1.
Jens Wilke www.langfox.com
A brief look at the language
learning services and apps
Linguacamp Berlin 2015 - workshop day 1
3 Oct 2015

2.
Jens Wilke www.langfox.com
1. Category:
Simple services and apps.
• Some of the more prominent ones
– DuoLingo – Simple and attractive. Free.
– Memrise – Learn anything. Flashcard like approach.
– Babbel – Paid. Berlin based.
– Talkmate – Emphasis on pronunciation. Chinese driven.
– Livemocha – Emphasis on interaction
• More
– Rosetta Stone, Rocket Languages, Busuu, Papagei.com (video driven), Yabla,
Worddive … there are practically hundreds if not thousands
• This is the segment where www.langfox.com is going first.
– Differentiates by not being English centric (for example, going to support learning
German in Chinese etc.), clear user accessible metrics that help concentrating on
the stuff that needs your attention (borrowing from the more advanced Anki)

3.
Jens Wilke www.langfox.com
2. Category
More advanced solutions
• Some of the more prominent ones
– YouTube with subtitles – Very common solution for getting used to
hearing and understanding.
– Anki – Great flash card solution, but requires some effort to get going
– Google Translate – Easy to use translator. Translations are not reliable,
but rather a starting point.
– Various dictionaries like merriam-webster, Beolingus, Dict.cc, Leo,
Bab.la etc. Many have some learning functions, but often seem more
like an after thought
– Linguee – Translation aid providing large amount of translated
sentences harvested from WWW (quality varies)
– Panos’ www.lingxm.com project also harvests content from WWW and
refines it frequency based language usage referenced

4.
Jens Wilke www.langfox.com
3. Category
Advanced
• Some of the more prominent ones
– Wiktionary – High quality multilingual dictionary
– Local wiktionaries like de.wiktionary.org, sv.wiktionary.org,
fi.wiktionary.org have even more details
– British National Corpus – High quality corpus.
– Many countries have high quality corpora, e.g. DeReKo,
DeReWo etc.
– For practical language learning a film subtitle based corpus
could be more useful, e.g.
https://invokeit.wordpress.com/frequency-word-lists/
– Google Search – Compare things like usage frequency and so

5.
Jens Wilke www.langfox.com
4. Category
Teaching
• Some of the more prominent ones
– Quizlet – Flash cards. At best for teachers sharing flash
share materials with students
• More
– learningapps.org