App Profile: Albanian Learning: Beginners

1&onlyDUDE

Rating: 5/5

Great help to learn Albanian

alyslush

Rating: 3/5

As a native English speaker I lived in an Albanian community for a couple years and learned some of the language while I was there. Since being back home I have lost a lot of the language due to no use for it, but was feeling nostalgic and wanted to see how much I could remember. I appreciate the time and effort that was put into creating this app, but I do have a couple critiques. First of all, it’s not a very user-friendly layout. The volume in the practice exercises didn’t want to work for me. Secondly, I noticed several mistakes right off the bat. I jumped straight into doing the number quiz and it has that 7 is gjashtë, but it should be shtatë. I skimmed through some other exercises as well and noticed several other spelling or grammatical mistakes. I know full well that dialects can impact spelling and pronunciation in different regions, but for apps that are teaching the language I do believe it’s beneficial to stick to the language as it would be academically taught as closely as possible. But overall it was a decent way to review what I knew.

DAViDATiOUS!™

Rating: 3/5

The automatic “Siri” voice that has been added in to read back pronunciations does not know how to pronounce the letters. I’m guessing the words aren’t any better. This is a very important part of learning the language. You need to add your own custom recordings of pronouncing the letters, words, and phrases properly.