Happy Saturday, everyone! I was invited to beta test the new (more) advanced LingoDeer Korean levels. Of course I jumped at the opportunity! LingoDeer has in the past been my top recommendation for language learning apps*, and I have to admit that I was excited when news of the new levels dropped. Past experience has given me high expectations for the new levels.
I did the first four levels—titled "Impolite Form 1," "Impolite Form 2," "Will," and "Suggestion" before taking the next two tests to jump to higher levels. I took notes on my experience based on a variety of things. As this is a beta test, I of course took notes of any bugs that I found (and reported them through the app as I encountered them). Still, even the smoothest language app is useless if its information is no good, so I also made notes about the presentation and utility of the material. I'll take you through each level and the two tests so you can "experience" them in the proper order.
*Past LingoDeer reviews: Korean, Japanese, Japanese (exit), Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin Chinese (revisited)
Impolite Form 1
Notes:
Each level in Lingodeer has a "Notes" section that precedes the actual gamified learning panels. The notes explain the grammar and relevant cultural things related to the material that will be taught in the upcoming lesson. In this section, I found that the notes were quite thorough and, blessedly, they explained that despite labeling 해체 as the "impolite" form, they do not mean to say it is actually impolite. If you are aware of how low-key angsty it makes me when someone says X form =polite and Y form=impolite, you will understand why I'm so happy about this (hint: politeness is relative to the situation!). Also, they included some small pronunciation notes on the loss of 애/에 distinction in Seoul dialect, which I found to be a nice touch.
One fault I did find in the notes—one that I have found in past reviews—is that they are peppered with little grammatical errors. Not enough to obscure the meaning of what they are trying to say, but enough that I wonder why a few simple edits were not made to clean it up a bit.
In-course:
The good and bad things that I found in the "Impolite Form 1" learning levels all apply to every other learning level.
In the learning levels, the audio files were on point, though I did not expect anything less since LingoDeer has had (imo) the cleanest audio files of any language app since it first dropped last year. There is even an option to record your own voice when you listen to new audio examples so you can play back and compare your speaking with the example. I'm still waiting for the day that they implement pronunciation-check questions like HelloChinese did, though!
Another thing I liked in the in-course sections is that, when doing sentence building with syllable tiles (if you do not choose to just manually input all of the Hangul yourself), they now have blank tiles representing spaces. This is a huge improvement to just clicking on a bunch of syllables and getting a long string of smashed-together words. Still, spacing in examples and answer displays still could be improved. Particles are still spaced away from the elements that they attach to, and the difference in spacing between attaching element+particle vs. individual elements that would typically be spaced is not large enough to be easily noticeable. I would recommend either spacing regularly spaced elements even farther apart, or better yet, spacing things normally and just coloring particles and other attaching things like the copula 이다 to show that, while they are attached to something else, they are still distinct things.
Another thing I would like to see is more variety in the sentences that you are asked to work with. Seeing an example sentence and then immediately being asked to plug in a missing part of the exact same sentence makes it feel like you see the same sentence too many times, and you could ultimately just memorize the answer instead of having to actually apply knowledge to respond properly. I think that throwing in more sentences using previously learned vocabulary would be nice. I will note that the feeling of seeing the same sentence over and over lessened as I moved through the sections, as it seemed more "unexpected" sentences were getting mixed in gradually. Still, doing that from the very beginning would be great.
Impolite Form 2
Notes:
The biggest bone I had to pick in this notes section is that it claimed that 해체 is always formed by dropping 요 from the "polite" form or 해요체, when that does not in fact always work (ex: honorific -(으)시-). This is clarified in a notes section in a later tile... but still, even though they cleared it up later, I think they should not have made such a blanket statement in the first place, especially since they had already introduced 해요체 sentences with the honorific infix. Someone who has learned those forms but is not yet familiar with -세요 becoming -셔 in해체 could very easily get into a habit of writing sentences like (X) 바쁘세 instead of (O) 바쁘셔.
In-course:
"Impolite Forms 2" is where I made the most bug reports. The previous learning section was very usable, but this one was a bit of a mess still. There were a lot of missing images, and audio would not play. This was especially a problem if you wanted to hear the new example sentences read out, and on listening questions (just had to guess the answers for those!). I trust the team will fix those bugs soon.
Concerning the actual material itself, I was more or less content except with the huge amount of particle-dropping that they jumped into. While dropping particles in Korean is very natural in speech (and especially in 해체), it feels like they went straight from using all of the particles to using literally none in some sentences. There was no mention of this natural particle-dropping in the notes, and I think that it is something that learners should be made properly aware of.
"Will" and "Suggestion"
Notes:
I liked that the information in the notes for these sections was explained in a clear and easy-to-understand way, same as for the other sections.
In-course:
The issues with audio and image loading were gone, and the smooth user experience returned! I just had a minor bone to pick, that being how they translated "심심하다" to "boring" when "bored" would be more accurate. Solid levels overall!
Tests 1 and 2
I wanted to check out some test levels because they could give me an overview of material in the levels yet to come. I was pleasantly surprised: In those first two tests, which cover 16 sections, there was a lot of useful stuff including -기 위하다, the difference between 데려오다/가다 and 가져오다/가다, obligation with -아/어야 되다/하다, reasons with -기 때문이다, honorific particles and verbs, noun modifier endings, and more. All of it is really solid material, and that plus a skim over the titles for lessons further down (up?) the tree have me convinced that there is a lot of solid intermediate information in this new release.
Verdict:
The LingoDeer Korean 2 beta is full of solid information! Only in one level did I run into any serious bugginess, and the rest of my experience was smooth, with some nice changes and additions from what I expected based on my past experience with LingoDeer. Other than bugs, the things that bugged (har har) me the most were issues with how they space particles and such in example and answer display sentences, and the lack of explanation for some things I felt really needed explanation. Overall, LingoDeer remains at the top of my recommended language apps list, and I look forward to giving the Japanese and Chinese betas test runs as well (when I have the time!).
i decided to try out lingodeer to see if it would be good for learning korean! here’s a quick but not so quick video of one of the lessons if any of you are thinking about using it :D so far i think it’s really good!!! i love how they include audio!!! i wish they had some sort of a placement test when you first download the app, though; more advanced learners might find it a pain to go through the stuff they already know. (note: you can choose to have romanization on or off by that little button in the top right corner, i chose to turn it off because romanization is pretty inaccurate imo)
I really don't like my handwriting but at least it's clear😅 This week has been impossibly stressful so I lost my streak for a few days— back on now,, so close to finishing the first course!
I can't afford Course 2 on Lingodeer but they allow invites so I want to see how you can get one👀🙏
