Online Spanish Courses and Learning Apps: Which One is Right for You?

As a business case study, DuoLingo is rather interesting. It has flipped the traditional language learning model on its head in order to deliver a quality product to language learners for free.

Instead of charging students to use the service, DuoLingo has been designed in such a way that the firm’s owners are able to make money from tasks willingly performed by language learners studying on their platform.

This is all explained by the company’s founder in this Ted talk (skip to 8m30), but essentially the model involves using translations carried out by DuoLingo students within the application to help translate real life texts (that are then paid for by external clients).

The result is that the product is free at the point of delivery for students of Spanish and other languages.

How it Works

Start using DuoLingo and you’ll be immediately launched into practicing Spanish language terms. There are no lessons to explain things to you; instead you’re presented with a series of vocab, pictures and Spanish audio files and have to match all these things up.

As you progress, you’re increasingly asked to transcribe Spanish audio and, of course, to do a significant amount of translation between Spanish and English texts. There is also some opportunity to practice your speaking also, by reading out Spanish sentences which are then picked up by the program’s in-built voice recognition software.

An important feature to also mention is DuoLingo’s design. The firm has gone to great lengths to make the whole learning experience as close to a game as possible: the graphics are cartoony in style, as are the sound effects, bonuses gems and other points you pick up as you advance through the material. All this is well integrated with social media so you can easily compete with your friends and colleagues.

A final innovative and recently added feature for DuoLingo users on the Mac platform is the ‘language bot’ function. This allows you to chat in your target language to an automated program that will respond to you as if it were a real human being. This is not a feature I’ve seen on any other tools and is an exciting development for the field of language learning.

MosaLingua’s Spanish learning app is like a supercharged phrasebook and vocabulary learner for Spanish and a bunch of other languages. The normal app provides all the stuff you’ll need to get around, order food, make arrangements and manage some social interactions when visiting a Spanish-speaking country. There is also an app for business Spanish, that’ll be useful if you’re visiting for work purposes.

How it Works

The app is based on a flashcard system, with each word/phrase accompanied by an image and audio file to assist memorisation and pronunciation. You can easily tailor your learning by selecting the level of difficulty and topic areas you want to focus on, along with the number of words/phrases you’d like to learn each day. In the newly launched desktop version, you can also use MosaLingua’s plug-ins to create your own flashcards based on words you’ve come across from other sources.

All this info is compiled to produce your own tailored language learning routine. The app uses a variety of different methods to help you commit the terms and phrases to memory: including testing you on Spanish/English and English/Spanish translations, working from the audio files only, as well as using anagram exercises / spelling puzzles for the Spanish words.

Once you’ve worked your way through the first bunch of phrases, at regular intervals over the following days and weeks the app will prompt you to do a quick test of these phrases. At this stage you can mark each word to say: whether you completely know it, know it fairly well, struggled with it a bit, or had completely forgotten it.

MosaLingua works all this feedback into its system so that future tests will feature more of the words you struggle with and fewer of those that you don’t. Indeed, the whole app is specifically designed to Spanish vocabulary into your long-term memory by using a method known as spaced retention. In other words, the app tests you on stuff you’ve previously learnt, precisely at the time that research indicates you would be in danger of forgetting them.

Fluent in Three Months is a well-known website run by Benny Lewis, an Irish entrepreneur who reportedly speaks seven languages fluently and is able to converse in four more. Based on his experience of learning so many different foreign tongues, Benny has developed his own specific techniques which he has subsequently developed into a range of products.

Benny’s guiding philosophy is that you should try to get out and actually use your language as soon as possible and not worry about making mistakes in the early stages. In other words, he believes you should learn to speak a language by, well, speaking the language. The actual linguistic content of many of these products is minimal, as the focus is more about providing you with the tools and confidence so that you get speaking with locals. In this sense, they are almost like self-help guides for people who have always wanted to speak another language, but have always hidden behind written exercises or found other excuses not to.

How it Works

The main guide that Benny has produced for Spanish is an eBook called ”Why Spanish is Easy”. The book claims to examine the “‘hardest’ aspects of Spanish in a new and positive spin, using fun examples and mnemonics to help you commit them better to memory”. It is split into three sections that deal with how to get started, speak better Spanish and navigating the trickier bits of grammar.

The UK’s public broadcaster, the BBC, has produced a detailed series of resources, exercises and lessons to help anyone learn Spanish for free. Of the various tools provided, the most engaging has to be the ‘Mi Vida Loca’ series, described by the BBC as an “interactive video learning drama”.

The course begins with you on an airplane, about to begin an imaginary trip to Spain. You’ve just discovered that your Spanish-speaking travelling companion will no longer be able to join you, so you won’t be able to rely on her language skills. It’s not up to you to deal with all the situations you’d face for real on such a trip, like dealing with taxi drivers, sorting out accommodation, paying for food, and responding to a few unexpected surprises along the way.

How it Works

The course revolved around a series of videos that are all filmed in the first person – as if it was you who was really sitting there talking to the taxi driver, waitress, or your new Spanish friend. From the very beginning you are exposed to real dialogues, at real speed. However, after an initial screening, the narrator then interrupts to rewind the conversations, stopping after each phrase to explain what has been said.

The little drama excerpts are accompanied by interactive exercises to test what you’ve learnt. For example, when the taxi driver reads out the cost of your fare from the airport, the video is stopped and you are prompted to click on the correct Euro note to pay for it.

Similarly, you might be asked to respond out loud to questions from the people you interacting with, or to stop someone in the street and ask them directions to the metro etc. Though there is no inbuilt voice recognition software, you can easily check your own responses by clicking on a button in the video which reads out the correct answer in Spanish.

The Pimsleur Spanish course is a premium language learning product, but one which came recommended by several members of our Spanish learning community. The courses (which are available in numerous languages) are all based on what they call the ‘Pimsleur method’; a technique developed by a professor of applied linguistics using his research on how children first acquire language skills in their native tongue. The lessons that Dr. Pimsleur learnt during these investigations were then adapted and applied to suit adults during their acquisition of a second language.

How it Works

There are three principles at the heart of the Pimsleur method. First, avoid information overload and focus principally on the few basic words and structures at the heart of communication in any language. Second, use ‘graduated interval recall’ methods (reminding you of words you learned earlier at increasingly spaced intervals) in order to commit words to long-term memory. And third, always introduce new vocabulary in context and immediately get students to engage with it by repeating aloud several times and then using it in new sentences and questions.

Though the course includes plenty of reading exercises, quizzes, flashcards and whatnot, it remains an audio-led course. There are four levels of tuition available, each consisting of 15 hours of audio that is designed to be studied for half an hour a day. The lessons work by introducing you to a sample dialogue – at normal speed – in the expectation that you won’t understand it.

Afterwards every phrase, word and even syllable is broken down by the instructors, and repeated multiple times. On each occasion, you are expected to say the terms out loud to help commit them to memory. You then return to the dialogue and a similar procedure is followed and the handful of terms are repeated again. Shortly after, you’ll then be expected to respond to questions and make oral translations using these words. You’re also instructed to mix up the few words and phrases you’ve just learnt to make new sentences and communicate new ideas.

Fluencia is a Spanish-specific learning platform developed by the language experts from SpanishDict.com. The idea is that learners focus on conversational Spanish from the outset, not just business or tourist Spanish, and the available content later goes right up to a very advanced level.

How it Works

Fluencia offers a lot of material as it has 9 levels, each of which is broken down into 10 units that are in turn comprised of between 5 and 7 lessons. Within each unit there is a good mixture of learning materials and exercises, including a sample dialogue, vocab lessons, a bit of grammar, pronunciation guides, some cultural information and then a review section.

The dialogues at the beginning of the unit are accompanied by graphical transcripts and images, with each phrase separated out into a clickable section so that you can easily return to listen to any particular phrase after the conversation has finished. The exercises and quizzes, at least in the early stages, mainly consist of putting words from Spanish phrases in order or matching up the Spanish words with those heard on the audio.

The latter lessons in the paid version include much more extended conversations held in near real speed. Paying subscribers can also use the voice recognition software, receive email reminders to study and are added into Fluencia’s ‘smart review’ system that purportedly increases testing and retention of words/phrases you don’t know well.