Yabla Italian

I love the app but when going through vocabulary reviews, where you enter the word, the entire app freezes and needs to be restarted. I also wish all features were available especially going through your vocabulary.

While Yabla offers lots of content, search and sort mechanisms for finding content appropriate to your skill level are poor and really need upgrading. For example, you can sort by skill level or type of content (music, tv, lessons, etc), but you cannot search by more than one criteria. So, sorting by INTERMEDIATE level yields 799 results; sorting by LESSONS yields 312 results, but you cannot sort by INTERMEDIATE + LESSONS. This means that you have to scroll through the list of 799 or the list of 312 to find the content you want. That is a huge waste of time, so I really hope the developers will make the app more robust in this area.

I love this app. As a beginner in Italian, I purchased this app to assist with pronunciation and listening/hearing. As an American, this is quite challenging when learning a Latin language. We annunciate each word separately. Plus I am learning on my own, so I don’t have others to speak and listen to. I rely heavily on the loop and slow features of Yabla - working my way through the videos. Note, most apps and language programs, which claim to get you speaking “right away”, are lying. They will teach you the days of the week and how to say “hello”, (which is not necessary in most of Italy as many Italians, especially in the tourist industries, speak better English than many Americans). And when you arrive, you will quickly learn that you cannot understand a word they say! I know because I’ve been through this. Yabla does have instructors teaching these elementary subjects as well. But what I find most useful is just diving in and learning and listening and repeating after the instructors using the slow and loop features. This is getting me used to hearing, interpreting and pronouncing. The videos range from beginner to fluent, so you can pick and choose. Lately I’ve been using history lectures as I’m planning a trip this fall. As I become more advanced, I am beginning to notice some Italian grammar anomalies which I wonder about. For example, Italians seem to use the present tense to express the past. I find this odd because the language is so intensely characterized by verb tenses. So I googled this question and discovered that there is entire section of Yabla which contains ridiculously easy to understand explanations, references to interesting videos which use the grammar, and other useful references and points. I didn’t even realize this section was there! I would highly recommend Yabla. It’s worth the $$ and will take you all through the process. I have waisted more money than this on the multiple apps I don’t use.