Language apps: the good, the bad, and the ugly
We took the top nine apps for language learning from Google Play store and tried it ourselves to see what the competitive landscape looks like. In short, many apps cater to beginner learners and get them exposed to a few languages. In this article, I’ll detail the salient aspects of some of these apps. We purposefully excluded Duolingo as we believe, overall the app provides superior user experience to a wide range of audiences.
Drops: unique language selections
Some of the Apps that we’ve tried included very small languages. Drops included Ainu, which is an indigenous language of the Ainu people on the island of Hokkaido in Japan. I would have never thought of getting exposure to a language that’s spoken by so few people. However, conversely, for such an inaccessible language, the carefully designed icons of Drop don’t do justice. Let alone the fact that I was not able to practice sentences.
Tandem: an eerie quasi dating app
While it’s marketed as a “Language Exchange App,” when we tried the app, language learning felt more of an excuse to casually get to know someone. My female co-founder only got men messaging her to practice languages. More so than that, many of the conversations felt a little forced without any topics provided by a moderator. And last, it’s an unequal relationship. In an ideal world, each person in the matching would get to practice their desired language for an equal amount of time, but it’s rarely the case in real life.
Memrise: the master of mnemonic devices
When very charismatic people repeatedly say with intense exaggeration a sentence, it’s hard to forget. The emotional expressions, the humor, all are mnemonic devices that Memrise leverages for the user’s experience, and it works! My team still keeps talking about the elderly actor who kept repeating “我去” (I’m going). However, practically speaking it is a profanity to say this phrase.
Lingo Deer: an oddly similar app to Duolingo
For the longest time I kept calling the app “Deerlingo,” and that’s when I realized, in essence, it’s the same as Duolingo, but perhaps poorly executed. One thing that the app tried innovating on was including a stronger emphasis on speech. The user has to record them reading out a paragraph and once it is done, it gets thrown into a leaderboard. The quality of the audio recording is abysmal, but at a premium price, one can improve on that. The aim is to get to the top of the leaderboard through awkward self-exposure to upvotes by other learners. It simply begs the question, really, why?
Common trend: pay to learn
One thing that in this day and age of freemium apps does not work is that paywall that pops up when you want to learn more. Drop limits the free learning to 5 minutes, other apps limit to a few lessons. Given that Duolingo, the dominant player on the market, provides a freemium subscription model, paid content in other apps simply won’t float. The users would likely churn from the app and choose one that they can continually use with a few ads here and there.
