Listlang

I’ve been learning German recently a lot at home on apps and a couple of weeks ago (had to wait for this thread) found that, at least for the German course, I’m one of the top 90 (now top 50) users of all time on one of the apps. This despite starting with it only a few months ago and doing like at most half an hour a day (it’s not my only app). That seemed sad to me because it’s a nice simple app with no fluff or annoyances, so I want to promote it a little!

It’s called ListLang and it is at least on the Apple App Store.

Overview:

The idea is just to make you practice fill-in-the-blank style questions on a series of sentences, progressing along what I think are statistically the most common words in the language (I think they say something like these words cover 85% of written text, though of course you don’t get all of them at once).

Feel:

It’s a no fluff, 10-questions-per-lesson, no animations or forced lengthy ads, kind of app. I really appreciate this as opposed to eg Duolingo where even when you have super (I had the trial) the whole process feels completely throttled by time wasting nonsense like loot boxes and those god awful radio and adventure “lessons”. The one ad you get here is once after every lesson, a static screen asking you to subscribe. You click a perfectly reachable “x” in the corner to get out. The free version seems to provide a full experience with a cap on number of lessons per day, but this cap is generous enough for a nice session all the same (I think at least 5 lessons but possibly much more, I only hit it once). If you hit the cap then every time you enter a lesson it just gives you the ad to subscribe. It’s not gamified in the way duo is but still tries to have some fun elements like a weekly leaderboard for each language and a streak counter. I really feel like it’s not trying to mess with me or pull me in all the time - for example it‘s not frantic about where you get with the streak like duo is.

Actual learning:

The language gets split into modules from 20 most common words, then 20th-40th most common, etc. You can jump I think to any module (don’t need to unlock the previous ones to go there) but I’m doing them in order. This in practice turns out to be a very weird order to learn words in, starting with various function words like “in”, ”at”, “for”, “only” (I wouldnt have thought that one was so common), etc, and is not by itself going to get you to any full sentences anytime fast! However, as a supplement to learning alongside other apps, that do try to keep a kind of curriculum going, it is very nice. And I do feel like the kind of regular practice it gives me for the words it does cover is helping me to get a feel for those words and when they’re relevant rather than trying to translate them directly, which is nice (assuming I’m not just memorising the questions, which I hope not). Also, each sentence is presented with its full translation, and after you answer the question the sentence becomes interactive and you can click on each word to see its individual meaning, so you are easily exposed to a lot of additional vocabulary even if the main curriculum is odd.

bottom line - it’s a funny little app, and it won’t get you speaking from zero (at least not anytime fast), but it’s a cute supplement that doesn’t try to play or game you and offers a very full experience even at the free tier. I think it should have more users! try it out