breaking news: best language app ever

as i mentioned yesterday, i'm getting back into learning languages, and have recently made a list of all the resources i'd recommend. this list is incomplete, though, as i don't remember perfectly all the resources i used to know and love. however, several of the apps i used to use are still on my phone, even though they have been offloaded to the cloud. 

i just started learning japanese, which i haven't really dabbled in very seriously before, though i have learned a good chunk of one of the alphabets, simply because i found a cute and fun enough gamified app that i literally couldn't resist. so this app stuck in my head, and i opened the language app folder on my phone in order to re-download it and start learning more japanese. 

lo and behold, i see an app i had totally forgotten about, called lingodeer. back when i used it, i think it only had three languages: chinese, japanese, and korean. at the time, it was right up my alley, as an asian studies major specializing in chinese and korean language (many other more popular language apps at the time, like babbel, only had european languages). i specifically remember lingodeer being a good app for learning the korean alphabet. 

as i tried it out anew, i was blown away. it basically felt like if duolingo was actually very good. i've defended duolingo before and i stand by it; it functions perfectly fine as daily practice for your target language, if the features of the app don't get on your nerves too much (they don't get on mine). though i must say, this can vary wildly across different languages. in my opinion, duolingo is more fun to use for languages that they spend less time developing. for the ones they put a lot of time and effort into, for the user this just means more lessons, not necessarily at a helpful pace: in other words, more fluff. it's been perfectly lovely for me learning swedish, but i didn't love using it for german. 

anyway, lingodeer has many of the same features as duolingo, but with several improvements. namely, entirely much less fluff. this does mean it's harder, and sometimes it's nice to have a super easy no-brainer app to use as your daily practice, but for me learning japanese, my priority actually is getting as good as i can as quick as i can, not it being easy and brainless. 

along the same lines, the lingodeer activities are just a bit more interactive than those on duolingo. for example, instead of clicking full words to form a sentence like on duolingo, lingodeer had me click each character/syllable and form the entire sentence by myself. on the first or second lesson, mind you! i'm several lessons into duolingo and it's still going over the same half-dozen vocab words. 

the best part is, in the years since i've been away, lingodeer has also added several more new languages! i'm excited to poke around and see how useful it might be for other languages too. they don't have swedish, but other than that they have all the other languages i need!

the lingodeer logo