Speechling: Learn Any Language

After a couple days using this app it becomes obvious that it is bar none the most effective way to learn a language. Dont waste your time with other apps that only give you the feeling of progress, or dont let you check your own pronunciation. However, the UI is really bad. I actually uninstalled the app when I first got it because the user interface was so unintuitive. Happy to provide more details, but there are always too many buttons up, and if you press the wrong one it messes everything up. Despite that I will put up with it because the core mechanics are the best (free) of any app I know. Unfortunate for the devs I guess, the free features are useful enough I feel zero need for the paid features.

Many options to study, so what you should do upon opening the app is less straight forward than with other popular language apps. Dictation mode really helps for developing a native ear! There's modes that really get you to listen and talk, which is what other apps are missing. The sentences are so much more practical than in other language apps (duolingo, memrise, glossika, I've tried them all). The voice actors are good, I wish they consistently spoke faster (at native speeds) and less...robotically (my native friends make fun of the mechanical enunciation 😂). You can get really far in free mode. Feels like you have to be pretty advanced before paying for a coach is helpful. Sure there's bugs and the app is less "beautiful" or gamified than the competition, but it actually works and isn't useless like the others, so what do you care about in your language learning?

There are lots of apps that teach you tourist phrases or do flash cards one word at a time. But this app has several important (to me, at least) features you don’t often see. First, they have many language levels. Second, they have lots of spoken word content and several ways to use it. For example, I started by listening to phrases in French and then English. It has a nice UI for repeating phrases in both languages. But it also has phrase flash cards where you can let it know whether you understood and it uses this to determine rotation of flash cards. Third, pretty much everywhere in the app it lets you record your own voice and here it played back side by side with the original. Which leads to the final feature, a built-in coach. Now, I haven’t really used this feature. But it lets send the audio you record to the coach and get feedback which I thought was pretty cool. The irony is that I like this app more than the others I’ve tried and so much functionality here is free. I’m impressed with how many different phrases they have at each level. If I end up using this regularly, I plan to get some paid content just to support the app (i.e., not because I need to “unlock” anything). Overall, very impressed. I certainly hope they can keep the content coming.