Interactive tools are not as flash as some competitors. Initial purchase price might seem steep. If you're interested in learning and understanding the building blocks of the Italian language, but you "zone out" with those long-winded textbook-style explanations Ouino Italian might be just what you need. It's another program like Rocket Italian that actually explains how Italian works from a grammatical perspective, but it doesn't overwhelm you with detail.
Ouino prefers to show the language in action through interactive examples and activities, while keeping the explanation to a minimum. What sets Ouino Italian apart is how empowering it is — even for people who might be nervous about learning grammar.
Each larger topic is broken into tiny modules, often covering just a small handful of words each. It's very easy to digest and remember the language this way, and the small modules make it a doddle to complete a couple of lessons over your morning coffee. All sections come with a range of interactive activities for each lesson. Often these will feel easy and repetitive, but they're quite effective for locking the material into your memory.
Ouino works on all devices, and can be bought either as a subscription, or as a one-off purchase. The one-off purchase price is extremely reasonable, and comes with free updates for life. The most digestible grammar course I've tried.
Highly interactive — most of your learning will happen through activities. Bite-sized lessons make it easy to see progress. Focuses on the most important and commonly used language. Extremely reasonably priced. This huge, detailed guide shows you how to get the most out of the course. The non-linear approach means some slightly-more-complicated concepts appear alongside easier concepts. These are marked with little warning signs. Pimsleur is one of the original great grandaddies of language learning, and their audio courses haven't changed a whole lot over the years.
You don't get a whole lot of explanation in Pimsleur, although there is an English-speaking narrator who points things out now and again. If you're interested in actively studying Italian grammar you could get another book or course to go along with your Pimsleur study. Where Pimsleur really shines is in improving your pronunciation.
You spend so much time repeating words and fragments of words while not looking at those words that your pronunciation will be fantastic. You might not learn very many words or phrases There are a range of packages and levels, but the general rule is that purchasing any Pimsleur course outright is very expensive.
The best option is to get their monthly subscription product. Very good for improving your pronunciation so long as you speak out loud. Also very good for improving retention due to spaced repetition. Teaches reasonably practical language from the get-go.
Quite dull, and with little explanation. Just repeat, repeat, repeat. The audio lessons don't teach you much about the mechanics of Italian some people might see this as a good thing , so if you want to study the grammar you will also need a textbook or another course. ItalianPod is quite probably the largest collection of learn-Italian podcasts and audio lessons that you'll find online. You'll find hundreds of hours of audio lessons on a wide range of different language features and topics, perfect for plugging in on that long drive or commute.
There are curated pathways for each level that will take you through the most important language in a logical order. For some levels, these pathways can be 70 - lessons long! Most of the Italian lessons follow a familiar format of introducing new language through conversations. You'll learn a new conversation in each lesson, and in the process the hosts will discuss the language features that appear in the conversation — normally focusing on one feature in particular.
Venturing off the main learning path, you'll also find a variety of other lessons — like lessons entirely filled with vocabulary, or discussing common sentence structures.
Or series of lessons on topics like superstitions, or holidays. There's a reasonable amount of variety here to keep things interesting, and the nice thing is you'll always be operating within your grade level, so the language should always be manageable for you. The collection of video lessons in the Italian course isn't as large as the collection of audio lessons, and also isn't as large as in some of the other Transparent Languages products.
So for Italian, I probably wouldn't sign up to a higher price membership just to get access to those. But a higher priced membership would also give you access to other features, like interactive activities, flash cards and line-by-line audio practice.
If you plan to use ItalianPod as your "core" Italian program, these would be worth getting. If you're looking for a big library of Italian audio lessons or podcasts, ItalianPod should be your first stop.
Both memberships will give you enough material to work with for a long, long time. HUGE library of Italian audio lessons. Curated learning path if you need it. Most lessons teach through conversations, which is more engaging and gives you additional language. Additional interactive tools with higher paid plans can turn the audio lessons into a powerful learning tool.
You can create a free membership no credit card required to try all the content free for 7 days. Content can be a mixed bag. Some of the lessons feel overly scripted and wooden i. Duolingo is everyone's favorite free Italian course. For most people, it's your first step towards learning a new language. It's interactive, full of cute animations and gamification features — points, 'lingots', streaks, and more ding-dinging sounds than a casino.
What's not to like? After finishing our studies, we decided to travel the world, and started to look into ways to learn a language while on the road. Language learning software was state-of-the-art back in the days. However, over the last couple of years, web-based learning has seen a dramatic rise in popularity, and still does. Mobile learning became much more convenient and sought after.
No wonder; the International Telecoms Union predicts that web-enabled mobile subscriptions will pass 70 per inhabitants in With all these changes going on and my high spirit for the technological future of online-based training, we've decided to evaluate those programs on my own. We hope you find it useful.
Thank you so much for visiting! The reviews on this site are based on my own opinions. The rankings are based on a voting system that relies on user interaction. The app also includes facts about the artist while you're learning. For now, the app only offers Spanish and German, but its website says it plans to add more languages in the future. I tried my hand at Greek on the Drops app. The app's fun, colorful layout definitely made the language which has its own alphabet less intimidating.
The app shows users each word in the Greek alphabet and the English alphabet, and says the word and shows an image of it. Drops is constantly adding new languages, most recently, the app brought on Ainu, an indigenous Japanese language. This can give you a leg up when your next lesson starts.
While not technically an app, the free Language Learning with Netflix Chrome extension can be helpful on your journey to becoming multilingual. Install the extension and click the icon to launch the catalog of movie and TV show options. You do need a subscription to Netflix though. Once you launch the catalog, you can pick from hundreds of titles that use movies on Netflix to help teach different languages.
For example, if you wanted to work on your Spanish, select the language in the dropdown menu, along with the country where you're using Netflix. If you're watching in the US, the extension generates titles. To watch one of the films, just click the red "Watch on Netflix" button. Depending on the language you want to learn, you might have fewer titles to pick from. As the series or movie plays, two sets of subtitles display at the bottom of the screen.
One set is your native language and the other is the one you want to learn. The words highlight as they're spoken, like a karaoke sing-a-long. You can listen to the dialogue phrase by phrase, pause and replay as needed, access a built-in dictionary and more. Pimsleur is an app that offers 51 languages to learn, but delivers the information in what is basically the form of a podcast. Essentially, you'll choose the language you want to learn and begin a minute auditory lesson which are downloadable and Alexa-compatible.
The app also has a driving mode, so you can improve your language skills during long commutes without looking at a screen. You get a seven-day free trial. Features include reading lessons, roleplaying challenges and digital flashcards. Perhaps the best-known language learning service, Rosetta Stone has come a long way since it started in the '90s. My parents still have a box set of discs for learning Spanish somewhere in their house. It's a lot easier now with the Rosetta Stone app, but you still need at least 30 minutes to complete a Core Lesson.
I tried Rosetta Stone's first Irish lesson, which was primarily auditory with images, though there are ways to customize the app to your learning preferences. The lesson started out fairly challenging, especially since I was completely new to the Irish language. But it did get easier as I went along. The iOS app got an update last year that brought augmented reality into the mix.
This enables Seek and Speak, which is a scavenger-hunt-style challenge. Point the phone camera at an object and get a translation in the language you're learning. Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. We delete comments that violate our policy , which we encourage you to read. Discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion. CNET editors pick the products and services we write about. When you buy through our links, we may get a commission. Shelby Brown. Best for an online school-type experience Babbel.
0コメント