Linguin - Listening Practice

Really nice way to practice reading and listening comprehension, and you can also save vocab. The stories are cute and interesting , often filled with informative material. Good free version. Paid gives you access to customizing your vocabulary/questions more. Sometimes bugs when you get an answer wrong. Also I would love if you could hear the audio when you tap on the sound icon in flash cards.

I find that it’s really helpful to read along with speech in your target language to develop fluency in listening.. I like the simplicity of the stories for beginner and intermediate. I also appreciate being able to adjust the speed of the speech. I’m reading the Italian stories. In the dozen or so I’ve tested out, I found a couple glitches: there has been missing text causing the read-aloud to skip ahead & not be synchronized; one of the quiz questions was actually true when the answer key said it was false and referred me to a different paragraph in the story when I pushed the “why” button. I just closed out and went to a different article. I’m not sure how these glitches would affect the learning of a beginner, I was able to recognize errors because I have a decent vocabulary.

I’ve been trying to learn how to truly speak Italian intuitively for two years now, and this app has helped me in strides in just a few months. Other apps focus on learning one word at a time, focusing on peices, but not really helping me learn how to properly put the vocabulary together in a way that flows. Linguin gets me used to seeing sentences and phrases and words in real use-case scenarios through many short stories, exposing me to the natural flow of a language so much better than other apps out there. If you’re a totally new beginner, this might not be the app for you, but if you’re an intermediate level learner, this app will truly be the difference in making you feel confident in speaking and understanding your new language.