Lingvist is hands down the best language learning app out there, and, believe me, I have tried them all (including all of the fully paid versions). I took French in school, but never learned to actually speak the language (despite always getting As). Over the years, I have wanted to fix that and finally learn the language for real, once and for all. I am not exaggerating when I say I have tried ALL the language learning apps out there (and not just the free versions, but the fully paid subscriptions). Many were useless, some were very good, but nothing compares to Lingvist. When I started using Lingvist, MAGIC happened. Suddenly, I was able to read novels (actual novels written for adults) in French, including books that I had purchased years ago but given up on as impossibly difficult, and even watch many movies/TV shows in French (something I had all but forsaken). Lingvist made my vocabulary EXPLODE—and somehow, I just remember the words I learn in Lingvist so much better than through other similar apps. As if that weren’t enough, Lingvist has an amazing feature that lets you create custom decks of words to learn. All you have to do is type in a list of words you want to learn, and Lingvist defines them and creates sentences with them. You can even tell Lingvist to expand on your custom list and find other similar words to add. I have no idea why Lingvist is so much more effective than other similar apps, but it just is. It’s like a magic wand for language acquisition. I feel like I have had pixie dust sprinkled on me.

This app is amazing. It’s everything you need to expand your vocabulary in German, Russian, French, Spanish, or Portuguese. Most apps give you just the basics and some structure—even Rosetta Stone—this app teaches you an immense amount of words. Absolutely worth the subscription price for the serious learner.Having all that said, there is one thing this app desperately needs—to understand we’re busy and we can’t always manage daily studying or even weekly studying. It desperately needs “levels” of some sort so we can go back and study all the words we’ve learned before. I remember quite a bit of them, but after two months of not using them or more, it would be great if I could go back and review those words at-will. Having all that said, I’ve completed the Rosetta Stone and Duolingo courses and they were okay for the basics, perhaps a few days travel in a country that speaks your targeted language, but this was the vocabulary breakthrough I needed to make German radio stations much more intelligible. It’ll help you get to the point where you can reasonably understand most of the conversations others speak. Great job, Lingvist team, now please consider those additions to the app.

Overall I like this app but it has flaws. The app should accept alternative words in the phrases, not insist on me having to learn another word. I already know how to say this. (learning a language is hard enough) Secondly, the voice option capitalizes the first spoken word (when more than one word is needed) and then it doesn’t accept the solution, it wants lower case , then I end up having to type it in by hand. Sort of negates the voice option. Thirdly: Everything is spoken by a robot who really can’t pronounce Italian 100%. It sounds like an alien and according to my Italian teacher the robot actually makes mistakes inflecting some words the wrong way. Recordings of real people would be much better. Also the algorithms throw the words at you that you don’t know, especially within the first 10-20, out of 50. It would be better to intersperse it more; ask for words we already know, so we can first warm up a little and feel better about ourselves. What’s good: learning words in context, in sentences. It doesn’t look like a stupid videogame. I don’t want virtual trophies and be overly praised for no reason. In case any of you Schmucks are actually ever reading this: we should not be rated by including the new word performance! After all, they’re new! Percentages should be based on repeats only. Bye. Off to find something better.

In ways, Lingvist is Duolingo for grownups—more advanced and without Duolingo’s annoying animations and autogenerated encouragement. And Lingvist does a much better job of targeting the areas where a particular user needs work. But Lingvist has a key shortcoming: it doesn’t help users understand why a particular synonym is correct in a particular context. Why, for instance, is “gleich” rather than “nun” or “jetzt” the right answer for a particular prompt? Occasionally a notification tells the user that the answer isn’t wrong but isn’t the word Lingvist is trying to teach, but even these notifications often don’t appear when they should. And the English translations seem unreliable. For instance, “Ermöglichen” and “sorgen für” are both translated as “ensure”, but “make possible” and “take care to” are probably better translations. And obviously “yield” isn’t the right translation for the past-tense verb “ergab”. Consequently the user too often must simply learn by rote to provide a particular answer for a particular prompt without knowing why.