the XP rewards do that real well.

Instant ticket refill x1: 0 XP
8 daily tickets: 10 XP
Introduce yourself: 20 XP
+1 exercise priority: 30 XP

Answer pronunciation: 65 XP
+2 exercise priority: 80 XP
Instant ticket refill x2: 90 XP
Read out loud exercises
Weight of your votes x2: 150 XP
12 daily tickets: 17 XP

+3 exercise priority: 225 XP
Write freely: 250 XP
Listen to pronunciation: 275 XP
+4 exercise priority: 360 XP
Listen to sentences: 390 XP
Highlight changes: 500 XP

…and honestly, that’s not even all of them. There are rewards all the way up to 12,000 XP! In case the common, repeated rewards aren’t clear:

Instant ticket refill: when you run out of tickets (i.e. do all the exercises you can), press a button to get more
Daily tickets: tickets (exercises you can complete) you’ll automatically receive throughout the day
Exercise priority: your submissions are shown before others’ with less priority/XP
Weight of your votes: your votes are more important I’m assuming? I’m not totally sure

And if you ever need more information about these various rewards (there are so many, holy crap), you can always go to the Features tab and tap on the one you don’t understand.

Yask review: pricing

Yask is free for everyone, with limitations of course. While their website is just as beautiful as their app, it is not easy to find a clear-cut statement of what free users even get. It does state that it’s free forever, but it doesn’t state what exactly that means.

We’re just left to make educated guesses based on the perks of Yask Plus:

Is it worth it? Absolutely, 100%. You get a motivating, engaging, human-driven, high-quality language learning resource for $5 a month (and you get a month free if you go 3 months at a time). For the value, it’s actually underpriced!

Yask is still pretty new to the world, so I’d get with the program – you never know when the price is going to go up!

Yask review: who’s it for?

This Yask review is excellent for language learners looking for active language practice with a low barrier (i.e. it doesn’t take too much effort to play with) and a healthy dollop of gamification.

The instant gratification, colors, notifications, and usability of it all make it really fun to work with. Plus, the essentially unlimited pre-made prompts and free speak/write options are super flexible! It’s like Speechling, but more fun to use and you get corrected within minutes, not within 24 hours.

However, if getting corrected isn’t your thing, you’ll have a bad time. Knowing just enough of a language to be able to communicate is just fine, but it ain’t for Yask. Or if you’re just not at a point in your language learning where you can comfortably get your mistakes pointed out to you without a compliment sandwich.

But if you’ve already got the vocab and the grammar and you just need the guidance and the motivation to put it together, consider this Yask review your sign to try it out.

Click here to get 40% off Yask!