Millions of followers came to the Ray Du English YouTube channel for his lively language lessons grounded in everyday life, then stayed to learn the secrets of how he managed to learn Italian from zero and pass the B1 level with flying colours within the span of a year.

In addition to discipline and comprehensive planning, Du relies on an assortment of apps to improve his productivity in language learning. Here are the best tried-and-true tips he shared with the App Store Editors to help you become a polyglot too.

Quizlet’s easy flashcards for acquiring vocabulary and memorising concepts make it an integral tool on Du’s learning journey.

The Ray Du way: I create flashcards in Quizlet’s desktop edition and use folders to categorise them. Then I study the words in the mobile app. You can also use a gamified approach to review what you’ve learned – I generate multiple choice questions and tile match-up tests to reinforce my memory.

Quick tip: Search for flashcards uploaded by other users on the Home tab, or make your own, like Du, to boost memory retention.

Once he establishes a foundation of words, Du moves on to putting the language to use. For example, when he was studying Italian, he wrote diary entries in English, passed them through DeepL Translate’s AI engine and analysed the sentence structures in the generated Italian results.

The Ray Du way: If I wanted to say ‘I’ll see you later’, DeepL Translate can give me a direct translation as well as alternative phrasings for that sentence. If you’re looking up a word, the app also provides synonyms. It’s perfect for learning how to say something in different ways.

Quick tip: DeepL Translate supports voice translation. Tap the microphone button on the main page to launch the feature, which comes in very handy when you are travelling in a foreign language environment.

This app is a game-changer for many people. Use the right prompts and techniques and it can help you with any number of tasks, including learning a new language.

The Ray Du way: I ask ChatGPT to help me clarify or explain grammatical concepts. For example, I’ll feed a sentence into the app and ask it what grammatical rules were used, and then ask it to test me on those concepts.

Quick tip: Leverage the app’s ability to summarise and extrapolate. When Du was studying Italian’s reflexive verbs, he asked the app to find similar words and explain how they are used.

Your phone helps you study, but it also distracts. Opal helps you control your screen time and block app notifications so you can focus on the task at hand.

The Ray Du way: When preparing for a language test, I set a limit on how long I can spend on social media. Once I reach the limit, the app locks those apps and I can only use what’s on my allowed list, such as DeepL and Quizlet. That lets me focus on what I need to do.

Quick tip: Set your parameters before locking things down – you can choose whether to allow apps to open immediately or only after a predetermined time. Using the strongest controls means you won’t be able to access locked apps until the time expires – even if you delete Opal.

YouTube’s wealth of audio-visual content includes an abundance of language-learning videos to help you learn natural-sounding expressions from native speakers.

The Ray Du way: There’s lots of carefully curated topical material – verbs, dialogues and so on. Many people don’t know that you can download videos. Before I travel abroad, I find and download instructional videos to watch even when I don’t have access to the internet.

Quick tip: Tap the Download button below a video and it will be made available for offline viewing in the You feed under Downloads.