BETTER THAN DUOLINGO: The 5 Best Language Learning Tools and Apps 

I saw the first 20 seconds and thought "yeah, this deserves a like".

‘U just said irregardless’ so no 😂😂

When your intro for your intro is longer than your intro

"If you're aiming to start a reading habit" Me: *cries in Japanese study*

Thank you for including us in your review!

I repect how staight to the point you are. your intro is literally about a second long. and you have WORTH while information that doesn't make me feel like I wasted my time watching this video. Plus it's entertaining.

*BETTER THAN DUOLINGO* Bird kills man after claiming that certain apps are better than Duolingo

If you're going to Duolingo to learn sentence structure/grammar, then that's a huge mistake. But if you're going there to get vocabulary, it's wonderful because the vocabulary it teaches you is the most used in daily conversations and it had actually helped me understand conversations in the targeted language for at least a bit.

So no-one is gonna write them in the comments?😬

This isn’t an app per se, however this has helped me with my exposure to my target language (French) and that’s changing the settings on your phone to your target language. Most apps on your phone will automatically adjust to the new language, and it’s free and easy to do. Idk if this’ll help anyone, but it’s the small things that count.

I'm blown away by the quality of the video. Only 388 subscribers. That's just weird. Keep doing this!

Absolute bombshell video! Cannot thank you enough. Will let you know when I make the changes you've researched and recommended. Thanks from southern California.

Just recently stumbled upon this channel today. As a language enthusiast, I've finally found the perfect channel. Cheers, you god damned underrated gem.

7 months after first watching this: Thank you so much for introducing me to Busuu. It is absolutely amazing! I can't believe how much german I've learned in such a short time

I hardly subscribe to a channel after just a couple of videos, but your honesty did it! I'm trying to learn Italian which led me to the fascination of language learning in general

Wow I'm super impressed with how quickly you responded to my question. Thank you very much.

I love using lingodeer to study japanese it explain also about grammar and culture, it's not just about memorizing a lot of word

This video just changed my whole perspective about learing language💖 Subed

Just came on to say Thanks for the Busuu recommendation. It’s amazingly comprehensive and I like the community feel 👍🏼

I wanted to thank you for your immensely high quality content. I enjoy it so much!

Many many thanks for your advice and information! Currently learning Russian for 1 year. I can't believe I can now read in Russian and understand elementary conversations. BTW I'm Saudi Arabian and I have lived in Australia for nearly 4 years from 2008-2012. It was one of my best years of my life. I made lots of friends and good memories.. Accept my regards and I hope you will keep posting these useful videos for language learners.

I just started learning japanese. . . And just a day using busuu made me learned so much already I use it together with Human Japanese, Quizlet, Drops and Bunpo. . . hope it will help other peeps out there. . .

I'm finding this video over a year after it came out but exactly when I need it. You've got a new subscriber. Thank you.

I completely agree. I often do record my lessons, but they're just sitting there. I need to go back and review them - great reminder! Thanks!

music speed changer

I’m so traumatized by tech youtube I was waiting for the nord sponsorship when you said vpn 🤣

Just subscribed to your channel and liked this video. Super informative and definitely will try some of these out. Keep up the great work.

Dang, love your channel! Thanks for this organized information.

I subscribed because I LOVE how fast your intro was... I hate how people have videos of themselves laughing amongst friends and slow music and shit. Yours is straight to the point. Cracking videos well

Wonderful!!! Such awesome info and short intro!!

I signed up for Busuu because of you. I'm very excited to continue my French and German language learning journey

thanks for the clear info! It helps out a lot to get some tips on how to structure my learning more effectively

This was super helpful! Thank you😃 I never thought about setting up a VPN but it really makes sense if you can't get access to the content otherwise. It's also a great idea to record your iTalki lessons. I'm definitely doing that once I start taking lessons on there.

After seeing the same tips and tricks in thousands of videos, this was something new and creative, amazing job. Greetings from Norway :)

Thank you very much for all the information about the apps you gave in your video, this will help me to improve my English.

Seriously one of the best videos about this on here. Thanks a ton man 🤙🏼

Thanks for making this. I just started my learning language journey and these tools will be super helpful. I already had my first italki lesson otherwise I would use your link. Gonna get Evaer for lesson 2 and onward! Also: I'm learning Danish so I feel your pain on Swedish not being on Busuu... It sounds great! Tak!

The first app that I discovered was Busuu, long before Duolingo. At first I loved it because it had a timetable manager, different options like learning the language for tourism or fluently, it had pictures, pronunciation, a friendly community ready to answer your questions. I started learning Italian but once I had passed the first unit, I realised that you had to pay for access to basic knowledge like the verb "to be" or gender of adjectives etc. Also, you couldn't learn more than one language for free. So I quit. However, I still remember most of the words I learned with the app.😀

Thank you so much for this list. I had never considered that my e-reader might have a translation tool but it does! 🙂

Thank you so much. This has been very helpful

I am enjoying Busu for learning Spanish and would highly recommend it. I like that you can also review and revise any problem areas without limit.

"Well you just said irregardless so....no." OMG I choked LOL

Thank you for that valuable info, you have a new subscriber!!👍

Man this is such a good video. I signed up to italki through your link, will not start using it right now but looking forward :) Just started with Russian.

I learn German by watching the Nico’s Weg series on RU-vid. I wish there were more series in other languages like that.

This guy really hates Duolingo for some reason lmao

Awesome, thanks for the advice. Downloading now

Vilken fantastiskt post! Rekommenderades till mig och jag blev så glad! :)

HOO boy, I got really bothered by the non-word "irregardless" and then realized you used it as a set-up for the joke. Genius.

Thought it was gonna be a vpn sponsor but no!

Usei seu link do Italki. Obrigado pelas dicas. Vão ajudar a consolidar meu inglês e a iniciar os estudos em um 3° idioma.

Thank you, this video is very useful 👌 👍 since am starting to learn Spanish and am working on improving my French 💚

I would add VLC Player to this list! I use it to watch movies with subtitles loaded in both my native language and target language. It has hotkeys for virtually every function. So I watch a piece of a movie without any subtitles and if I have difficulties understanding a phrase I just rewind it, listen again, then maybe turn on subtitles in my native language and then rewind again and again with subtitles in target language. And all that just by using arrow keys and two letter keys as hotkeys. Very convenient

I used Duo for quite some time, had a super short affair with Babbel (only one lesson available for free, come on...), then switched to Busuu and yes, it is awesome. (I'm learning Russian with them) I hope they're gonna add more languages, fingers crossed for Norwegian and Romanian. Drops is nice as well, quite fun method of learning. And don't forget old school flash cards :)

Great stuff. I feel like a lot of people get hung up on boring apps and then lose motivation (like I did). I've had way more fun just wandering through all parts of the web seeing what I can find in my target language. It feels like an adventure into another culture and makes me genuinely want to understand the things that I come across.

Excellent review. You included a few tools I never would have considered but can easily see how and why they would be irrevaluable...er...invaluable. :D

i've just started using Pimsleur to attempt to learn some Japanese.. 2 lessons in and it's going pretty well besides the fact that i'm *extremely* unmotivated 😂

But Duo is so cute 😢

Absolutely amazing 🙏🏾....keep it brother 👍🏻

I do enjoy this. I hope you have fun with a happy learning.

Duolingo is not bad. You can use it for the basics. You can also use it to test your skills. It does not necessarily make you completely fluent in any language but it will definitely give you a head start. Imagine this: You are stuck in a cave and you have a flashlight. The cave symbolizes the language barrier. That flashlight symbolizes duolingo or any online learning app like it. It can give you light so you can be guided throughout the cave. You come across what seems to be some incredibly large boulders about twelve feet tall that are blocking the exit. You obviously can't carry the boulders by yourself, and the flashlight won't be of use for this so you need another set of tools for this job. PS. I did not come up with this metaphor on my own. Courtesy to Rafael Leon, the youtuber who came up with this.

"My biggest regret with learning Swedish is that I took too many lessons rather than going back and getting everything out of the lessons I already had." Priceless insight - I never thought to record the lessons, although it should have been completely obvious. Thanks for this. I'm currently taking Turkish lessons via Skype and this will be an invaluable approach for me.

Great tips. Thank you. I plan to try all 5(6).

Thanks for this nice video, it is the very first video of yours I watch and immediately subscribed to your channel. I do agree with you, it is very sad busuu does not have Swedish.

Thanks I’ll definitely check a couple of these tools out - I’m learning Indonesian and as a non mainstream language it can be difficult to find effective tools

Thank you! I was so tired of Duolingo lessons in Russian that made me repeat "The horses eat apples", babbel doesn't allow you to learn more than one language at once, and memrise is great for vocabulary (especially Mandarin) but to learn how to speak not so much.

Thank you for your amazing advice. I didn't know some of them😊

Thank you for your fabulous intro!

Well that's ironic. I got the duolingo ad at the beginning of this video 🤣🤣

Irregardless is correct. It is a very common misconception that it isn't a real word, but it is. It just happens to be an irregular and somewhat redundant word, like inflammable or dethaw.

This is the first video I watched on your channel looking for an app to learn a language with. I like the way you approach langauge leaning. I believe you genuinley know how a language is acquired or learned. Besides you sound very trustworthy helping others learn languages not trying to sell stuff. Please don’t lose it. I have subscribed your channel and thank you. :) PS: what do you think of Rosetta Stone. Now I am looking into Buusu.

You just got me as a new subscriber because of the quality of information in this video. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!!!!!!! It would be interesting to see what your top five would be now (2022) compared with this video.

I don’t want to be that one person who disagrees, but I have been using Duolingo. Maybe when I learn a little bit more of the language I could try to use some of the others to learn it better. I may even try to learn to read a children’s story in Spanish. But this is a really good review. Gran trabajo 👍

The moment you mentioned VPN as a crucial tool, I knew you were going to give good tips. A VPN is so useful, it helps me to watch Norwegian tv programs, which are free in Norway, but not accessbile abroad. Watching a country's tv programs is often fun, and fun is so crucial in language learning. Also love the other tips, am going to try out some of them.

I absolutely love this list Thank you

Aussie from UpOver here (California). I'm trying to learn Spanish in the USA which is really difficult due to the prevalence of really awful language learning traditions and applications. Thanks for your suggestions, some of which I had already found, but others which I have not yet encountered. I'll check those out pronto. I've had two very different language learning experiences: one in Indonesia/Australia and the second in the USA/Mexico. I learned Indonesian as in my early forties in about five years. It began with four weeks of tuition from a Primary School teacher in Bali while I was on vacation there. I continued learning this language when I returned to Australia. I found beginner books used in Australia to teach the Indonesian language to Primary School students. They contained interesting stories with an accompanying audiotape with a consistent accent. I followed this with language practice with a group of Australian locals who either already spoke the language (for example, an ex missionary to the area) or were in the process of teaching themselves,. This was followed by more visits to Indonesia, lots of letters written to friends I found there, and lots of chats with anyone I could find in Australia who I heard speaking Indonesian. My final lessons were gained from living in a remote Indonesian village for 8 months where no-one but the local teacher spoke English (badly) and the English test given to his students would have scored me at about 70 percent in spite of the fact that I taught advanced Australian English to HSC Year 12 students where the reading and comprehension materials that I used were standard for US Junior College level students. HINT: don't try to learn English in Indonesia; you are likely to learn it poorly. After my immediate family moved to California in 2000 I decided to learn Mexican Spanish because a significant portion of that State spoke it as a home language along with their school-learned Californian English. It is now 2021 and I am STILL not fluent. Why could I not learn this language after 21 years of trying? This is because of the dearth of GOOD language learning programs over here and the prevalence of a lot of very bad ones. Academic Spanish teaches Spain Spanish ("espanith") with a different grammar from the one used by Mexicans and other Latinos who actually use the language to communicate with others in the region. It also teaches a different set of accents from those in common use in the United States and its Spanish-speaking neighbors. Worse, it frequently mixes up all the accents so that the helpless learner is totally confused. I spent 8 weeks plus another 6 weeks learning Latino Spanish in Mexico I still failed to pick up the language properly. These language schools were, I think, unduly influenced by the requirements of the students who were doing their courses for credit in the USA: grammar was emphasized well above spoken communication. There are a quite a few free Spanish lessons and tutorials available in the USA, but a good many of these come from teachers in Spain. These teachers also present a mixed bag of regional accents to their beginners as well as presenting the early stages in complex language spoken at the speed used by those with advanced knowledge of the language, years of exposure to native speech which I assume was preceded by several one-to-one relationships with parents, relatives and teachers who modified their language to suit a child acquiring their first or second language. Spanish teachers appear to have little to zero understanding of the differences between acquiring a first language in infancy and acquiring a second language as an adult. Most of the offerings seem to assume that adult second language learners not only already understand the basics of the Spanish language but have sufficient knowledge of it to travel to and live in Spain while attending lessons in the basics. This is just nuts. While there are various audio books around in Spain Spanish that can be slowed down to learner level, there are very few Latino Spanish books available like this. This is slowly improving. LingQ now provides short stories with audio in Latino accents that are either Mexican or sufficiently similar to that accent to be useful for learning to converse with Mexican Spanish speakers. So far, none of these audios identify which accent is being used by their readers, other than the broad term "Latino". This is bad because places like Agentina use their own unique grammar and a fairly gutteral accent. Spanish speakers from Peru, which has a number of different regional accents within its borders, can also be quite difficult to understand. If you are going to learn a language then you should be able to find basic and at least intermediate material that uses the sounds and grammar of the variety of language that you is (a) most likely be spoken by your neighbors and (b) come from accents that are considered to be prestigious among the natives of the country where you wish to be understood. Just as it is likely to stigmatize you if you speak Broad Australian in an educated setting in Australia, or cockney English in a British court of law, you will start off on the wrong foot if you speak your second language with a marked regional accent when you are not speaking to people in that particular region. When, o when, are second language teachers going to admit that and accommodate it? I should probably mention that I failed to complete some audio lessons that used so much repetition that I got bored and dropped out, I am a graduate of DuoLingo and I have tried conversing with several tutors via Italki. At this stage of my learning, Italki is very useful, but insufficient in and off itself. I have recently gone back to LingQ which has improved, thank goodness, in the time it has been since my last use of this application. It, too, is imperfect: the first stories are repetitive and the questions very boring. The advanced material is much better but revising words from the context that it chooses to give can be very frustrating and extremely difficult.

It’s great to pick music in your target language, write down the lyrics, and then playback at half speed or slower and speak and read along with the song

Thank you! I just started learning Portuguese about 8 months ago through classes at my university. I’ve been trying to find an app to use along with the tools that you mentioned, however it seems like many don’t offer European Portuguese and they only offer Brazilian Portuguese. I know that they are similar and it would be important to learn both so that I can communicate with both types of Portuguese speakers in the future, but how do I find an online app or program that can help me learn European Portuguese and not just Brazilian?

Loved the video style dude. KEEP GOING

Good video thanks for not being sold to anyone else than giving true information!

I really like Duolingo and it taught me a lot of german. It won't teach you a language but it's a fun (though probably inneficient) way to learn the basics of a language. BTW I tried to use a vpn but I don't think it allowed me to access german netflix because the titles aviable were the same as before (very few movies or seres in german)

The amount of sass in that intro, though 😂

Busuu is amazing, I'm excited to finally hear a language RU-vidr positively talking about it

Thank youuuu. I needed this

*_My fingers brought me here._*

i also like when they give you homework to practice the reading and writing

If you change the gps voice over through settings on your phone it helps with listening and prepositions specifically. It’s helped me a lot with Norwegian and French.

Such a great video, thanks man.

I learned French by Duolingo. It was worthful for me.

Have you tried HelloTalk or Tandem? They're free and when I've wanted them I've always been able to find a native speak who's willing to give me a lesson in their language, or else you can help others in your languages and you can just have general conversations... it's great!

Thanks for your tips.. it helps a lot

Thank you for this video! Really usefull.

Like that I have a advertisement of babbel, before the video starts

That intro made laugh out loud. 😂🤣

Thanks for your valuable tips 🙏

Thanks I'll give these a try

1st.... nice video lad

Duolingo is pretty good. I learned most of my English there (like, enough for me to star pretty good in school

you are just wonderful! thanks for such a helpful video :)

Thanks brother! Great suggestions.