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OkyDoky Review: very fun way to get useful vocab

January 11, 2022 by Jamie Leave a Comment

Note: this review is currently being updated. Some information may be outdated.

OkyDoky (formerly Hey! Lingo) is a new resource for foreign language vocab that offers language learners a ton of languages. What it lacks in history it makes up for in diversity (both in languages and in the ways you can learn the vocab in them).

In this OkyDoky review, I’ll explain all the ways in which you can learn all this vocab, and what kind of language learner OkyDoky is best for.

OkyDoky languages

OkyDoky is for learners of 38 different languages, including:

Albanian
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Chinese (Mandarin)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Estonian
Filipino (Tagalog)
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese

Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese

Bonus! Just like Mondly, OkyDoky is great for language laddering: any language you can learn with OkyDoky can used to be learned any of their other languages as well.

Using OkyDoky

Once you create an account, you’ll immediately be walked through a tutorial of the app so that you’re aware of both how to use it, and what options are available to you to learn a language.

https://vimeo.com/1044386409/527c5bd612?ts=0&share=copy

At first glance, this seems like a completely reasonable way to approach learning a language, as long as you already have some beginner knowledge behind you. This tutorial assumes you know beginner vocabulary and verbs, which is worth noting.

Also worth noting? Just from this first glance, all I see is AI. I’m hoping that it’s just the tutorial and the cover art that is AI, and the rest is human made (let’s not take a lesson from Duolingo, please!).

Your path to 3000+ words (which leaves you a solid-sized vocabulary to practice actually speaking)
Courses (start with frequently used words & end speaking long sentences)
Vocabulary (learn useful words related to a single theme)

You can choose to learn vocabulary with either of these two paths, whichever one is more useful or interesting to you. For example, if you want to be conversationally fluent as quickly as possible, you’d go by way of courses; if you want to be able to talk about specific things, you’d go by vocabulary.

This right here is already a pretty good indication of the flexibility language learners can get from OkyDoky! This not only offers us a specific road map to achieve a specific goal, but it also includes several ways to get there.

And, no matter which path you choose, you can pick up whichever course you like, whenever you like. This allows us the flexibility to be spontaneous and creative in what we’re learning, while still working towards the same long-term goal of 300 words.

OkyDoky review: flashcard types

I’m a big fan of resources that allow us to switch up how we’re consuming our flashcards. There’s Anki, which has several different options that we can mix and match however we please. There’s uTalk which takes us through a predictable pattern to build our skills in multiple ways. How does OkyDoky do it?

Here’s what I got when I selected a French course. There’s a lot here, so let’s dissect it.

How many cards in the course, depending on if you’re a plus member or not (more on that later)
Different tabs to go through as you make your way through these cards: “Study”, “Review”, “Difficult”, and “Pinned” cards. These are great tools for keeping track of the terms that are more difficult for you
“Timer Speed”, which you can use to speed things up or slow them down if your comprehension is higher/lower than average. You can also turn this off if it’s putting too much pressure on you
Card types

Card types is the biggun’ here! We’ve got “Translate”, “Listen”, “Build”, “Switch”, and “Blank” (I told you, OkyDoky is all about options and flexibility!).

Here’s what some of the different card types looked like when I just selected “all”.

There’s a couple of things I really liked about how this session went. First of all, even though I left myself open to all the card types, it started easier and slowly got a little harder (i.e. “Build”).

Second, if you like all the fun little sound effects and graphics of Duolingo, you’ll love OkyDoky. With the little clicking sounds and the “success” sound effect, plus a big giant reward star that pops up every time you get 5 or 10 in a row right…OkyDoky’s got the gamification thing down pat. This will absolutely keep you interested in language learning.

Oh, and for the sake of building your comprehension, the term is repeated multiple times, whether it’s a “Listen” card or not.

If you get it wrong? No worries, it’ll show you the answer for you to review, and make a note of it to test you on again later.

And that’s pretty much it for the cards themselves! While you’re not going to get any grammar lessons or explanations, this can make for an excellent way to pick up grammar in context. Simple, yet very fun and effective.

Looking for more information? Scroll down to see a list of all the flashcards you’ve been working on.

Seriously, OkyDoky’s graphics are on point! The whole website gives off a great fun/easy-going/perky feel.

You can see a visual representation of how well you know each phrase, the translation (and transliteration for languages with non-Latin alphabets), two different audio recordings of said phrase, a little emoji describing the phrase, and a link to a forum to discuss (again, much like Duolingo).

Because OkyDoky is still so new, there’s not much in terms of discussion. However, just like Kwiziq was when they first expanded to Spanish, you’ll get a response pretty quickly.

Fair warning: if you head on over to the Discussions sections, you’ll find a lot of users correcting OkyDoky’s content and complaining that there shouldn’t be so many errors.

They make a fair point, but I can’t say how their content is created, and they consistently heed the advice and make the corrections. So, you know, take that bit as you will. A brand new website isn’t going to have all the kinks fixed just yet.

OkyDoky’s chat courses

Recently, OkyDoky has released 80+ new language courses in a new feature called chats! To access them, make sure you have the most recent version of the app (or just use the website on desktop) and click on the brown speech bubble courses.

With these chats, OkyDoky switches it up a little bit and goes from kind of random phrases to phrases that you’ll use in an actual conversation. You don’t have all the options of the other courses, but it is a good option for connecting the information you’re taking in into some more realistic “conversational” practice (you’re not actively having the conversations, i.e. speaking, but you’re still creating those connections between random words/phrases and getting used to real-life chats).

It’s pretty simple: you’re given a phrase, a few fill-in-the-blank options, and a timer. Your job is to make it make sense.

As you can see, your correct answers are in green speech bubbles, and incorrect ones are in red. In the end, you get your stats, which let you know how you did in that particular session.

And, per the rest of the app/website, you can replay the chat just with the phrases that you struggled with to really dive deep into the more difficult stuff. So it’s a challenge because you’re essentially throwing yourself into the conversation, but it’s not a challenge because you’re still not actually speaking.

OkyDoky’s other tools

Besides the main show, the flashcards, OkyDoky has a few other tricks to help us stay motivated, consistent, and interested in our language learning.

First we have the Leaderboard. As OkyDoky continues to improve I can see this as a really helpful motivation tool to keep us learning!

At the moment there are two versions of the site-wide Leaderboard: one by language, and one for all OkyDoky users put together. It’s pretty easy to rank at the moment because there aren’t that many users, but I hope once enough language learners join you’ll be able to compete just against those in a particular course.

I would love to see this develop into something along the lines of Duolingo’s leagues, where you’re pit against a certain amount of members every week. But, as of right now, they’re working with what they’ve got (i.e. not too many members).

Another option, if you have friends who are also using OkyDoky, is groups! Create a group and give your 4-digit group code to anybody you like in order to compete with your friends (a much easier and personal competition than everyone learning a certain language).

You can create a group with as many languages as you like, and edit which languages are counted at any time.

Next up we have daily goals! Go into your account page and see some simple statistics for your study habits.

Unfortunately, these aren’t really front-and-center – it took me a minute of exploring the website to find this. However, I do really like the calendar view. Some may want some more in-depth stats (especially for paid members), but at the moment this section is pretty simple.

Besides the fact that I really need to focus on one course at a time, you can see the percentage of the words I’ve learned, when I’ve studied, and how long I’ve studied for (excellent fodder for PolyLogger!).

Underneath, you also have the option to set a daily study goal and set a daily reminder, either via email or via the mobile app.

OkyDoky prices

Even for a paid language resource, OkyDoky keeps it pretty accessible. They don’t block out entire courses but instead give you a little bit of everything. Just in the French course I reviewed for this post, it included 38 free words and 329 extra for paid users.

So what does it take to get those extra words? Well, not much!

OkyDoky is very accessible. I recommend getting that membership now; like I said, it’s a pretty new resource, so these prices may very well increase over time.

And keep in mind, OkyDoky currently covers the most often-used vocab of 26 different languages, and we get access to every single one of them with an account. The sky’s the limit folks!

Who should use OkyDoky

That’s the end of this OkyDoky review. Do I like it? Yes. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Because it’s still in its beginning stages, there are a lot of errors that need fixing. While it’s easy enough to report errors and get them fixed, this does mean we need to take these flashcards with a grain of salt sometimes.

OkyDoky really shines in its use of gamification, giving us those little endorphin rushes whenever we click around the site. It also mixes up the flashcards really well and gives us the power to choose what kind of learning we want to be doing.

And, of course, I love the visualization of the OkyDoky goal. With that specific goal in mind, language learners who are looking to bulk up on phrases in a variety of different languages in a fun way are gonna love this!

It’s a lot like Duolingo, but strictly for vocab and phrases. Like I said, you’re also not going to get any explanations behind grammar rules or anything like that, so if you can’t figure out these phrases via context, you’ll need to go somewhere else for backup.

Preply Review: great for student, not for teacher

January 11, 2022 by Jamie 10 Comments

Preply is an online platform for teachers of a variety of subjects (not just foreign languages) to connect with online students. Specifically, Preply is well-known for offering dirt-cheap lessons, which attracts language learners who want to save a buck or two.

Honestly, I’m of the opinion that spending a few extra bucks to support an experienced tutor is always worth it, but this Preply review is for all the language learners who want a realistic, no-fluff review of a language learning platform that can help them to push their spoken language skills forward.

In this Preply review, we’ll talk about what I love and what I don’t love, from using the platform to an actual lesson with a (very cheap) Preply tutor, including what Preply does differently than the competition.

Preply review: getting started

When you first get started, you get a screen very reminiscent of Verbling and italki: a list of Preply tutors who teach your target language with an intro video, schedule preview, pricing, intros, and more.

You’ll also notice the menu bar at the tippy-top where you can narrow down specific features that are important to you. Again, italki and Verbling also operate similarly, though each has different options. My favorite is to organize by gender, but I didn’t get that here. Oh well! Preply does allow you to search by:

Language
Price
Country
Availability
Specialties (including learning disabilities and test preparation)
Other languages spoken by tutor
Whether or not they’re a native speaker

….and you can even search by name or keyword, which is great! I’ve definitely run into the problem where I’ve been searching for a specific tutor and just…couldn’t. Such a simple functionality that isn’t nearly as common as it should be!

Anyways, I narrowed my search down to $5/hour (because if you’re on Preply, you’re probably looking for something cheap), and Spain as the country of origin. Only one Preply tutor popped up and she wasn’t available for a few days, so I expanded the country of origin to also include Venezuela. Found my tutor!

On the tutor page, you get a few key details, including their “about” section, reviews, how many lessons they’ve booked in the last 48 hours (implying success/popularity), and a little intro video. While intro videos probably won’t say too too much that the “about” section already says, this is a good opportunity for you to listen to how your potential tutor speaks, and see if you can understand their accent/way of speaking.

This particular tutor didn’t have a resume on their profile, but many of them do. Of course, you likely won’t get a decorated teacher for $5 an hour, nor would you want to if you want a high-quality education from someone who has spent the time and money to earn various certifications and work highly-skilled jobs.

Scrolling down, you’ll also get a peek at the tutor’s availability in your time zone and their past clients’ reviews.

As you can see, Dargy was wide open!

If you look closely, you can see that instead of just blocking out the times when she’s not available, there are greyed-out letters. If you guessed those are the initials of the student scheduled in that time slot, you’d be correct. In my opinion, that’s kind of weird. Why is it important what a student’s initials are, except to the tutor? Why did Preply make that choice instead of simply blocking the time out? I have questions here!

Anyways, I went ahead and booked a trial lesson with Dargy. I’m not really sure what makes it a trial lesson though…it was full price, for an hour! An hour is a long time for a 1:1, especially for a first lesson. 1-hour lessons wear me out, and I wish there was an option to schedule a 30-minute lesson, especially since the schedule is broken up into 30-minute chunks. Weird.

There were a couple of interesting perks, at checkout, too!

Specifically, Preply has some major fail-safes in place. For one, you get free lesson cancellation until 4 hours before your lesson. I’m not sure what happens if something comes up and you have to cancel after that – maybe you pay a fee, or maybe you work it out with your tutor.

More importantly, though, is that Preply’s got your back if your tutor doesn’t show up or you’re not satisfied: either a full refund or free replacement! I wonder if they’ve had problems in the past with tutors bailing? That’s the most aggressively secure guarantee I’ve seen anywhere!

Once you have your lesson scheduled/paid for, Preply directs you to prepare in a few different ways. Some directions are to prepare for the lesson itself, others are to motivate you to consistently set up more lessons.

The first is the option to make sure you can get into the Preply classroom smoothly, and that all your tech works. I love that they have their own classroom as opposed to relying on something like Zoom or Skype (which hasn’t been the go-to for foreign language tutor platforms in a while, fortunately).

Very simple and smooth: I approve!

When you get your email confirming your lesson date and time, it also includes a link to this classroom, which I love! I copied & pasted it directly into my Google calendar so I didn’t have to go searching through the Preply website when the time came. This is what I do with all my Zoom meetings, so I love that I could seamlessly add it to my schedule.

After that, I was given the option to test my level and set goals. You can edit these at any time in the settings of your account.

If you can stick to this…it honestly seems pretty legit! The levels are based on CEFR guidelines, and Preply does a decent job of breaking down how to get from where you are now to your goals…though it is important to keep in mind that this is based on the speaking skill only, so don’t expect the certification to be good for anything besides putting it up on the wall.

Like I said, way to get language learners to stick to it! If you want some light structure, this is not a bad start!

Oh, and one more thing: this guy popped up while I was on my lesson page.

Ideally, if the trial lesson goes well, you can get a monthly subscription to your tutor and save another few bucks! Consistency is absolutely key to improving your speaking, so this is a super interesting move into the Netflix era of the internet. This is the kind of thing that BaseLang has been doing from the start but at a much less intensive/expensive scale.

Preply review: the problem

Before attending my lesson with Dargy, I did some searching to see the inner-works of the platform. Most anyone can be a tutor (unsurprising – that’s usually the case), but I did find one key feature of Preply that was….upsetting, to say the least: the pay that tutors receive.

Yup – Dargy wasn’t even getting paid for my first lesson with her!

Not only that, but she was losing at least a quarter of my payment until we had 201 hours together.

Holy crap!

Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand that the platform needs to be financially supported, and I absolutely believe that Preply should receive some sort of commission for hosting and maintaining all these tutors. I also get the value of promoting long-term tutor/student relationships. But I don’t like these numbers.

Considering I didn’t want a full-hour lesson in the first place and Dargy wasn’t even getting paid for her time with me, the first thing I did when our lesson started was request a 30-minute lesson instead.

By the way, Dargy was very gracious, kind, and intentionally asked me how I felt about our lesson together/if I had any feedback for her. She got 5 stars from me!

After our scheduled time together, I got a BUNCH of notifications pushing me to schedule more time with her. Specifically, I was prompted to schedule another lesson/buy a subscription to her:

as a notification in the app
in an email
in a pop-up after I rated our lesson

This is a good way to keep students accountable, honestly. Especially considering you have to spend over 200 hours with a single Preply tutor for them to keep more than 75% of their income from you…and keep in mind that with subscriptions, they’re earning even less from you. Yeesh!

Nonetheless, when it comes to the success of a language student, I am a fan of any tactic that removes obstacles between the learner and their commitment to studying. It wasn’t spammy – more like you have to make the decision to turn down more lessons three times. I’m sure it works, and if it convinces more learners to improve their foreign language skills, I’m all for it!

What you need to know about Preply

Like I said, I was honestly not expecting this Preply review to be very high quality – I figured it was a matter of “you get what you pay for”. I do have to say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised!

I love the platform. It’s incredibly user-friendly. The app is really nice, too, and gives you notifications for your lessons. I love the option to commit to a long-term relationship with a Preply tutor, and all the other methods that really encourage you to stick with it and stay accountable, like setting reasonable goals and expectations for having conversations a few days per week. I mean they really hook you in!

I don’t love the payment model. It was already kind of strange that a trial lesson was a full hour (a long time for even a normal 1:1 lesson), but Preply tutors aren’t even paid for it? That’s gross. Plus, you have to commit over 200 hours to a particular tutor for them to keep over 75% of their pay? Even after the student discount with a monthly membership? Yikes.

All in all: this Preply review shows that for the student, Preply is great. For the tutor, not so much. Nonetheless, there are tons of highly qualified Preply tutors with great resumes and lots of experience, so one has to assume it’s not all bad!

Want to give Preply a shot? Click here to get 50% off your first lesson with Preply!

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!