I'm agnostic about language apps. I use them. I enjoy using them. I think they do some good. But I'm not sure how MUCH good they do.

General pros:

-- They're game-like, and therefore fun. They're designed to be attractive, so you WANT to use them. They give you quick feedback.

-- They therefore offer a relatively pleasurable way of learning and practising vocabulary and set phrases.

-- On the principle that something is always better than nothing, apps are a great way of doing bite-size bits of language study when you're really pressed for time. And for languages that I'm not currently prioritizing (Turkish and Portuguese), I'm hoping that regular bursts of a few minutes will stop my small amount of knowledge seeping irrevocably into the sand, and make it easier to focus on these languages again when their time comes. Will this in fact be the case? I'm not sure yet. I'll let you know...

General cons:

-- Apps can be addictive, so that you find yourself spending time doing these fairly mechanical exercises, when you'd be much better employed focusing on comprehensible input.

-- This is all the more valid because apps can really only take you so far... It is much better to think of them as a supplement than as the be-all-and-end-all of your language-learning. They're your vitamin tablets, rather than your well-balanced diet. It is a truth pretty generally acknowledged that you'll never reach fluency through using an app alone...

-- Predictably, then, they're also much more useful for your "baby" languages than for languages you're already pretty good at.



I regularly use three:

Duolingo gets lots of flak, but I like it. (See here for a very fair assessment of its pluses and minuses.)

Relatively recently, in the app version, they introduced a scheme whereby you lose "hearts" when you make mistakes, and once you've lost five hearts you grind to a halt (unless you buy new hearts with your slowly accruing points, watch adverts, or cough up for the paid version...). I don't know how this strategy is working for them, but in my case it has meant that I use the web version more, and the app version less.

Duolingo is good for getting you started in a language, or for rescuing a language you once had some familiarity with, but then left to vegetate. I completed the Russian and Chinese courses a while back, and have now moved on to different kinds of materials, but I still use Duolingo for Spanish (this course is long but very thorough, and helps my shaky Spanish grammar), and for Turkish and Portuguese (the latter also offers great interactive stories, as well as the standard grammar and vocab exercises).


Duolingo, a couple of weeks ago...

I really like Clozemaster. The principle is very simple: you just fill in the missing word of a sentence (by either reading a set of options or listening to the sentence being read). I find it very effective for vocabulary-building, because you see the words in context, and depending on your level and needs in any given language, you can choose to input the answer by clicking on the multiple choice option or by typing the word in from scratch (great for that tricky Russian spelling...). This app also lends itself really well to the "language-stacking" that Lindie Botes recommends. For example, I practise Turkish through German, Portuguese through Italian, Russian through Spanish, and Indonesian and Chinese through English...

The offerings on Memrise vary quite a lot, but I'm definitely benefiting from using the Turkish and Russian courses.

I've also just started experimenting with Memrise for Manx, but that's another story...