Not really a proper review thingy, but more like thoughts upon trying some stuff and deciding to keep some notes to not forget and end up picking stuff I did not like the first time.
All these are my personal opinions on them, so they might not align with yours. 👍🏻
Colour key (?) I made for these notes:
red: I'd avoid this app
yellow: meh, not a fan but there's worse i guess
pink: maybe it's better to try this when you already have some basics of the language, and not from scratch
green: I like this app
blue: not bad, like- good but nothing to write home about
HiLocal
Appeared like a nice language learning app, with the chance of some language exchange feel... but as soon as I opened it, it shoved me their AI in the face for learning and it irked me a bit. Deleted account and uninstalled.
LanguageCrush
Unless you already have some basics for your target language, it's not a good app for starting out. Better for practicing after having already a decent level of knowledge in a language.
Koryo Korea
A pinch of basics are needed for this app. The courses feel a bit clunky and mainly give you some vocabulary and phrases but doesn't feel like it's helping learning. Better for memorising, maybe.
Teuida
A good app. The lessons start from the basics and the video lessons where they simulate a real life situation where you'd use the words and sentences you have learnt. Mainly voice/audio focused, so it kinda helps with figuring out the pronounciation... even though the voice recognition sometimes doesn't really work, and makes you repeat something until the mic catches it.
Busuu
I'd say it's better than Duolingo before it become ai-powered shit. The free version letsyou follow the main course for a language and only a few things are behind the paywall. There are ads, yes, but it's only promoting their paid version and usually only before and/or after doing one of the lessons. There's a little community-like thing where you can correct other peoples' exercises and viceversa.
HiNative
Similar name to HiLocal but afaik it's a different thing. It looked kinda nice because you could ask questions/clarifications to people who know your target langued natively, but I uninstalled it quickly because unless you have already some basics it's not easy to start from scratch with this app.
HelloTalk
I wanted to try a "language exchange" app that wasn't Tandem (it wasn't that great years ago and I heard that now it became worse) and I picked this one. I feel like if you're fem/register as fem you might have more chances of finding someone to chat bc many use these kinds of apps as dating-app-lookalike, but I tried registering an account under my deadname and I still had no interactions LMAO Feels more like a social network than a language app. There are some stuff in-app for learning, but I didn't really enjoy them when I tried them. There are voice chats (didn't do much other then lurking in one for a bit, so I have no opinion on those) and you at least can avoid interacting with the damn ai, because apparently they are everywhere now.
TalkIn
Another language exchange app. Picked this because it had many stars on the app store, but weirdly no reviews written (maybe deleted? idk but it wasn't the first app with this issue). You can sign in with FB, Google acc, phone and mail. I tried the registration by mail because I didn't want to connect my google account, but then got an error message kept popping up. I uninstalled and left a negative review addressing this issue. The developer said they disabled email regisation to avoid bulk registrations and people bothering the community already in there... while this is understandable, I do not like an app who forces me to connect my personal account to register. And if you remove the option for mail registration, you should remove the option from the main page, duh.
Learn Korean! Hangul
Okay. Nothing much to say about this, it's good for learning/reviewing how to write the korean alphabet. It's a bit picky with how you write the strokes for the letters.
QLango
Appeared like a valid option, but I noticed that the difficulty of the various levels (A1 to B2) didn't feel regular as they should be. In a Korean A1 course there were more things you'd have to already know before starting out, while the French B2 was easier (imho, I have only B1 level and haven't practiced French in like a dozen years) than it should have been. And there's ai here, too. You can spot it only when completing an exercise (in the pop up that appears there's a "ask the ai" thing) or opening the sidebar menu with the buttong to go ask DeepSeek questions. Deleted account and uninstalled.
always studying during work hours...and I finally improved my notetaking! At first, I rushed up writing down only some vocabs and nothing else; but then I decided to use the slower times to properly write down stuff instead of just screenshotting and nothing else.
I might have to give up on travelling to Korea this year, but at least I can keep learning the language!
When I started trying to read a book in French to try jogging my memory (I had a B1 back in 2012 and now I remember nothing lmao), I also started underlining and writing the meaning of the words that made me struggle a bit and now I found the list so- here it is? In no particular order bc I don't remember if I searched them as soon as I found them or only after finishing some pages.
English version here!
BTW the book is: "La Nuit des Temps" by R. Barjavel
