Would you like to brush up on your French before you go on holiday? Or do you want to be able to understand fellow students better when studying abroad? You can now simply learn another language on your smartphone. We put some apps for learning foreign languages in the spotlight.
There are several ways to learn a language and which option is best for you depends very much on your needs. If you want to improve your French or German a bit for a short city trip, there are a number of useful and free apps available. If you really want to learn a language seriously, it’s almost inevitable to pull out your wallet.
Yet it does not have to be expensive: for a few euros a month you have access to good online courses, via your web browser or via apps. If you want to take it even more seriously, you can also find online teachers who can teach you a language via a video connection.
In addition to taking lessons, it is of course also very important to actually speak the language. If you don’t have acquaintances who speak the language you want to learn, there are special apps with which you can find a so-called tandem partner.
All these solutions are discussed on this page.
The 12 Best Foreign Language Learning Apps
Duolingo
If you want to learn the basics of a language, you can hardly ignore Duolingo. This app has no less than fifty million users worldwide, making it one of the most popular apps for learning a language.
From Dutch you can choose from three languages: Franks, English and German. If you want to learn another language, it is best to start from English. Then you can also learn Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish and dozens of other languages. Less spoken languages such as Polish, Greek and Finnish are also offered by Duolingo.
Once you have installed the app and completed the setup, Duolingo will ask you which language you want to learn. Now choose whether you want to start from scratch or let the app determine which level you have. The lessons are short and there is a lot of repetition, Duolingo focuses on all kinds of different things such as reading, writing, listening and speaking.
The app takes you through all the lessons as if it were a game, when you have completed a lesson you get points. Duolingo is completely free to use, but does show occasional commercials between classes. If you do not want to see any advertisements and also have offline access to Duolingo, you pay 7.33 euros per month.
Duolingo Alternatives
Duolingo is certainly not the only app that allows you to learn a new language. Other popular services include Busuu, Memrise and Babbel. Each app takes a slightly different approach and you decide which one suits you best. Fortunately, this is easy, because every app offers a free trial or you can use it for free for a few days before you have to pay money.
For example, Babbel uses images, which makes learning a lot easier for some people. In addition, sentences and texts are immediately read by real voices, so you immediately hear how a word or sentence should be pronounced correctly.
Memrise focuses on locals: you see short videos of people explaining things in their own language. Nice, because that way you don’t immediately learn a local accent, you also learn facts about the country where the person is located.
Busuu is a kind of mix of Duolingo, Memrise and Babbel. You’ll find short lessons here, you can practice on accents, and the app offers offline access with a premium subscription.
At Busuu, a premium subscription costs 6.66 euros per month with annual payment, Memrise Pro costs 5.83 euros per month if you pay it per year.
Babbel becomes cheaper the longer you take out a subscription. If you want to try it for a month, you pay 9.95 euros. For an annual subscription you pay 59.40 euros – that comes down to 4.95 euros per month. You can also use all services via the browser.
Best tandem apps
Once you’ve mastered the basics of a language, it’s time to put what you’ve learned into practice. If you don’t have the means to talk to a so-called native speaker, try finding someone through a tandem app – sort of like Tinder for language learners.
You register and indicate what your own language is and which language you want to learn. In the tandem app you will find people who are looking for exactly the opposite. You indicate your level and can start chats with your tandem partner.
The two best-known apps are Tandem and HelloTalk. Both apps work about the same, so you can improve sentences or words of your tandem partner in chats and it is very easy to translate a certain sentence directly in the app. Of course it is also possible to record or listen to text messages.
Of course, a tandem app has pros and cons. Most of the people you’ll find in the app are not professionals, so you may be learning the wrong things. It also regularly happens that your contacts make spelling mistakes, so it is useful not to use a tandem app if you don’t know anything about a language yet.
You can use HelloTalk for free, but it does have a limit in the number of translations you can do per day, and the search functions are also limited. An annual subscription costs 39.99 euros. It’s nice that with a VIP subscription you can also search for people in the city where you are, so you can also meet people in real life to speak each other’s language.
Hire an online language teacher
If you want to learn a language that is not available at a language school in your area, you can always look for a teacher online. One of the best known sites for this is italki.com.
click on Choose a language and choose one of the offered languages. The most popular are at the top, but if you scroll down you’ll even find languages like Kalmyk Oirat, Occitan, and Wolof. click on Find a teacher and you can see what a teacher costs per hour, how many positive reviews a teacher has received and whether a teacher also speaks another language. Handy if you can’t speak the language you want to learn well enough.
All teachers have a small introductory video so that you can get acquainted and see if the teacher would suit you. At the top you can also search for Teacher types, Availability or native speaker.
Click on a teacher’s page and see if the teacher is available at a time of your choice. You can book a lesson right away or contact a teacher first by pressing Contact speaker to click.
Hopefully, with these apps and services you will be well prepared for your trip. If you can’t quite figure it out on the spot, fortunately you can always fall back on Google Translate. You can read useful Google Translate tips in this article.
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