Jumpspeak | Language Learning

This app is one of the worst ever created. If you’re unfortunate enough to lend them your financial information, then you will have no choice but to cancel your card, otherwise you’ll be charged hundreds of dollars without recourse. Part of the ruse has to do with subscribing either through the app or the website. If you go directly through the website, you might have a chance to avoid being cheated, since there’s no third party for these criminals to hide behind. If you go through the app, they’ll refer you to a robot that plays dumb and it will be impossible to be treated fairly, since they can just blame the third party and refuse responsibility for their crimes. This absolute scam is part of a wave of criminal behavior within the online world where they will bait well meaning people to giving them money via a third party and then leave them with nothing. I have even met one of these people at a foot massage place in Southeast Asia and was taken aback at how shameless he was about these businesses practices; it was even creepier since he was rubbing his hands together the entire time he was speaking jovially about how the third party subscription trick made them enough money to refund all the website subscribers while paying for a reverse engineered Frankenstein app created in the basement of an abandoned 3 star hotel in rural Cambodia. Buyer beware!

Let me tell you about my very short experience. I’m trying to become much more fluent in Japanese, and I saw this as a really great tool as I only have few speaking partners and they are all sleeping when I’m awake and want to practice. Enter Jumpspeak. I saw ads for this app and was excited to give it a try. I thought the price was a little steep for essentially an AI practice partner, but if it got me speaking more, I was all for it. Boy was I wrong. The conversational topics seemed forced and limited. Almost as if they didn’t know what else to include in the app to talk about. There were no apparent conversation choices about more relevant topics, making me feel disengaged. Often times the AI would catch itself in what I call a “compliment loop” where you both are saying the same thing over and over add infinitum. Other times, I get the SQL database information (that I shouldn’t get) and in a JAPANESE accent but in ENGLISH the bot reads the DB info. This happened to me 3 times, and each time broke the flow and immersion of the experience. This was enough for me to request a refund. While this app does have massive potential, it’s isn’t there yet. For it to be in release and still have major bugs appear so frequently, but charge so much and for support to be so shallow is unacceptable for me. If things improve, I could potentially be back, but for now, this was a massive waste of my time, research, money, and energy. Unfortunate.

I love that this is the closest thing you have to simulate real conversations with locals minus doing it in real life. This chatbot concept does open the door to build fluency drills without having to feel embarrassed about how to say proper pronunciation. However, I think this type of app only taps into a small portion of what is required to learn a language. You still need to be aware of basic grammar/sentence structure/tenses in order to fully excel in this app, and that requires other software like Rosetta Stone in order to fill in that gap. It would be more attractive if you had the tutor and conversation database updated for more languages. Also, having only kanji available as text for Japanese is going to be a severe learning curve to get over unless you have an option available for English phonetic alphabet pronunciation for those that haven’t studied kanji/don’t have the time for it. All in all, it is a fantastic app, fun to play with for just a few minutes a day, and it makes me more determined to want to learn/speak French more fluently.