Learning a language has many benefits including helping you to travel and keeping your brain alert in a way that minimises your chances of dementia. Learning a new language can be good fun and can help you to meet new friends from all over the world. Some of the best language learning apps include Babbel, Duolingo and Busuu. Most of these have a free version that you can download, and you can then decide to pay the plus or premium version if you feel that you are getting a lot out of it. I personally do subscribe to Duolingo Plus!
- Babbel
Babble is a great language learning app that gets you talking on your first lesson. Babbel is an excellent option because it teaches the full range from beginners (A1) all the way up to proficient learners (C1) depending on the learning language.
- Duolingo
Duolingo is my favourite language learning app. The east to use gamification combined with the motivational Duolingo owl gets you into a routine of language learning. The idea is to work your way through the Duolingo leagues competing with friends and earning trophies. When you complete the units you move up the tree, and it can take over a year to complete the Duolingo tree for a language doing 10-15 mins per day. You can reach up to intermediate level with Duolingo.
- Memrise
Memrise is a vocabulary learning language app that uses memes and gamification. You can learn vocabulary with Memrise for almost every language on the planet. It has fun and unexpected topics such as ‘naught Japanese words’. It focuses on repetition and mnemonics to help you to learn new vocab.
- Busuu
Busuu is a language course app that has 12 languages to choose from. It helps you to practice individual dialogues and has audio to help with pronunciation. You can collect points which are berries, and berries lead to badges. Busuu is a popular option over Duolingo as its comprehensive lessons and accurate translations.
- Rosetta Stone
One of the most popular language learning apps is Rosetta Stone. It’s an excellent app for learning vocabulary, but doesn’t give too much content. Although it has state of the art recognition software, it doesn’t always work. Rosetta Stone is popular due to the reputation it had in the days when it published books and CDs, but actually in terms of apps it’s not the best.
Overall I really like Duolingo and Babbel as apps to learn a language, but I do believe that this should be combined with proper language tuition and preferably face to face lessons with a native speaker.
Personally I prefer Duolingo over the other apps because I really love the format and the motivational owl! But I understand the restrictions and may decide to move on to Babbel or Busuu next. What about you? Which app do you like to use to learn a language? Or do you prefer face to face learning?
