LingoDeer Language App Review

Hello, everyone and welcome back to my blog! I hope that you have been having a nice month so far and that you have been staying warm during our cold winter days. For this week's post, I wanted to share my all-time favorite language-learning app. I have been using it for almost a year now for German, French, and now consistently for Portuguese.

LingoDeer is an app that I found out about from one of my favorite language YouTubers, Lindie Botes, who made an app review about it on her channel a while back. At first, I was not sure if I would like it, or if I could use it, given that I am not learning any Asian languages, but the more I learned about it, the more I started to use it. I completed almost the entire course for German in a few months, started using it for French, and have now completed 40% of the Portuguese course it offers.

What makes this app so great? Well, to start off, it is free, so you do not have to worry about spending a single cent to install it on your phone. It's also very practical, fun, and easy to follow. Unlike Duolingo that gives you very unnatural-sounding sentences and often robotic sounding voice recordings, I would say that the sentences you are asked to learn and then spell out, as well as the voice recordings, are very clear and logical. They are also made by native speakers, which helps you practice your phonetics and pronunciation.

It's a bit hard to describe how to use this app, so I decided to attach a YouTube video that shows you how to use it step-by-step. It also talks about many of the features that you can use that provide further vocabulary and grammar explanations that you do not get when using Duolingo. I am determined to finish the entire course for Portuguese within the next 3 months or so, which goes to show how much I love this app. I especially love how you can earn prizes after completing certain challenges, such as having a 30-day streak, or completing a certain level of the course.

This app offers courses in Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, French, German, and Portuguese. I have to say that I have been very impressed with the non-Asian language courses, but have never tried the other ones. Most LingoDeer app reviews talk about the Asian language courses, so they seem to be very thorough and easy-to-follow from what I have gathered.

Boa sorte com tudo! Good luck with everything!

Until next time,

Laura 

Foreign Language Vocabulary Builder: Sticky-Notes

In order to make language-learning fun, and practical, you have to have to look forward to being surrounded by it on an everyday basis. I have found that sticky-notes have helped me not only build my vocabulary, but have also helped me to start learning words by which I am surrounded. Since I want to become an advanced learner of German, I have tried to immerse myself as much as possible with the language. One of my goals for this upcoming year is to become fluent. You may be asking yourself, “how, and can she really do this?”

One of the most powerful, and inexpensive tools that I have used to my advantage have surprisingly been sticky-notes. What I have already done is very simple. I have labeled different objects throughout my bedroom, and bathroom with their translations in German, along with their genders. For example, where I have my necklaces, I have labeled them “die Halsketten”, the drawer “die Schublade”, the toilet paper “das Toilettenpapier”, and the doorknob “die Türklinke.” I have had many objects labeled for about a year now, and have noticed an increase in my vocabulary. Most people, even the best polyglots, do not find it necessary to learn these kinds of words, but I think that it makes languages a more integral part of your life.

What do I mean by this? Every day when I wake up, I lay on my bed, and look around my bedroom. I then stare at objects that I know are labeled with sticky-notes, and test myself to see if I remember the words (if you are learning a language that has masculine, feminine, and or neuter words, it is important to always learn the words with their genders). It is practical, because I only had to label these objects once, and know that they will stay there, as long as no one else takes them down. By doing this, you learn vocabulary that native speakers use on an everyday basis.

If you are a college student like me, and live in a dorm room, and you want to try this, but your roommate does not want you to do so, do not worry. Simply label objects in your bedroom at home. This method can also be done with objects throughout the house (especially in your kitchen, and in your living-room).

This is also a great exercise for your brain. Whether you are ever going to have to actually say, or write the word “the doorknob” is unlikely, but what does matter is that you are pushing your brain to its limits trying to remember abstract, yet useful vocabulary that you would never learn in a textbook. Who knows? Someday, you may have the chance to impress a native speaker by effortlessly saying one of these words.