Speakly: Learn Languages Fast

I have really enjoyed using Speakly to brush up on my German, but I wish there were support for non-European languages. I would have given Speakly five stars if it supported any of the languages I would consider starting to learn, but that is unfortunately not the case. I am a bit disappointed that Speakly has lately prioritized adding Norwegian, with apparent plans to add Swedish. No offense to speakers of Norwegian or Swedish, but considering that there is already fairly broad coverage of European languages, and that highly popular non-European languages such as Mandarin Chinese and Japanese are still not supported, I would have hoped Speakly would choose to diversify a bit more. Mandarin and Japanese are spoken by hundreds of millions of people worldwide and are in high demand among language learners. Introducing non-European languages would make Speakly more diverse and culturally inclusive. It should not be so hard to find competent teachers, linguists, and voice actors to create quality materials for these languages, especially given the large number of Mandarin and Japanese speakers worldwide. Speakly already supports a non-Latin script with Cyrillic, so it seems it should not be such a huge challenge to add support for non-European scripts as well. I hope Speakly will consider adding non-European languages in the future to make the platform more inclusive and appealing to a wider audience.

I’ve been using Speakly for several months now, and I like it. It’s ONE of my favorite language learning apps. I typically just stick to building my vocabulary each day since I do mix in other apps, but it offers a lot of different options and I add all the music suggestions to my library. However- there is one thing I cannot stand. The speaking questions where you have to form a sentence. Sometimes it’s fine, and other times it’s SO picky it’s impossible to get past the question. I’ll be stuck on it for days sometimes because it takes the most minuscule detail into account that no one but the app would notice. Sometimes I eventually have to just skip the question which is frustrating. I am learning Spanish, and my boyfriend is a native Spanish speaker and even he agrees it’s ridiculous sometimes. He’s always on me on my pronunciation, so I know it’s not just me or he would 100% tell me. Even he answers the questions for me and it says he’s incorrect. I really wish the app wasn’t so robotic and took different dialectics into account(for example, the app uses the Spanish lisp, whereas my boyfriend is Mexican so he doesn’t use it and neither do I). Again, I really like this app but this one problem is really frustrating to me.

So far I’ve used the app for just a little over two weeks. It’s fun and easy to navigate. I like the live situations and choice of words and phrases. They’ve been starting to stick and the listening exercises are also nice with the option to translate it to your native tongue or target language as well as the live situations. I didn’t give it a 5 star because it’s crashed on me twice and my progress for the particular lesson was lost. It’s not a deal breaker but when I’m at work on a short break and trying to squeeze a quick lesson in its slightly frustrating. It’s not so bad when I’m on my leisure time I just start over something I normally do anyways after a lesson to repeat the lesson. And last but not least. The audio on certain words is clunky and not always spot on or mashed together so I have to go to google translate type the (German) word or phrase I’m studying and get a second opinion from google. It’s not the most convenient thing when you have to stop open up another app to hear the word/phrase slowed down or pronounced correctly. I hope the Speakly team is able address these issues in the near future. Overall I really like the app so far and and combine it with other free green bird apps, podcast and good ole text books when I want to unplug. I hope this review was helpful, take care all. 🌍 ✌️🧠