Welcome back to the Learn English podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
On today's episode, we are going to discuss free language learning apps that you can use to learn English this year.
There are a lot of people who are trying to learn English.
Maybe you're one of them because you're listening to this podcast.
So on today's episode, I really want to go over these free resources that you can use.
I'm going to talk about the pros, the cons, and how I think you could best use them in your language learning journey this year.
If you're interested in learning about these apps, then follow along because we're about to begin.
Before we get started, I want to remind you to look in the description of this podcast episode.
There you will find the vocabulary list of the words and phrases that I say so you can take them and start building your English vocabulary.
Now let's talk about some of these apps.
All of them are going to be free and I really want to discuss what the pros and cons are for each so you can decide which ones would be best for you to use.
Let's start with the biggest one.
That is Duolingo. Duolingo is the app that is known for language learning.
Millions of people have downloaded it and it is one of the most popular apps when it comes to language learning.
Let's start with the pros.
The first pro about Duolingo is that it is a structured course.
There is currently a path model that Duolingo uses, which means that the lessons come in sequential order.
Sequential means that they follow one right after the other and you build on previous knowledge.
This is great if you are a complete beginner.
If you don't know where to start in your language journey or how to structure a lesson, this is a good option and a good thing that Duolingo has.
Another thing that I like about Duolingo is that it has a short grammar section at the beginning of some lessons to try to help explain what you're going to be seeing in that lesson.
The grammar part is very quick.
It's pretty short and it makes it simple so you can understand what you're going to be seeing in the lessons that are coming up.
The lessons themselves are pretty quick.
They're only a few minutes long and it doesn't take very long to get through a few lessons.
Another thing that I like about Duolingo is that they have a story part.
You reach these stories, which is some type of interaction between two characters.
You listen to the story and you try to test your knowledge and see if you understood what they were saying.
I think this is great because I think stories is a great way to learn a language.
And the last benefit of Duolingo is that it has added an AI component in the path.
You can reach a point where you can actually have an AI conversation with a character, you can do a phone call with them, and they respond to what you're saying.
That's pretty cool because you can practice your speaking in a low -stress environment.
It is not a real person, it is a character, which means that it doesn't really matter if you make a mistake, the Duolingo will still be able to answer and respond to you.
Now let's talk about the cons because I do think that there are a lot of cons when it comes to this app.
The first one is that it does make language learning into a game.
It uses that heart system and I don't think that's the best way to learn a language.
When I am studying I want to be focused.
I want to just really study the language that I am trying to learn and with the short lessons that Duolingo has and the heart system, it feels like you can get pretty easily distracted with it.
I think this is especially true with the ads that you see in Duolingo.
When you finish a lesson, you get an ad for the premium version of the app and when you run out of hearts, it tries to push you to get the paid version of the app and I don't really like that.
I don't like feeling like I'm getting pushed to try to pay for the app.
I also don't like that when you run out of hearts, you have to just kind of wait and kind of stop your studies in the middle of it.
Like I said, when I am studying, I really want to focus.
I don't want to have those distractions.
The other thing that I don't like about the app is that the lessons themselves are not that great.
Duolingo is notorious, which means that they're famous for something bad.
And they're notorious for the sentences that they give you in the lessons.
Some of the sentences are just known to be really bizarre, very strange, something that you would never say in real life.
And I don't think that's a great thing.
I feel like they should have better sentences than what you are getting when you're going through some of these lessons.
And the last one is the AI part.
I know I said that the AI was a pro but I think it's also slightly a con just because the conversations are very short and you can't go back and immediately recall the character.
I think that there are better AI programs that you could use to practice your speaking ability and we're actually going to go over those in a few minutes so keep watching so you can get those tips but I think they could do the AI better and even though it is cool that they have it in the app I don't
think it's the best option you have.
Now, how would I use Duolingo?
If you are a brand new person to a language, if you have no knowledge, I think Duolingo can be a great resource.
It can help you get started with the language.
It can help you just get the basics of the grammar down.
And I think that's really helpful.
I also think you can use Duolingo if you have some time to kill, as we would say, which means that you have nothing to do for a few minutes.
Let's say that you're on the bus or at a doctor's appointment waiting in the lobby, while you're waiting you can do a Duolingo lesson.
I think the lessons are short enough, you can get through them in a few minutes and when you have nothing else to do but you want to get a little bit of language learning practice in, I think that's a good option.
It's not going to make you 100 % fluent but it is something at least it gets you some contact with the language.
And my favorite part of the Duolingo company really isn't the app, but the podcast that they produce.
And I think that this is one of the best resources that they have.
If you are an upper beginner, maybe low intermediate, if this podcast is maybe difficult for you to understand, I think that the Duolingo podcast would be a great resource for you.
That's personally how I used Duolingo, and that's what I would recommend to you if you're thinking about using this app.
The second app is actually my favorite, and it is called Language Transfer.
Language Transfer is an app and also a website.
I will leave a link for them, but the program was created by one person, one man, and there are a number of courses.
In the courses, you will find a bunch of different lessons and all of the lessons have a teacher and a student.
The teacher explains some basic parts of the language to a student and then asks them questions about it.
When the student answers, that is your time to also answer and see if you got the answer correct if you were able to answer the teacher's question.
Just like Duolingo, these lessons are sequential.
They're pretty short and they're really good.
It's a very low stress environment because there's no heart system.
There's no one grading if you're right or wrong.
You can just be by yourself and practice these.
You can listen to them as many times as you want.
And throughout the course, it actually teaches you to make very long sentences.
You will be making long sentences after just a few lessons and these sentences are more complex and longer than you might have thought you were able to do.
That's one of the reasons why I love this program.
Now, there is a huge con when it comes to language transfer, and that is that the majority of the courses are in English.
It has an English -speaking teacher talking to an English -speaking student in English, and that's really difficult if you're trying to learn English.
it's really best for someone who knows English who is trying to learn another language.
There is one bright spot though and there is one group of people I would highly recommend this program to and it is Spanish speakers.
Now I know a lot of my listeners are from Spanish speaking countries and if you are one of them there is a course for Spanish speakers who are trying to learn English.
I would highly recommend that you check this course out.
Like I said, this is personally my favorite free language learning resource.
And if you are able to, I would recommend trying to go through the course.
Our next set of apps, I'm actually going to group together and I'm going to call these language exchange apps.
These are apps like HelloTalk in tandem that allow you to speak with someone else and try to get them to learn your language while they are helping you learn theirs.
That is what it means by language exchange, and I do have some experience with this.
I did use HelloTalk.
I didn't really use Tandem, but I've heard that they are very similar.
What you can do in these apps and some of the pros about these apps is that You can actually post a lot of different things and get feedback on what you're posting.
You can take a sample of your writing, you can post it in the app, and people can correct your grammar, correct your spelling, and give you feedback on your writing.
You can also record yourself speaking the language, and people can comment on your pronunciation and give you some feedback.
I think that's really helpful.
Another thing that you can do is that you can message someone.
so you can set up those language exchanges.
If someone wants to learn your language and you want to learn theirs you can talk to each other and help each other out correct each other and hopefully learn each other's languages.
The first con that I noticed was that I got messages from people on the app who didn't seem like they were trying to learn English but who were trying to find a girlfriend.
I thought that this was a little weird because I was trying to really learn Spanish.
I did not want to use this as a dating site, but I did notice that I did get some of those messages and it was a little uncomfortable.
I have heard from other women that they've had similar experiences.
Like I said, I only used HelloTalk, so I can't talk about the other apps if this happens on all of them.
But I have heard stories from other women saying that they do get these types of messages.
I have to say that this is not the majority.
Of course, there were men on there who were helping me with my Spanish and who were great.
There were a lot of women on there who helped me.
It was just a small minority of messages that I got, but it still made the app a little bit weird.
The other thing that I noticed in the corrections when I was helping people is that sometimes the advice that was given or the corrections that were made were not correct.
I was on there helping people with their English, of course, because I helped teach English.
And I would see corrections on there that were wrong.
The grammar was wrong, or the saying that they were putting in the feedback was something that you would never actually say, something a native speaker would never say.
And that was a little concerning to me.
So if you do use these apps, the one thing that I would recommend is that you look at the profiles of whoever is giving you feedback.
Sometimes the person who is correcting your English is someone who only has an intermediate level of English and you should just be aware of that.
There are a lot of native speakers.
There are a lot of people who will help you but just make sure you do your own research and make sure you take advice from someone who actually is a native speaker.
So you know that you're getting good feedback instead of something that's incorrect and that could actually harm your language learning.
My advice if you're trying to use these language exchange apps, use them if you have an intermediate level of the language.
I downloaded HelloTalk very early in my Spanish learning journey.
I saw someone recommend it.
I downloaded it and I honestly didn't get that much out of it.
I couldn't ask even basic questions so I wasn't able to do that language exchange part.
Sometimes people would try to do language exchanges with me and I couldn't respond in Spanish.
So I ended up just talking in English and that didn't really help me in any way with my Spanish learning.
I would definitely recommend it.
If you are at an intermediate level, if you can have a conversation with someone, I think that's how you can get the most out of it.
And of course I would recommend recording yourself, just your voice recording.
It doesn't need to show your face just so you can practice speaking and you can get some tips from people.
I think the feedback on that is actually really good and it kind of forces you to start speaking, which is a very big benefit when you are trying to learn a language.
Our next app is Italki.
Now, I know Italki is known as a paid app where people take lessons.
Personally, I teach on Italki.
I teach people who are trying to learn English.
I will leave a referral in the description if you want to take italki lessons you can use my code and get some free money if you do end up doing that.
However I want to talk about the free features on italki.
I don't really see people talking about these features and I think they're actually really beneficial and something that could help you when you are trying to learn English.
On the app or on the website you can go to different tabs.
And one of the tabs has a podcast section.
There you will find podcasts that are made by teachers who are helping people learn their language.
You can find a lot of English podcasts that are made for people who are trying to learn English.
The teachers on the site also make flashcard decks.
So there are different decks on different topics and they have flashcards for vocabulary and different sayings.
They also make quizzes so you can go and test your knowledge and see if you really understand or know English as well as you think you do.
And the last thing that you can do is that you can post different writing samples and get corrections.
This is very similar to HelloTalk or Tandem and you can go on there and post your writing samples and find people to do language exchanges with.
There are some cons to the free parts of italki.
The main con that I saw is that if you are posting on the free part of italki to try to get feedback for your writing sample, you might not get as many people giving you feedback as you would on some of those language exchange apps.
When I would post something on HelloTalk, I would have maybe 20 people respond to my post because there were so many people using the app on italki, you might get one or two.
Now the good part is that these are usually English teachers.
You can see right away in their name if they are a teacher.
So usually you're getting really good feedback and you know who is responding and correcting you.
Personally, I think they are of a higher quality because these are usually teachers, but just know that that you might only get a few people responding to you.
The other thing that I noticed is that if you are someone who posts a lot, and what I mean is that if you do one post after the other, so when someone is scrolling through that part of the app, they just see your posts and a bunch of your posts, you're probably not going to get as much feedback.
You might get someone to respond to one of the posts, but no one's going to go through 20 of your posts and correct everything for you.
especially a teacher.
They would do that for you if you took a lesson.
They would help you correct whatever writing you wanted, but if you're looking to try to get that for free on the app, I would say you can't post an entire essay.
People aren't going to respond.
A short sample of just one paragraph, people will, but you have to be aware of how much you're posting because a lot of times people won't do all of that work for free.
And regarding the language exchanges, I'm not sure how many people actually do free language exchanges on Italki.
Like I said, it's mainly known as a paid app, so it might not be the best place to find a free language exchange.
Just know that when you are trying to use it.
Overall, though, I would recommend it.
I do think that the free parts of Italki are great.
You might find a teacher on there while you're looking at all of the free resources.
you might find someone that you want to take classes from.
But even if you don't, you can just use those free resources.
They're made by teachers.
They're usually very high quality and they're all things that you can use to help you learn English.
And our last app is ChatGPT.
ChatGPT seems to be everywhere nowadays.
AI seems to be in everything.
And I really think that it can be used to help you learn a language.
There are a lot of different prompts that you can put into ChatGPT to try to help you with different parts of a language.
You can upload a writing sample onto ChatGPT and have it correct it for you.
You can have it make it sound more sophisticated and use better vocabulary or just correct your grammar.
You can also have it define different things for you.
So if you see a sentence and you don't understand it or if you see a certain word or phrase, you can ask ChatGPT what the meaning is and it can give you a full explanation.
And you can also ask it for practice problems.
So if you are struggling with a certain part of the language, you can tell it that and you can ask for it to make you practice problems to practice with and it will give you a bunch of different examples and you can walk through them and see if you're better at understanding that certain grammatical
point. I've personally done this with Spanish because the subjunctive is very confusing for me.
And I have asked ChatGPT to make practice problems for me.
And it did. The best part about the app, though, I think, is that if you do download it on your phone, you can actually have a conversation with it.
So when I talked about Duolingo and the AI component, I said there was a better option.
And I think ChatGPT is that better option.
You can have a very long conversation with it.
It will respond to what you're saying and you can talk about almost any topic with it.
That makes it a lot more accessible and interesting, I think, than Duolingo, for example.
Now, some of the cons, even though it is like a tutor, it's not a real person.
it's a software. And just like every software program, it can have some bugs or some glitches that make it seem a little bit odd.
I've noticed this when I did the practice problems with it.
Sometimes the problems are a little repetitive.
I don't think ChatGPT knows how to make a very diverse and exciting set of problems.
So it kind of tends to do the same type of problem over and over again.
I've also noticed that sometimes the answers are incorrect or the question itself is just weird.
And I just want to make people aware of that, that sometimes chat GPT doesn't get everything right.
You have to be a little bit careful with some of it.
Now I do think that's getting better and I think it will continue to improve in the future, but it can be a little bit odd sometimes when you're using it for practice problems.
The other thing about the chat feature, when I used it on my phone, I thought it was really great.
I would talk to ChatGPT for 15 to 20 minutes to really get my speaking practice in, but I did notice that sometimes it was a little bit strange.
A couple of times, it completely switched languages when I was talking to it.
We were talking in Spanish, and then all of a sudden, it would be in Indonesian or Russian, and I don't speak those languages.
I didn't ask it to switch over to those languages.
So that was very odd and a little bit confusing.
I don't know why that happened.
I think it was just a glitch in the system, but it did happen a couple of times.
And I also noticed that sometimes the feedback it gave me was a little bit strange.
I would say a sentence and then it would correct that sentence, but give me the exact same sentence back.
So let's do an example.
Let's say that I said, I am an English teacher who helps people who are learning English.
And then it would respond and say, well, you could say it that way, but a better way to say it is, I am an English teacher who helps people learn English.
And then I would look at the transcript and I would stare at it and I would realize it was the exact same sentence it told me that it was correcting me but it didn't correct me it took my exact same words and just pasted them into the response and that was really odd it took me a little bit to realize
that it wasn't actually giving me feedback when it said it was and even though I realized it was just some type of glitch in the system it was a little bit confusing and it did happen a couple of times.
Now overall, I still think ChatGPT is great.
Like I said, I would talk to it for 20 minutes and this would just be one sentence maybe every couple of days where it would have this weird glitch or a few times where it would switch languages.
It was a little bit odd.
It was enough to kind of get me thinking that the system isn't perfect, but it's still a really great resource.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I hope you learned a little bit about these apps and started thinking about which ones you might be interested in using this year.
If you have used these apps before, please let me know, and especially let me know if you know of other free resources that you would recommend.
I would love to hear about these.
I always want to be able to recommend free resources to my students, so if you know of any good resources that I didn't talk about in this episode, please leave a comment.
Tell me about them.
Also, tell me if you enjoyed this episode, if you like this type of episode, and if you want more of this in the future.
I, of course, can do more episodes like this, but I don't know if you want those unless you tell me about it.
If you are enjoying the podcast, if it's helping you learn English, please consider leaving us a rating on whatever app you are using to listen to this podcast on.
You can also tell a friend, tell a family member so we can continue to grow our audience.
You can follow us on social media at learnenglishpod.
The website is learnenglishpod .com and remember to like and subscribe so you don't miss our next episode when it comes out next week.
Until then, keep learning English.
