Fluent Forever - Language App

I am in the middle of my free trial, and I will admit that I have learned a lot so far. I read the book a while back, and have been trying to find some way to make the flashcards that incorporate pronunciation. I thought that this was it. I love the design of the flashcards. They test you on pronunciation details, spelling, and translations, and they have the spaced repetition built in. Sounds great. Here's my problem, though. Where on earth did they get the words? In the book, the author said that you should learn 625 words that will give you most of what you need for a basic conversation, and that you should use this list to make your flashcards. So you would think that the flashcards in the app would come from this list, right? Nope. I have flashcards for "gray album" and "Yugoslav album". People don't use albums anymore, for either music or photos, and Yugoslavia isn't even a country anymore. There are a lot more examples, but I can't go look them up, because the only way you can see your cards is to do a review of the flashcards. I can't find a list of my flashcards anywhere in the app. Since the app isn't using the recommended word list, and I have no control over what words are made into flashcards, I have to dock 2 stars off my rating. I don't know if I'll continue with the subscription after the free trial. It's that annoying.

This app is fantastic as a way to easily and efficiently make flash cards and review them. I also enjoy the ability to easily search for photos or add my own from my camera roll. It would be an invaluable tool to my language learning except for a pretty serious drawback for us advanced learners: There is no way to add your own words/sentences as flash cards. The explore tab rarely ever returns a match for any vocabulary I’ve encountered naturally through the media I consume in my target language, and it rarely includes the right conjugations of verbs when I’m trying to learn grammar. I can’t add chunk phrases I’m trying to learn, either. I’m disappointed that fixing this issue hasn’t been made a bigger priority. Users absolutely need to be able to add their own material!! It’s frustrating because otherwise I think the app is a near-perfect tool, but I hate being limited to only the material available through the explore tab. So, great for a beginner to whom all vocabulary is potentially new, but unbelievably frustrating to use as an advanced student. Please, please fix this issue! It has SO much potential aside from this!!

I love the fluent forever method and this app is extremely user friendly. Unfortunately, because I started with the book and the anki card method, I actually find that the app became a little too watered down during the effort to make it fast and user friendly. The thing I miss from Anki is being able to really customize the cards. To help me remember what words were masculine or feminine, I would write masculine words in blue and feminine in pink. That’s not possible in the app so I’m finding I’m having a lot more trouble with remembering genders of new words. Also, when making cards on my computer, I could use any photo I wanted. The way they allow you to choose photos on the app is certainly very fast but if I’m not loving the bing options, I wish there was a way to choose a photo from somewhere else like google search or even import a photo from my camera library. Maybe some people aren’t as picky as me with this but when using anki, I enjoyed the process of finding the exact right photo to help me remember even if it took a little longer. Lastly, I wish there was a way to access all of my flash cards in the app so that I could look up a word or review as many cards as I want per day. In anki I was able to do a custom study session which I can’t do in the FF app. Like I said, I think FF is amazing and is by far the best language learning method out there, I would just like a little more customization abilities in the app :)