6 best Language-learning Apps to Have

There are plenty of apps out there to help you learn a new language, which makes it tricky to pick the right one. You may need to strengthen your vocabulary, get some conversation practice in, practice your grammar, or all of the above. Whatever your objective, there’s likely an Android app for you. Here are the 6 best language-learning apps to help you learn a new language. 

Here are a few of current popular ones, so you can pick up a foreign tongue without attending any classroom.

1. Duolingo

This app is one of the most popular language apps around. It’s free, well-featured, and easily accessible. Lessons are broken down into chunks and it feels like you’re playing a game.

The app divides languages into different topics, like clothing or business, but also into adverbs, pronouns, and other grammatical subjects. You need to interpret the content and audio. You can slow down the audio if you’re having trouble understanding it. It offers a wide range of activities, too, meaning you’ll often switch between typing answers, speaking them aloud, and choosing from a set of multiple choice answers.

The offline mode is limited, so you really need a Wi-Fi or data connection to make the most of Duolingo. You may also upgrade to Plus from $7 a month to access courses offline, unlock progress quizzes, and enjoy the app ad-free.

It supports over 35 languages like English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Irish, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Ukrainian, Esperanto, Polish, and Turkish.

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2. Mondly

Already having Apple’s award for the Best New App in 2016 and with over 50 million downloads, this app is getting better each day. It’s easy to use, and designed to get you speaking fluently, fast. This app lets you learn in your native language, great for non-native English speakers.

The app’s colorful design and attractive content make it fun to learn, with in-depth lessons on over 20 topics for beginners, intermediate, and advanced students. You get to learn in a real-life context, and there’s a chatbot with speech recognition so you can practice your conversational skills. It also offers a competition board to track your progress and a variety of games, quizzes, and activities to help you consolidate your learning

You’ll get access to the first section of six lessons, one conversation, and one vocabulary section for free. It also includes one new lesson a day, weekly quizzes, and monthly challenges to test your progress. You can learn only one language at a time. You can subscribe and unlock all languages and features at $10 a month or $48 a year.

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3. Babbel

This app also has lessons between 10 and 15 minutes each. There are list of lessons that cover different abilities, including those tailored to both beginners and advanced learners. The app teaches you a range of terms, words and phrases, and challenges you to spell them out, speak them aloud, and use them into sentences.

It majorly focuses on conversational learning and it explains grammar rules as you progress. Filling in the gaps in mock conversations is amazing and the lessons progress in a logical, traditional manner, starting with basic conversational phrases that you’ll want to master. You may also download lessons to work through while you’re offline.

With a bit rough deign around the edges the software’s voice recognition doesn’t always work the way it should. You will get one lesson for free with Babbel, and need to pay from $7 a month if you want full access to the learning materials for a single language.

Using this app you can learn languages like English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Polish, Indonesian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian.

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4. Busuu

With an impressive learner base of more than 60 million people, this app is worth checking out. It’s a great app that offers about a thousand complete lesson packages, all of which are created by linguistic experts and span an impressive amount of content. It features essential flashcards, along with grammar, writing, dialogue, and pronunciation exercises. It also has quizzes and vocabulary games that are quite fun for testing your knowledge, and they keep you easily engaged while you learn.

It offers writing exercises and essential flashcards, but to get the full experience of courses and bonus tools, you need to subscribe. You can subscribe it between $6 and $10 monthly. One outstanding feature of Busuu is the robust community of both native speakers and fellow language learners.

Supported languages include Spanish, English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Polish, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese.

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5. Tandem

This app is geared toward conversations with native speakers. The idea is that you can help learn new languages through text, audio, and video chat. The app helps you to find a partner who shares your interests. They teach you and you teach them.

Once you agree on a time to chat, you can pick particular topics that serve as conversation triggers, which helps ease the initial awkwardness of talking to a stranger. It’s free if you can find a suitable exchange partner. You can also pay for a lesson with a professional tutor, if need be. Its most functionality is free, still you can upgrade to Pro, from $7 a month.

To sign up, you’ll require a Facebook or Google account. There are also moderator checks to ensure that you’re serious about learning, and to weed out those who are abusing the service. You need to wait for your profile to be approved.

Supported languages include English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and nearly 150 other languages.

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6. Memrise

If you want to practice and expand your vocabulary, Memrise is a fun way to do it. This app works like a game, one in which you travel to a foreign planet as a spy and you score points for correct answers. You can frame language lessons, and the bulk of the courses consist of memorizing specific words and phrases using mems, which are strange sentences or images.

You can also listen to audio recordings of several words and phrases, and occasionally see video footage of native speakers saying them.

It usually functions as a vocabulary builder, so you’ll want to combine it with conversation and grammar lessons, if possible. You can sign up for the app via email, or use your Google or Facebook account, which grants you access to the wealth of community-created content.

The app’s basic functionality is free, and you can subscribe for $9 a month to get access to additional games and an offline mode.

It supports languages like French, Spanish, German, English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, and more than 100 other languages.

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