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Mondly vs Duolingo: how to start a language

January 21, 2022 by Jamie Leave a Comment

Many language learners tend to compare Mondly vs Duolingo, and for good reason! They’re very similar with gamification, tons of languages, and beginner content. So which should you go for, Mondly or Duolingo?

In this Mondly vs Duolingo review, we’ll see the core differences between the two language apps so you can decide which one you should use to start your language learning journey.

Mondly vs Duolingo: how they’re similar

Both platforms function mostly as mobile phone apps but are also available on desktop. They’re both meant for beginners with no or next-to-no knowledge of the language they want to learn. And they both support the following languages:

Arabic
Chinese (Mandarin)
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese

Korean
Latin
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese

Both Mondly and Duolingo teach you via short, 5-minute lessons, and also remind you to study every day. Both apps keep track of how many days in a row you’ve studied to help you keep up your motivation, and give you a little map by your username so you can show off how many languages you’re learning.

Both resources also have free and paid options and can be highly addictive.

So, as you can see, both Duolingo and Mondly are very, very similar in a lot of ways. However, this is just about where they each branch off into their own methods of bringing language learning to their audience.

Mondly vs Duolingo: the differences

To start, Mondly also supports the following languages:

Afrikaans
Bengali
Bulgarian
Catalan
Croatian
English (American)
English (British)

Filipino (Tagalog)
Latvian
Lithuanian
Persian
Slovak
Urdu

Duolingo does not cover those languages, however, you can use it to learn:

Esperanto
Hawaiian
High Valyrian
Klingon

Navajo
Russian
Swahli
Welsh

Using a base language other than English

Besides being able to learn some different languages depending on the app you’re using, there’s a difference in the language you’re learning from as well, which is great for those whose native language is something other than English!

Mondly really excels in this, by offering every language course in each of its 41 languages, which is amazing! You can use Mondly in Hebrew, for example, to learn French, and vice versa. This is not only great for language learners of all backgrounds but is helpful for learning more than one language, as it allows you to immerse yourself in one language while studying another.

Duolingo does offer a similar approach, but not nearly as well. Go to the Duolingo website and select your native language (or the language you want to learn from) and you’ll see which languages are available to you. It’s usually not much, honestly.

Learning foreign language concepts

While Mondly and Duolingo are both primarily a way to get new vocab into your brain, they both teach new vocab by presenting sentences, and you can’t make sentences without grammar! Grammar, though, is another concept entirely that language learners have to set aside time to figure out. Grammar is like the math of language learning.

Duolingo does this pretty well by having forums. Whenever you answer a question, if you get it wrong, you can easily click through to the comment thread on that particular question. There you’ll see all the questions other users have asked, as well as any answers that have been provided.

If your question isn’t answered, ask away! You’ll also find other users sharing resources outside of Duolingo that might be helpful for you, so this is also a good way to expand your tools and find help outside of the app.

Mondly…doesn’t. At least not as well. As you go through your Mondly quizzes, you sometimes have the option to tap a word that you might not understand, and the app will translate it or present you with a conjugation table.

But that’s about as far as Mondly goes. It’s helpful, don’t get me wrong, but I do prefer seeing the conversations that other people have had about sentences on Duolingo. I also like the community aspect of the Duolingo forums. You have other language learners right there with you, trying to figure out the same things that you’re struggling with, as opposed to being all alone.

Syncing between mobile and desktop

Both Mondly and Duolingo are more commonly used as mobile apps, but their content can be accessed on a desktop, too. I know that 99% of you are going to stick to mobile, but I thought I’d touch on this, just for the sake of being thorough.

Going to Duolingo on desktop is pretty much the same thing as mobile, but there are a couple of other features that you won’t find on the app. We’ll talk about those perks in a sec, but for now, just know that you can’t get to them via mobile.

Other than that, your accounts and all your languages will sync seamlessly between desktop and mobile, so you can use whichever device at whatever time you want to work on your Duolingo.

Mondly is also accessible via desktop, and the switch is pretty seamless. However, many of the more special Mondly features, like Augmented Reality, are not available on desktop, for obvious reasons.

Free & paid options

Both Mondly and Duolingo provide you the option to give them your money (surprise, surprise!), but for two completely different reasons.

Duolingo advertises itself as free forever, which is true (technically…there’s a strong theory that Duolingo’s getting money-hungry with the new hearts system). Everything I’m talking about here and what I talked about in my Duolingo review is accessible to everybody for absolutely free.

Fairly recently, Duolingo also introduced a $10-15/month subscription (depending on your commitment) service, called Duolingo Plus, which allows paid users an ad-free experience as well as offline access. There are some other perks as well, but no new content.

Duolingo vs Rosetta Stone: Duolingo is always free

Mondly, on the other hand, is a completely different animal. You can use Mondly for free, but you won’t get a whole lot. You basically get a preview of the app so you can give it a trial run before you invest. It’s definitely not a huge investment – over the long-term, it’s actually cheaper than Duolingo!

Free Mondly members get a few lessons, a few chatbots, and the streak function. After that, you can opt to pay monthly, annually, or just once for life. Plus, you can use my link to get 20% off!

In this context, I’m gonna have to side with the angry Duolingo users who believe Duolingo is using tricky tactics to get everybody to pay. Not to say that I’m getting behind this theory, but in using both Duolingo and Mondly…I’m more of a fan of Mondly being upfront about charging.

Daily reminders

The fact that each app provides daily push notifications to get you practicing your language every day was already mentioned, but they’re not quite equal. If you’re one of the literally millions of language learners that have already used Duolingo, you know you get a quick notification every day to prompt you to open the app and study.

If that works for you, that’s awesome! It never did anything for me, though. Plus, if you just ignore it enough, it gives up on you. Literally. The little Duolingo owl basically says “well, you’re clearly not coming back, so I’m going to stop wasting my time on you”. Ouch! That hurts the ego and is also not very productive to inspire people to get back on the horse.

Mondly is a little different. Yes, it gives you the same kind of reminder, HOWEVER. While Duolingo tells you to do something, anything, Mondly has new lessons every day for you to work on. They might not be new content for you, but you do get a monthly calendar to keep track of every lesson every day.

Once you’ve completed that day’s lesson, you’ll get a little green circle on that day on the calendar. If you complete all the lessons for the week, you get a new weekly quiz. If you complete all the daily and weekly lessons, you’ll also get a new monthly quiz. That is definitely more motivating than a generic message to get back to Duolingo.

Language skill development

While Mondly vs Duolingo have very similar approaches, the meat of the lessons is actually pretty different! Primarily, Duolingo teaches grammar the way we learn languages in school (but more fun, to be fair); Mondly teaches vocabulary and speaking.

Both apps do have other features besides their main lessons to help expand on their users’ educations. For example, Duolingo Stories are very short stories combining reading, listening, a touch of vocab, and even some comprehension questions.

Duolingo vs Rosetta Stone: Duolingo Stories are great for language skills

While Duolingo keeps the approach pretty passive, Mondly is much more effective for your speaking skills. Not only do they offer both chatbots and AR conversations, but you can also opt to say the answers in some of the normal lessons. It’s not a real conversation, but honestly? It’s pretty close.

With the chatbots and the AR (and soon-to-be VR) experiences, it’s really hard to beat Mondly’s approach to conversations with a robot!

Yes, Duolingo does have a speech recognition function in their lessons, but it’s really buggy. It’s totally normal for speech recognition to straight up not work, which is fine, but on Duolingo, you’ll get stuck until it gives up on you. With Mondly, you can just tell it to move on.

With their own directions, I don’t think it reasonable to expect Duolingo to catch up to Mondly; there’s a huge difference between repeating a phrase back once, and contributing to a real conversation!

Besides having conversations in your language with real human beings, I do believe this is the best you can get. The tech isn’t quite 100% just yet (the AR lady isn’t particularly life-like, for example, and the phrases are said by a different robot entirely), but I’m excited to see how Mondly continues to improve on this.

Accessibility

As a language learner (and a human who cares about the ethics and privilege that goes into learning foreign languages), the accessibility of learning a language is an important subject for me.

And when I say accessibility, I don’t mean that free apps are good and expensive apps are bad. Let’s use Mondly and Duolingo as an example.

As I’ve mentioned, while Duolingo is technically free, they are slowly but surely putting all of their users on the heart system. More on this here, but the basic idea is that you’re actively punished for getting questions wrong; if you don’t want that punishment, pay for Plus.

If you’re a Duolingo Plus user (if you pay), you get unlimited hearts and you can focus on learning, without the added pressure of losing hearts (including in the middle of a lesson, at which point you lose your progress and you start over).

Meanwhile, though Mondly is a paid app, it can be cheaper than Duolingo. No trickery, no nothin’.

And don’t even get me started on the non-English base languages: Duolingo offers the ability to learn some languages from non-English languages (though the options aren’t consistent and the content isn’t complete), while Mondly offers the ability to learn all of its languages from all of its languages.

And remember: with Mondly, you can pay for lifetime access once. With Duolingo, the best they can do is annual.

Mondly vs Duolingo: which one is for you?

Whether Duolingo vs Mondly is your preferred app at the moment is a totally personal decision. In my personal opinion, I do think they’re both great starting points for learning languages, though as time goes on Duolingo is getting more restrictive and Mondly is constantly improving.

I’ve used both for long periods of time for different reasons; Duolingo because it’s clearly structured from beginner to intermediate, and Mondly because of the languages available.

Personally? Experiencing both Mondly and Duolingo over the long term, I’d go for Mondly any day (especially considering my 20% off discount!). For one, I’m excited to see their AR blossom and grow into the future tech that all language learners need (while Duolingo seems to consistently become less and less usable without paying).

At the end of the day, I’d recommend you try both out and see what they do for you. Honestly, they both utilize slightly different strategies and methods.

Click here to try Duolingo, or click here for Mondly (including 20% off)!

BaseLang Review: pricey, but worth it

January 20, 2022 by Jamie 2 Comments

BaseLang is a Spanish-specific language learning service that connects Spanish learners to native Latin American Spanish speakers. BaseLang is special because it’s the first (though no longer only!) of its kind: unlimited lessons for one monthly price.

In this BaseLang review, you’ll learn everything you need to know about this resource: what you’ll learn, what you won’t learn, and if you should consider BaseLang for your Spanish language learning.

BaseLang review: comparing plans

BaseLang keeps it simple: unlimited 1:1 Spanish classes to get you to speak Spanish quickly. They offer 2 options (which we’ll talk about below) and offer you a free trial of $1. No fluff, not wild marketing schemes…BaseLang gets right to it.

From the get-go, you’re directed to choose how you’re planning to use BaseLang: either online, or in-person at their location in Medellin, Colombia. Unless you’re planning to relocate to Colombia, we’ll stick to online.

While we’re here, let’s talk about these differences, starting with BaseLang Real World.

BaseLang Real World

BaseLang’s Real World plan is simple: it’s basically a gym membership for learning Spanish. Pay one monthly fee, and get unlimited access to conversational practice with native speakers.

These classes are taught via Zoom, and are all private, 1:1, with native Spanish speakers.

Your lessons do follow a curriculum, but it’s largely up to you to decide your structure including when you learn, with whom you learn, etc. We’ll see what that looks like in a minute.

BaseLang Grammarless

If BaseLang Real World is your basic 24-hour gym membership where you show up whenever you have the time and take turns using the machines, BaseLang Grammarless is hiring a private trainer.

You choose your teacher and meet with them on a fixed schedule, and while a personal trainer can’t promise you washboard abs in 30 days, BaseLang guarantees zero-to-conversational fluency after 80 hours.

This translates to either four-hour days (conversational in a month) or two-hour days (conversational in 2 months). Very intensive.

And if that’s not enough practice for you, BaseLang Grammarless includes BaseLang Real World.

BaseLang teachers

If you go for BaseLang Real World, where you don’t choose your teacher at the beginning and instead basically use any teacher that’s available for flexibility, there’s somewhat of a process.

Here are your options for finding yourself a BaseLang teacher.

I do love the basic category options on the left in particular. Especially that gender option – one of my main qualms with italki is that you can’t search for teachers by gender. Apparently I’m not the only one!

Side note: in the above video, you’ll see the selected teacher doesn’t have any availability. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is because I was supposed to click the teacher in the left-hand column. That teacher was simply left over from the initial search.

BaseLang teachers have always had a little get-to-know-you video, but the newer (to me) bit is that bottom bar. That “Private Rating” part is SO helpful – last time I was active on BaseLang, you just got a list of BaseLang teachers to choose from, and you had to remember which ones you liked. Now you don’t have to remember!

I’m a huge fan of the option to favorite a teacher, too.

One of the problems I’ve run into is trying to get onto BaseLang scheduling the minute the next day opened up, only to find my favorite BaseLang teacher, and my favorite time of the day was already taken. That was WAY too much effort so I really like this fix for that.

You can now set up to 3 teachers as favorites. Favoriting a teacher allows you to schedule a lesson with them 2 days in advance.

Nonetheless, in past years BaseLang would just give you a list of the BaseLang teachers available in this time slot, and it would be up to you to go back into the section with their bios and descriptions and everything. Now they’re included right in this scheduling section, which is a serious improvement!

Once you’ve got your timing and teacher all figured out, there’s nothing left but to confirm your lesson!

Important note: BaseLang is known for its extra-high turnover rate, especially with its best tutors. Basically, if you love a particular teacher, they’re always going to be booked out until they just kind of disappear and you have to find a new favorite.

BaseLang review: scheduling a session

The first thing that happens when you go to schedule a BaseLang class is you’re asked to add the email address linked to your Zoom account – it also mentions that Zoom has a much better connection than Skype which is somewhat promising for me, as one of the worst problems I’ve had with BaseLang in the past is really bad connection.

Then you get to schedule a lesson.

In the past, you used to be able to schedule a BaseLang lesson by time or teacher, which I really liked. At some point, they seem to have removed the latter choice, so you can now only schedule a lesson by time on this screen; if you want to schedule by the teacher, you can do so in the “Teachers” tab.

One thing that BaseLang is proud of is the fact that you’re able to schedule a lesson at literally the last minute. You can also show when multiple consecutive classes with the same teacher are available. That’s HUGE! This option makes the BaseLang search so much more efficient than it used to be.

Just make sure that your time zone is correct in the settings tab, or else you’ll have to guess/hope that everything’s all set, and you’re not going to miss any sessions (which I definitely have).

The old adage of “beggers can’t be choosers” is usually pretty accurate in this scenario. While there are a surprising number of teachers available, you can’t be sure that you’ll necessarily hit it off with one of them, if they speak any English, or if you’ll enjoy your lesson.

Sometimes you just don’t jive with a particular tutor, it’s a normal part of finding a teacher in literally any scenario.

BaseLang review: Lessons

While BaseLang Real World is much more loosey-goosey than Grammarless, there is still a curriculum. This curriculum used to be confusing, but they seem to have simplified it a lot, which is great.

Under the “Lessons” tab, you’ll find Core Lessons and Electives.

Core Lessons are broken up into levels 0-9, from beginner to advanced, and are there to support your grammar education.

Each of these core lessons is broken into subjects based on grammar and/or vocab. Just click into any of these lessons that you might want to review and you’ll get some PowerPoint slides to click through.

From here you can see that BaseLang truly offers lessons from beginner to advanced – you can choose to follow this pathway as rigidly as you like, or not really at all, based totally on whether you prefer to focus on grammar or conversational skills.

These lessons aren’t particularly special compared to something you could find elsewhere, but it is nice to be able to reference the material you might’ve been working on in class that day.

Then we have Electives. Same layout and all, just some fun vocab to help you express yourself in your sessions if you’re looking for pure conversational practice.

These lessons are very interesting to me, but they’re clearly best used with BaseLang teachers. By themselves, these slides are lackluster at best. I’m guessing the intention behind them is to give BaseLang students some inspiration/conversation starters, in which case these will definitely keep the conversation flowing.

I know I said it before, but it’s worth saying again – I’m really glad that BaseLang made these lessons much more simple. There used to be an independent intro and all this frankly unnecessary information. This is much more helpful!

Interestingly, BaseLang has also supplemented these courses with their own Memrise flashcards. This makes it super easy to review the vocabulary independently, which is a great study practice.

BaseLang price

Whether you use BaseLang online or in person in Medellin, Colombia, BaseLang Grammarless is $1200. For an 80-hour program with guaranteed, that’s just $15 an hour.

Plus online learners get BaseLang Real World for unlimited classes thrown in for free. You quite literally can’t beat that.

BaseLang Real World online is the most affordable option. But if you need the in-person classes, that drives the price up. You do get the online classes thrown in, though.

You can see BaseLang’s updated prices here.

BaseLang alternatives

So, basically, BaseLang Grammarless takes the structure of Lingoda (and the intensity of Lingoda Sprint) and mixes it with the teacher-student relationship that you (at least should) get with Verbling or italki.

Let’s be clear about the difference between Lingoda Sprint and BaseLang Grammarless because they are both highly intensive Spanish-speaking courses.

Lingoda Sprint is a 2-month course (and only opens to new students every 3 months) that includes 15-30 classes per month (15 classes for Sprint, 30 classes for Super Sprint) and a guaranteed refund (50% for Sprint, 100% for Super Sprint) if you attend all of these classes. These classes happen at varying times with different teachers.

Lingoda also offers a couple of other less intense options.

BaseLang review: should you try it?

After this BaseLang review, I’m a fan. However, it’s not for everyone. They are very intentional about their preferred audience, which is great.

In particular, BaseLang is best for Spanish language learners (total beginners, if you’re going for BaseLang Grammarless; level doesn’t matter for BaseLang Real World) who are looking for highly flexible 1:1 lessons with a native-speaking Latin American tutor, whether in-person or online.

Is grammar important to you? Not for you. More interested in Castilian Spanish? No-go. Your time zones don’t match up (BaseLang functions on Eastern Time)? Look elsewhere. Don’t have the energy to work with a person (i.e. introverts and neurodiverse folks) for close to 100% of your language learning? Definitely not.

However, if you can spare at least $179 a month and are able to commit to a reasonably significant number of hours to learning conversational Latin American Spanish with a private tutor, BaseLang has quite a few options for you to play with.

After reading this BaseLang review, are you still not sure? Another super special feature of BaseLang is their negative risk guarantee: pay only $1 for your first week, and if you don’t like it, get $20 back.

On top of that negative risk, use my link and get $10 off your first month of online practice!

Mondly Review: a fancy beginner’s app

January 20, 2022 by Jamie 3 Comments

Mondly is a super fun, super easy language app that has earned itself a plethora of awards for its tech including Augmented Reality and chatbots. Is Mondly the language app for you? In this Mondly review, you’ll learn where Mondly shines, its flaws, and what exactly you can expect from it.

Mondly Languages review

One of my favorite things about Mondly is its selection of languages; not only does it support a ton of them, but each language in this list can be learned through any of the other languages in this list. That’s no small feat!

You can use Mondly to learn/learn from:

Afrikaans
Arabic
Bengali
Bulgarian
Catalan
Chinese (Mandarin)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English (American)
English (British)
Filipino (Tagalog)
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Indonesian
Italian

Japanese
Korean
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese (Brazilian)
Portuguese (European)
Romanian
Russian
Slovak
Spanish
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Vietnamese

I love this because Mondly has made language learning super accessible to not only those interested in laddering (learning a third language through a second language) but also native speakers of languages besides English!

Mondly’s website boasts “it’s faster to learn from your native language” and they’re absolutely right.

For this Mondly review, I decided to learn a bit of Afrikaans to see if the content is consistent across languages (unlike Duolingo, where there is a clear preference for more commonly-learned languages).

Mondly review: the good

Let’s get started with this Mondly review. This is how all the Mondly languages are set up: collections of lessons (generally 6 or 8 apiece) organized by category and presented in an artistic version of a map.

These lessons are very simple multiple-choice, so it’s a great option for quick, low-key practice. All of the content presented in the language you’re learning is accompanied by native audio, not a robot voice, so Mondly also does a very solid job of training your ear to recognize the words you’re learning.

Mondly hits all the senses

Another thing I love about Mondly is how it caters to all the senses and, therefore, all different types of learners. This game isn’t difficult, but it does change up the format of the questions (while always supplying audio), so it pokes at all the senses just right.

Now, if you’ve ever tried using Duolingo before, you know that a lot of the sentences you end up translating are sentences that don’t make any sense, and therefore you’ll never use them. If you’re not a fan of “implicit learning” like that, Mondly may be a good alternative for you, as you learn with everyday sentences.

Mondly’s Chatbot

While the above quizzes are pretty passive learning, Mondly also helps you to practice speaking the language in a couple of different, fun ways. Let’s start with the chatbot.

Mondly’s chatbot is available both on desktop and via the app and can be found inside a category (select the lessons labeled “Conversation”). There you’ll find a pre-written conversation for you to mimic and practice speaking the language with.

While many chatbots depend on speech recognition (which is iffy technology and can keep you stuck on a phrase even with perfect pronunciation) Mondly guides you through a conversation while letting you be the judge of your speaking!

These conversations are one of the last lessons in any given category, so you’ll learn the vocabulary before you’re led to use it in a conversation. As you can see, here’s how your first conversations go:

read and listen to the first phrase
record yourself repeating the phrase
compare your audio to the original, trying again if necessary
continue to the next phrase and repeat

You’ll respond to both sides of the conversations for double the practice.

I’m really glad Mondly’s going in this direction (in the past they’ve relied on speech recognition and other kinds of confusing features)! Chatbots aren’t unique to Mondly, but you know what is? Augmented Reality.

Mondly’s Augmented Reality

The big perk that helps the Mondly language app stand out from all the other apps is its Augmented Reality, or “AR”. The concept is really awesome: as long as you have an AR-capable device, Mondly can help you procure images of things that don’t exist through your phone’s camera! Because of this feature, Mondly advertises itself as the future of language learning. Only time will tell!

To access the AR, you’ll need to download another app that’s included with all Mondly Premium accounts (we’ll discuss free vs premium later). It looks like most if not all languages are available for AR experiences, but not all languages have all lessons/conversations.

P.S. Mondly also has a very new VR feature…looks really buggy for now, but I’m excited to see what comes of it!

AR lessons

The first feature of Mondly’s AR is lessons. It’s a cool option and I’m excited to see how it develops over time, but for now, it’s almost more like a party trick than anything else.

It’s a very engaging way to learn beginner vocab, but most of it isn’t actually in the target language. That’s a personal preference though, and may not be a big deal to you. AR is a new science, so be wary of your expectations; Mondly’s AR still relies on speech recognition, and the vocabulary words themselves are spoken by a robot voice (a different robot voice than the AR lady’s robot voice). I wish they could at least use the same audio clip that they use for the regular lessons!

You may notice at the end that the video just…stops. This is a great feature but it is prone to crash.

I’m also not sure if it was Mondly or my device that muted the audio, but it was mostly robotic English.

While I would rather stick to Mondly’s normal lessons over the AR, I think the AR conversations are awesome!

AR conversations

Just like the AR lessons are a fancier version of Mondly’s regular lessons, AR conversations are a fancier version of the chatbots. The conversations have the potential to go a lot more smoothly because instead of recording every phrase every step of the way, you’re relying on speech recognition to accurately understand your side of the conversation.

Speech recognition is faulty in general, but Mondly does offer the option to skip any particular part of the dialogue for those times when you’re saying it right but it’s just not taking it.

As you can tell, this feels much more like a real conversation, which is awesome practice for the real deal!

…if you could hear it. You’re just going to have to trust me!

Daily, weekly, & monthly practice

If you like using the daily streak feature of popular language apps to keep you consistent and accountable, you’ll love Mondly’s version of the daily streak!

Many language learners get burned out by this feature because they find themselves coming back to their app every day out of guilt over the potential of losing their streak and therefore their motivation. This feature changes that.

Instead of just a reminder to do something, or even a reminder to do a particular activity, Mondly triples down on this motivation tactic with not only a daily streak but lessons every week and month that are only accessible if you complete all the lessons of that week and month, respectively.

They’re bite-sized, and they might not be new content, but it’s a great way to poke at your new language consistently every day. Even if you’re not necessarily learning something new, it keeps the language fresh in your mind to prevent forgetting anything

If you’re worried about these little snippets not being enough, don’t. If there’s one thing I learned from the Fluent in 3 Months Challenge, it’s that the important thing is that you’re working on your language consistently. It doesn’t have to be a whole lot, but as long as you’re using it, your skill will keep growing.

Mondly review: the not-so-good

While I love the unique direction Mondly is taking language learning, it’s not for everyone. For example, Mondly is beginner content only, and really best for starting a language from scratch.

Mondly can also be kind of inconsistent between different languages, features, and categories. Not every category has chatbot conversations, not every language has the same categories, etc. You’ll have to check your target language in particular to see your options.

Finally, Mondly’s statistics. Clearly, it’s a beautiful feature that can make you feel good about the time you’ve spent on a language, how many words and phrases you’ve seen and your daily streak. These statistics pop up after every lesson.

This isn’t any worse than most apps’ statistics feature, but I’d love to see some sort of SRS or even how well you know different terms. For example, I love the Memrise feature that shows your knowledge of a term going from short-term memory to long-term (theoretically, obviously, but I still like it).

Mondly Premium: worth the splurge?

With Mondly free, you get access to:

daily lessons (for daily streak lovers)
fun quizzes
chatbot conversations

Mondly’s free features are a great way to get to know the app and see if it’s right for you without any commitment. If you do love it, Mondly Premium includes features like:

full access to all 41 language courses (1,320 language combinations!)
vocab organized into practical categories (including business categories)
over 50 real and stimulated native conversations
grammar lessons
access to all daily, weekly, and monthly quizzes created since 2015
access to Mondly AR and the Mondly Kids app

And the Mondly app is updated consistently over time, which makes lifetime access to all languages and updates a steal if it suits your language learning goals.

Or, if you’re enjoying the app but still commitment-phobic, you can always spring for a monthly membership and upgrade later.

Mondly review: who it’s for

From this Mondly review alone you can see the sheer amount of potential there is in this app, and I love seeing it develop over time!

I hate to use the word “polyglot”, but honestly, Mondly is a great investment for language learners who want a super fun, engaging way to access over 1,000 different language courses for native speakers of different languages.

It’s a great resource for getting beginner vocab as well as ease into conversations. The AR lessons need some work, but it’s still new tech and Mondly is at the front of the line with this stuff.

But if you’ve got your basic vocab covered and you’d rather stick to conversations with real human beings, Mondly isn’t going to be for you. Same for those who aren’t particularly into gamification or features like daily streaks.

Wanna give Mondly a shot? Use my link to get 20% off!

Memrise vs Duolingo: want vocab or grammar?

January 19, 2022 by Jamie Leave a Comment

Two of the most well-known language learning resources on the internet today are Memrise and Duolingo. They’re pretty similar: both have vocabulary practice in a variety of languages, both have cute little graphics and motivations for being consistent, and both are available both on mobile and desktop. But what happens when we look at Memrise vs Duolingo?

Let’s address the differences between the two. Which one will work for you? Duolingo and Memrise both have their shining moments, and both have something that the other just doesn’t do so well. So let’s jump into it: Memrise vs Duolingo.

Memrise vs Duolingo: available languages

You can use both Memrise and Duolingo to study the following languages:

Arabic
Chinese (Mandarin)
Danish
Dutch
English
French
German
Icelandic
Italian
Japanese
Korean

Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish

Memrise also supports:

Icelandic
Mongolian

Slovenian

And languages offered by Duolingo include:

Czech
Esperanto
Finnish
Greek
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Indonesian

Irish
Latin
Navajo
Romanian
Swahili
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
Welsh

Memrise vs Duolingo: how does Duolingo work?

Basically, Duolingo is a free program that works in what they call “trees”. Trees are collections of little mini-lessons, generally ranging from beginner to intermediate, depending entirely on the language. More commonly-learned foreign languages have a lot more content to them than the newer additions.

Duolingo advertises the ability for its users to learn a language in just 5 minutes a day using Duolingo, making the time-commitment for learning a language feel really tiny. You go through each and every one of these tiny little lessons until you get to the end of the tree, and there are no more lessons to be had.

Duolingo mixes up lessons with both plain memorization and constructing sentences. Historically language learners have complained that Duolingo teaches languages through sentences you’ll never use; this is key to Duolingo’s strategy, but it’s not for everyone.

The point is, Duolingo will teach you to put sentences together in a grammatically correct way.

If you’re not an ultimate beginner when you start your Duolingo tree, you can just take quizzes at “checkpoints”, so you don’t have to waste your time learning vocabulary that you already feel comfortable with. You can just go right to lessons that are actually worth your while, which is nice.

It can be a little tricky to find the right level, though, since they’re named things like “City” and “People”; while the vocab introduced in those levels may very well relate, the grammar probably doesn’t!

Memrise vs Duolingo: Memrise courses

Memrise courses are heavier on the vocab side of things. Memrise has some free content but is more of a paid service than Duolingo (which is not a paid service at all, unless you want to get rid of the ads – more on that below). If you stick to the courses made by Memrise itself, you’ll learn vocabulary and a few key conversational phrases. Basically, simple rote memorization.

There isn’t really a strict system to Memrise content; they don’t have a tree to go through, or particularly intentional “levels”. If you want, you can go through whichever lessons you want at whatever time, though they are organized from ultimate beginner to intermediate-beginner.

Though Duolingo’s system of titling lessons is not totally helpful, they’re more helpful than lesson titles on Memrise! So, likewise, if you’re not an ultimate beginner, it might take you a sec to figure out where to start.

Like Duolingo, you can also set your goal to spend 5 minutes a day learning, so both Memrise and Duolingo are very attractive to those with limited amounts of itme.

Duolingo Plus

Duolingo now has its own paid service (if you’ve ever asked yourself “how does Duolingo make money if it’s always free?”). It’s a pretty wholesome concept: pay 10 bucks or so a month (depending on your commitment) if you want to:

Remove ads without an ad blocker (meaning Duolingo still gets paid, but you don’t see ads)
Use Duolingo offline
Support free education
Get unlimited hearts (if your Duolingo app is on the Gems system, not the Lingots system. I explain these systems a whole lot more in my Duolingo review!)

It’s a nice little option for you if you want to support free language learning education, which is an idea that I personally like. I’m all for financially supporting language learning!

Though, to be fair, there is a very widely-acknowledged theory that Duolingo is slowly but surely trying to push the Plus system. Draaaaaama!

If you want to try it out, you can opt for a free 7-day trial. But, again, it’s not a heavy investment, so if you’re going to be using the product anyway, I would throw a few bucks at it if you’ve got it!

Memrise Pro review

Memrise also comes with a paid option, Memrise Pro. Memrise Pro is a bit more bang for your buck, in my opinion. You’ll get a couple more tools to enhance your language learning:

Difficult word review
Video/audio files in Memrise courses
Learning statistics

The first two of these are definitely really helpful for taking in languages. Difficult word review is pretty self-explanatory: Memrise Pro knows which words you have a hard time with, so you have the option to study only those and shove them into your brain. It’s like Anki’s SRS system, but prettier.

The video and audio files are also a nice touch. It’s a step closer to immersion, learning your words by hearing a native say them, and not in a robotic way. It’s a decent way to start training your ear to hear the language, and it’s another method of learning the new vocabulary.

Honestly, it is a much better way to take in new words. I always recommend taking in new foreign vocab with more than one sense.

That being said, Memrise has a much heavier focus on vocabulary, while Duolingo teaches more grammar than anything else.

The statistics Memrise Pro offers can also be very helpful. If you stick with it, you can see what you’re studying, how often you’re studying, when you’re studying, and when you’re getting the most questions right. This can be a great way to shift your language learning strategy to one that works with your natural habits.

Personally, I prefer PolyLogger for this, though it’s admittedly not as complex as the above screenshot.

Duolingo forums

My favorite thing about Duolingo is the forums. The lessons themselves are pretty simple, but they each connect to a thread on their forum where members have talked about the questions. There are so many members that there’s a pretty good chance that any questions you may have about your lessons have already been answered.

In this way, Duolingo goes way above just simple question and answer and directs you to think more about grammar and how the language actually works, which goes into more intermediate and sometimes advanced concepts. If you still have questions, you can ask them yourself, and the forum is pretty active.

The Duolingo community is super helpful and has answered all of these questions pretty well, from what I can see. They also link to other resources online that explain these things well. If anything, it’s a good way to find this other helpful content online, so you can branch out on your studies.

Memrise’s member content

Memrise lessons themselves are decent, but they only go so far. Fortunately, Memrise isn’t just a language learning resource, but also just your basic flashcard app, so members have created flashcards for the words and phrases that they’re learning outside of Memrise itself.

So, depending on your language of choice, you might find the vocab or grammar that you’re looking for either in the Memrise courses themselves or in the member-generated content. There’s lots and lots of content, so you can take in almost endless amounts of vocab just on Memrise.

And, since it’s a flashcard app, it will probably never stop growing. So keep an eye out for new decks, and even make your own decks to share with the world. Where Duolingo is limited to the lessons they create themselves, Memrise grows whenever members share their own content. That’s a lot of vocab for you to learn, so if you want to stick with it, you can go far!

Duolingo app review

It’s hard to find another website that does desktop and mobile as well as Duolingo. It’s definitely built to go wherever you go, so Duolingo’s app is convenient and easy for your eyes. It’s actually meant to be more of a mobile app, so that’s where you’ll get your push notifications reminding you to get your studying in every day.

Now that the Duolingo app also links to the forums in every question, it’s also a much more convenient way to find explanations or common complaints about any particular problem.

It’s super seamless, so you don’t have to think about it at all – just let the app remind you every day to get your studying in and keep up your streak. The more you get back to it, the more you learn! Perfect for the more easily distractible and forgetful language learners.

Memrise app review

The Memrise app used to be awful, but fortunately, they’ve stepped up and made it MUCH more user-friendly. Now it’s nice and smooth to compete with the Duolingo app, complete with cute little sounds, vibrations when you answer a question incorrectly, and seamless integration with what you’re doing on desktop.

However, there’s still one hiccup with the Memrise app: you can’t access your statistics! If seeing your journey and growth is important to you, I hope you’re on a computer a lot, because you just straight-up can’t see them on the Memrise app.

Memrise vs Duolingo: Memrise paid app screenshot

On top of that is the section where they talk about Memrise Pro. Yes, while you’re on the free version, I absolutely understand pushing the paid content. That makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is when you do pay for Memrise Pro, and not only does that section stay the same, but it doesn’t link to paid content! It literally just says that you’re a subscriber, and reminds you what you get.

Memrise vs Duolingo

Comparing Duolingo vs Memrise…whichever one you use definitely depends on your needs: vocab? Grammar? Creating your own study materials? A clearly defined path? Input and questions from other users? These factors can easily define your choice of Memrise vs Duolingo.

They’re both simple tools to play with from day to day, complete with daily notifications to keep you motivated in the short term and fun graphics and sounds. But, if you’re looking for more CEFR-based help (content structured along the same lines as official assessments), Duolingo is a bit more structured.

However, if content is king for you, Memrise is a great option for Duolingo alternatives. As long as people use Memrise, the amount of content you can find on it will never stop. If you’ve got a desk job like most of us, it’s not hard to keep a tab open to Memrise and drill new and old vocab in your downtime. Not a bad way to take in new words if you ask me!

Click here to get started with Duolingo, or here to start Memrise.

Duolingo Review: how to use Duolingo in 2023

January 19, 2022 by Jamie 2 Comments

Ah, Duolingo. The internet’s most famous place to study foreign languages. It’s cute, it’s bite-sized, and it makes you feel good. All that surface-level stuff aside, does Duolingo work? Is Duolingo good for all types of language learners? We’ll discuss in this Duolingo review.

And if Duolingo is the answer for you, how do you take advantage of everything that it has to offer (which is a lot)? That’s where this Duolingo review comes in.

How to use Duolingo

The first question for this Duolingo review: is Duolingo effective? It can be, as long as you understand what it’s used for. What I mean by that is Duolingo does not offer conversational practice, any independent speaking, reading, or writing. There’s a teeny tiny bit of listening when you’re learning the words, but that’s about it.

1. Overview of Duolingo
2. Lingots
3. Duolingo’s learning path
4. Other features
5. Duolingo Leagues
6. Duolingo Achievements
7. Super Duolingo
8. Duolingo alternatives

That being said, the question of “how effective is Duolingo” is…a mixed bag. For what it does, it can be very effective! Because of the tools it provides (i.e. reminders, gamification, competition), Duolingo is effective for:

Learning beginner vocab and beginner-intermediate grammar (in some languages)
Forming a daily habit
Making language learning fun
Creating competition

And, most importantly, making language learning free and accessible to all.

You’re not going to get conversational using just Duolingo, but you can easily get a very solid base in the language, with which you can search elsewhere in the world for more advanced concepts and actually practice your fluency.

Duolingo can be a great start for your language learning in a variety of languages. The languages you can find on Duolingo include:

Arabic
Chinese
Creole
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Esperanto
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Korean

Latin
Navajo
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Scottish Gaelic
Spanish
Swahili
Swedish
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
Welsh
Yiddish

Duolingo also offers fantasy languages, like Klingon and High Valyrian; suffice to say, you’re more than covered for language learning inspo.

How does Duolingo work?

Duolingo works by providing you with a bunch of little, incremental lessons that are easy to consume, and constantly giving you positive reinforcement via adorable sound effects, awards, and notifications. It absolutely is addicting, and that’s their MO. They get you addicted to coming back and spending even just 5 minutes with them.

On top of that, with Leagues and XP, you can use Duolingo to find motivation via competition against other language learners regardless of target language, goals, and skill level. I’ll go more in-depth about this later.

Lingots

“Lingots”(pronounced ling-guhts) are Duolingo’s currency. You earn lingots by:

earning crowns in any skill
finishing any skill
practicing
continuing a streak for a specific number of days
finishing a League in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place

When you only have to study on Duolingo for 5 minutes a day, it’s really not hard to see why you’d keep coming back. This is why Duolingo depends heavily on Lingots to keep Duolingo users hooked.

With these lingots, you can buy:

streak freezes (if you forget to come back one day, you won’t lose your current streak) (
double or nothing (double your wager if you maintain a 7-day streak)
extra minutes in timed practices
hearts (AKA more practice)

In the past, lingots could be used to buy several other things as well, like outfits for Duo the owl. However, today your options are limited, and this is one of the many updates to Duolingo that users are not happy about.

For free Duolingo users, “hearts” also play a major part in the Duolingo experience; you automatically get 5 hearts; whenever you get a question wrong, you lose a heart.

You can keep learning until you get 5 wrong, and lose all 5 hearts. Once you lose all your hearts, you have three options:

quit playing and wait to get 1 heart every 5 hours
buy more hearts with lingots
earn 1 heart by practicing old skills
get Duolingo plus (to be explained later)

Duolingo review: the learning path

Duolingo teaches languages by way of a learning path. These learning paths are made up of bite-sized lessons collected together and organized by skill. Because Duolingo is as gamified as it is, and these lessons are so easy to swallow, it’s not hard to push yourself to learn more and more; not only that, but Duolingo has so many adorable little achievements and reminders that it’s easy to stay in the habit, which is awesome.

Unfortunately, even though these lessons are based on grammatical concepts, they’re not named specifically based on that. For example, the “City” skill doesn’t teach you the name of cities, but words like “store”, “small”, “school”, etc. Kind of confusing. I wish they took the LingoDeer approach of having lesson titles match up with the actual lessons.

Here you can see a lesson about “changes” under the unit about places being…neither of those.

These skills are organized by level, and for the more extensive languages (namely Spanish and French), Duolingo will ease you into a more and more advanced understanding of the language.

For the more extensive languages, there are 5 crowns per skill (on mobile you may have 6 crowns per skill, the last crown, “Legendary”, being a review worth 40 XP). Each of these crowns is broken up into 5 levels, and each of those levels has 10 questions each.

One of the things to keep in mind with Duolingo is that even though there are a ton of languages to learn, not all of them are as complete as some of the more common foreign languages.

That said, more commonly learned languages like Spanish have a significantly longer learning path than something like Finnish.

Regardless of the language, Duolingo is best for language learners with little to no experience in a given language. If you’re an intermediate learner of the more commonly-learned languages, you may also find Duolingo valuable.

This is because of the “Checkpoint” feature of Duolingo. If you’re not a total beginner of the language, you can take and pass Checkpoint Challenges to show Duolingo what you know, and get to the lessons that’ll actually be beneficial to you.

Again, this does depend on the language you’re learning, as well as your abilities. These Checkpoint Challenges are not easy – simple mistakes make a big difference.

Otherwise, Duolingo’s learning path guides you one lesson at a time. Many users complain that they’d like more choices as to what they’re learning at any given time; if you don’t want to take that particular lesson, you’re stuck.

There are other things to do in Duolingo that are not connected to the learning path to give you something else to do, like separate speaking/listening exercises.

Duolingo review: other options

In the past, Duolingo offered users more options: which skills to learn, when to learn them, and how many repetitions they want. With the new learning path, those options are totally gone; users must take the next lesson, or else they can’t move on.

For Super Duolingo users (i.e. paid members) on mobile devices, there are a couple of other options. Timed practice, for example, has users review vocab at breakneck speeds to earn more XP and get to the top of the League leaderboards.

Users might also find timed practice with more advanced content, like translating to transcription (listen to an audio clip and write down what they’re saying).

Suffice to say, Duolingo truly changes things up (albeit inconsistently – they’re known for their A/B testing, so it may take a while for updated exercises to hit your account).

Here’s a tip for you if you want to use Duolingo: try to focus on these kinds of comprehension questions, if you can:

These are excellent because they lead users to use their language skills together with their critical thinking skills to check for understanding.

Simple, brainless, matching exercises will only take you so far, so I’m glad to see these more complex exercises.

As you continue through Duolingo’s learning path, you’ll also work through Duolingo Stories; again, this is one of their better features for genuinely building comprehension skills in an engaging way.

It is worth mentioning that you can commonly get questions wrong because of a typo that isn’t relevant to the actual thing you’re being tested on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten questions wrong because the sentence started with “Julie” and my phone auto-corrected to “Julia”. Super frustrating.

PRO TIP: add the language you’re learning to the keyboard on your phone! This’ll reduce the number of silly autocorrect mistakes.

Duolingo Leagues

Let’s talk about the competition aspect of Duolingo: Duolingo’s leagues exist as yet another level of gamification to keep you coming back to the app.

Everything that you do in Duolingo earns you at least 10 XP. You can earn more by not making any mistakes, reviewing your mistakes, or doing separate speaking/listening exercises (Super Duolingo users only).

This XP is used to pit users in competition with each other for the next week, based on when they started the week.

The purpose of Duolingo’s leagues is to motivate you to practice enough to get to the Diamond League.

Every week, you get pitted against 25 other Duolingo learners (regardless of language, skill level, etc.) who started their Duolingo week at the same time as you. You move forward, backward, or stay in one of 10 leagues from week to week:

Bronze
Silver
Gold
Sapphire
Ruby

Emerald
Amethyst
Pearl
Obsidian
Diamond*

Each of these leagues is a week long, which means it’ll take you at least 10 weeks to get to Diamond League. Competing against 25 other language learners, you have a week to:

graduate to the next league by finishing in the top 10 (plus earning lingots if you finish in the top 3)
stay in your current league by finishing in spots 11-20
get demoted to the prior league by finishing in the bottom 5

If you get to the Diamond League, there’s one more challenge for you: stay in that league for 3 weeks to earn all 3 pieces of the Diamond. It won’t be easy, though, especially at the very end. Some users use illegal bots to earn thousands of XP points just to earn the coveted award.

Achievements

As you continue on through Duolingo, you’ll get cute little achievements here and there. Things like following 3 friends, adding a profile picture, maintaining your streak for a varying number of days, etc.

There is one important achievement that really raises the stakes, especially in the Diamond League. This achievement is the Legendary award.

The only way to achieve this is to finish the Diamond League in the #1 position. This means that the Diamond League can get FIERCE! Not to mention stressful.

Sometimes the Diamond League is pretty chill and the winner only had 2,000 XP or so, and sometimes the top 2 players are fighting till the death, and the #1 finishes with something like 10,000 XP.

So yeah, it can get crazy.

How does one land this extra special achievement? I have a couple of tips (that don’t involve the bots that some people absolutely use to cheat) just for this Duolingo review.

Don’t start the league until the last minute
Leagues are events that restart every week, but timing can be a big deal. Think of others who are lazy or busy, and can’t maintain their streak until the last minute. Try waiting until the very last minute to join the league – you can even use a streak freeze to really put it off and still maintain your streak!
Check out the competition before you get too crazy
I’ve been in leagues where players have used bots to earn 8,000 XP in the first hour of the league. There’s no point in competing against that. If you find you’re in a league with players who are too competitive, maybe wait til next week.
Work through old lessons or a language you already know
If your goal is to get as much XP as possible, don’t worry about learning new things. Go through beginner lessons in your language, or if you’re already at an advanced level of another language, go through that tree. Remember, the specific language you’re studying has no weight in Leagues.
Take advantage of your free Duolingo Plus trial
Duolingo Plus means no ads. Take advantage of the time saved! When you ditch the ads, you save a few seconds each lesson, and that can really add up (or at the very least remove the frustrations of ads when you’re already stressing your XP).

Super Duolingo review

Duolingo’s thing is free education forever. There are no gimmicks, no surprise “if you want to keep learning, pay us!”, nothing, which is great, especially for a large, publicly traded company.

But as time goes on, more and more users have a bad taste in their mouths with Duolingo and believe that they’re trying to focus more on monetizing the site than focusing on providing a great, accessible language learning app.

Whether that’s true or not is not for me to say. With the free app, the only disturbance you’ll get to your language learning is ads. With the hearts system, you’ll also be disrupted if you get 5 questions wrong.

If you really care to get rid of the ads (as well as get a couple of perks), you can opt for Super Duoilingo. If you want to try it out, every account gets free access to Super Duolingo for 14 days. You’ll get to try out:

no ads
unlimited hearts (i.e. unlimited learning)
mistake practice (any exercises you get wrong)
unlimited Legendary (do an exercise and your final lesson turns purple)

In my opinion, sticking to the free Duolingo won’t break your language learning experience; however, if you find yourself using it a lot and would benefit from some extra learning tools, there’s no harm in using your free trial.

You can opt for Super Duolingo either in the app or on desktop.

Duolingo alternatives

If after this Duolingo review you’ve decided it doesn’t quite suit your language goals, what are some Duolingo alternatives?

If you like the heavy gamification (easy to use, great colors, and fun sounds/animations), you may prefer Mondly or Drops which are both great for beginners who want to build their foreign language vocabulary.

Or, if you like the usability but want to learn vocabulary that you’ve found or are more relevant to your own personal interests/goals, I’d recommend Lingvist or Quizlet.

Finally, if you’re learning a language from scratch and want a structured path but can’t deal with Duolingo’s heavy gamification, you can try Rosetta Stone or Babbel (this post compares all 3 resources!).

Duolingo review: who it’s for

If you’ve made it this far into this Duolingo review, it’s the moment of truth: will Duolingo help you learn a language?

Duolingo is appropriate if you:

want a simple way to practice a language
thrive off reminders and happy sounds
are just starting out learning a language for the first time
know absolutely nothing in the language

However, steer clear if you:

are focused on getting conversationally fluent
are looking for a high-quality language education
get annoyed by constant reminders
want to learn sentences you’ll use in real life
want explicit grammar instructions (not “figure it out as you go”)

Sold? Click here to get started with Duolingo!

FluentU Review: more languages, fewer options

January 16, 2022 by Jamie Leave a Comment

FluentU is a video-based language learning platform with a ton of content stretching quite a few languages. In this FluentU review, we’ll walk through the resource and see what FluentU does right, does wrong, and how it compares to other video-based language learning resources.

FluentU review: languages

FluentU offers content in a variety of pretty commonly learned languages, including:

Chinese (Mandarin)
English
French
German
Italian

Japanese
Korean
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish

The best part is that FluentU is more flexible than a lot of the competition: you’re welcome to switch languages as you please! I love this, because having to choose a language, or even pay double to learn more than one language, can definitely feel constricting for language enthusiasts like myself.

Another thing that FluentU does right: pricing!

Without a premium subscription, FluentU limits access to almost all of the tools that we’ll learn about later in this FluentU review. I would go so far as to say that unless you pay, FluentU isn’t the most useful.

The FluentU price comes with a 14-day free trial to give you a chance to test the water before you commit to a month.

As you sign up, FluentU asks for your level in your target language.

There is no native “assessment”, so it’s up to you to decide your level. Your answer to this question directs you to the relevant level in FluentU’s content, but honestly you can freely switch around once you get started anyways, so no pressure.

Don’t know your level? Hovering over those question marks gives you a brief description of each level:

Beginner: build a strong foundation with essential vocab and phrases, very basic grammar, and full – but short – sentences.

Intermediate: keep moving along with trickier vocabulary, longer sentences, and more grammar

Advanced: start feeling like a native speaker with exposure to high-level topics and scenarios, as well as all kinds of advanced grammar and vocabulary.

Last but not least, you choose a daily goal.

If you’re a daily goal kind of language learner, hopefully, this motivates you to keep coming back consistently! A minute a day may keep the language reasonably fresh in your brain, but you’re definitely not going to be making huge strides over time.

And, of course, FluentU takes it a step further and sends you a notification every day to remind you to get your points in.

FluentU lessons

First I went with beginner Spanish, so I could get an idea of just how beginner FluentU gets.

Yup, that’s definitely Spanish 1.1!

FluentU has their own native lessons for you to get your bases in, like the above screenshot. Once you get a bit more comfortable, there’s also a ton of natural content from all over the web that’s also stuck into this format.

You get a video and a really big text box that includes captions in both the language and English. If you’re getting along just fine, let it play and read/listen along.

If you’re not familiar with a word, mouse over the text area and it’ll pause automatically. Mouse over any unfamiliar words and you’ll get a translation, and the option to easily add it to a vocab set.

Feel free to go through this video as many times as you like – it won’t automatically continue. Instead, it’ll just stop and wait for you to make a decision.

Do you want to watch it again? Or do you want to use one of your other options (look at the transcript, take the quiz, choose another video, etc.)?

If you decide to take the quiz, it’ll run you through the words it’s registered as important (easy enough for FluentU’s native content, but I’m not sure how it assesses that vocab for its other stuff) as if you hadn’t watched the video.

From this, I can definitely tell that you should be working through videos that are just above your level; if you stick to your current level, watching the video and then being taught these words/phrases individually is redundant.

On the flip side, if you’re speeding through vocab that’s just out of reach in the video and then getting it dissected in the quiz, that’s a pretty solid vocab strategy.

You’ll go through the vocab, seeing and listening to it, with the option to tell FluentU that certain words aren’t new to you, and to stop showing them to you.

Then you’ll get quizzed.

FluentU switches up the nature of these quiz questions pretty well, so you’ll get an actual understanding of how the vocab is spoken, written, and flows; it’s not just a brainless activity.

I do wish you had the option to tell FluentU how easy or difficult a certain word or question is for you though, like Anki and Rocket Languages do.

You can choose to just go through the native content for a while, or you can branch out and find something that really interests you. Just hit Browse and you can look through all the content in the language you’re learning!

Don’t rush, though: I’ve found that if I type too quickly, FluentU doesn’t register some of my letters, and I’ve gotten words wrong because of that.

If you really want to, you can switch the level on your account by going into settings and making a different selection. But realistically, it doesn’t really matter. You can literally just go into the different levels of content straight from the FluentU library and see what works for you.

Here’s an example of a video I found in the intermediate section.

There are a couple of things to note here.

First: ” no tienes remedio”. That’s not a word, but a phrase. While you can select individual words to go into your vocab lists, you can’t select that whole phrase to study just on FluentU.

LingQ does this better with written materials, where it always provides you the option to select potential phrases (because you never really know with new languages). I’m disappointed that FluentU doesn’t.

Second: I wish FluentU would differentiate between different Spanish accents. It may seem like a small detail, but the accent can truly make the difference between understanding audio or not, even at advanced levels.

Nonetheless, if you need some more info on a new word, just click it.

You’ll keep a couple more sentences for context, a couple of grammar notes, and the option to add it to a vocab list so you can remember to review it later. Like with Yabla, I like having access to so much context that you can add to any preferred flashcard app!

And if you can’t understand ANY of the words and just need to study all the vocab before you go through the video? No problem!

Take in this new vocab word-by-word to memorize it, or do so in the context of the sentences spoken in the vocab. Both options also include audio clips of how they’re said in the video.

And then FluentU takes it one more step forward: transcripts!

The transcripts aren’t pretty, but you can choose to download them with or without the English translations, and you’ll see the timing of the dialogue in the upper right-hand corner, which can be helpful.

Want to work on your pronunciation of a specific word? Maneuver to that time frame of the video and listen. Want more context to understand the meaning of a phrase? Go to that time frame and watch the speaker’s body language.

In this transcription, I notice something interesting, particularly in that second line: “for that reason”. That is the direct translation, but it’s not the natural translation; the natural translation would be “that’s why”.

This is a helpful way to get your brain thinking in Spanish – you’ll naturally put those two together. Languages put together their words differently to say the basic ideas of different words and phrases, and it’s an important way to make sure you’re thinking the language, not just translating it.

I prefer this approach to translation, but obviously, that’s a personal preference.

And of course, you can take a quiz on the video, just like in the native content.

My Content

Everything that you do or make note of is saved in the My Content section.

This includes a history of the content you’ve consumed, the vocab you’ve stashed away to review later, any other vocab lists you’ve made, and the vocab you’ve labeled “already known”.

You can separate them by the kind of content you’re looking for, too, so if you watched a video a while back and want to go back to it and see how much easier it is for you (which, by the way, is one of my favorite ways to see how much better I’ve gotten in a language), it’s not hard to find.

While you can see the level that all this content is at, I wish you could organize them by beginner/intermediate/advanced, at least. There is a big difference between the three levels (both in vocabulary and speed), so it would make reviewing content just a tad easier.

FluentU app review

FluentU will suggest you install the FluentU app (available on Apple and Android) from the get-go, and I don’t see why not! The FluentU app is just as smooth and digestible as the desktop version, so it’s great for on-the-go language learning.

The FluentU app is nice and smooth and fun to use…but I do have one complaint.

I mean, from a usability standpoint, it’s just fine. But…just look at that. Why is it so ugly?

There’s this HUGE empty space in the middle of what you’re watching/listening to. Why is that there?

Could they not put in more helpful content there? Could they not make the English translation a bit bigger? Anything?

FluentU review: who it’s for

Now that we’re at the end of this FluentU review, the question remains: how do you know if FluentU is right for your language learning goals?

Fortunately, FluentU has content for language learners of literally all levels (as long as you’re studying one of the languages offered).

Plus, there’s even a list of future improvements that FluentU is working on!

FluentU is an excellent way to immerse yourself in the language naturally and easily – a lot of the videos are just content from YouTube or something like that, and they’re all outfitted with transcripts, dialogues…the whole nine yards.

At the same time…it’s really not pretty. The content itself can also be pretty random (20+ beginner Spanish playlists, but 3 intermediates and only 1 advanced) so it’s not the most reliable. The native educational content is also really cheesy!

If you like the concept but are looking for more options to learn with video, I’d recommend checking out Yabla – it supports fewer languages, but I like all the games and activities!

But if you really love the concept and the native tools showcased in this FluentU review, start a 14-day free trial with FluentU!