From Both Sides Now: Holy Crap So Many Apps!

 Back when I was still teaching, students would frequently ask me for my recommendation for apps for learning English.  I hadn’t really investigated the topic, but usually threw out DuoLingo as a name because it’s free and it’s gamified.  In truth, though, any language learning tool, be it beautifully engineered software or handwritten flashcards, is only as effective as long as you use it frequently and consistently.  Will you use it five or more minutes a day, every day?  Then it’s a good tool.  Will you pay a lot of money for it, binge use it for a couple of days, then stop?  Then it’s not a good tool.

One of the problems inherent in most language learning apps is that they try to be all things to all people for all target languages.  The problem, however, is that different languages present different challenges to different learners due to different factors.  To take my own current example: Spanish is a grammatically gendered language with extensive verb conjugation.  

For people not into foreign language learning, let me explain: nouns in a great many languages have a gender, typically masculine and feminine for Romance languages (German throws in a neutral as well).  This typically means that there are two different variants of articles (“a/an” and “the” are the indefinite and definite articles for English, respectively), depending on whether the noun they are with is masculine or feminine.  Adjectives attached to these nouns also get endings depending on gender and whether they’re singular or plural.

Furthermore, verbs in Spanish are EXTENSIVELY conjugated, with different endings based on number (first, second, or third, as in “I”, “you”, or “it”) and number (whether they’re singular or plural.  Plus whole different ways of doing the endings depending on the verb tense (where you are in time) and voice (whether you’re talking about fact or conjecture).  Fortunately, at this point I only need to learn present tense, but I want to make sure that’s solid before I have to throw in other ones.  

And just to make matters worse, even though 95% of verbs are likely to be regular, the remaining 5% are irregular (which means memorization rather than extrapolating from known building blocks), and language being language, the most common ones are the most likely to be irregular (like “be” and “have”).

So, to that end, I need apps that will help me learn those two classes of grammar challenges.  Genders dovetail nicely into just learning vocabulary, and I have a trick planned for that (which I originally designed for German genders, but never got around to using).  Vocabulary is something I will tackle with a spaced repetition system, which I will get back to in another post.  But for conjugations, I have identified a couple of different well-rated apps which are specialists rather than generalists: ConjuGato (love the pun!) and Ella Verbs (also a pun, but only when you see that the icon has an elephant in it).  Watch this space for reviews in the future!