Rosetta Stone is also US owned.

I pay for a family plan and share it with a bunch of people. Several are government workers and use it in addition to traditional training, so it is actually an important subscription.

It’s one of my last US subscriptions.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Matriks404 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

You mean: Any alternative to gamified app that makes people think they're learning languages, but really just waste their time for relatively quick dopamine boosts?

That said, I don't really use any apps aside from Anki for learning basic sentences/common words (up to about 5000-10000 of them) with examples of usage.

Good language course, a handbook or getting knowledge from YouTube videos, dictionaries, corporas, random Google searches and prompts in chatbots (they are so good for that), etc. is much better.

To get to B1-B2 level in any language I think it's the best to have good handbook or individual teacher (who is a native speaker). Also learn phonetic symbols (IPA) for your target language, to be able to check pronunciation of words you aren't sure how to pronounce. For higher level(s) see above.

You should also immerse yourself into target language as much as you can, but if you want to actively learn from media, you should only use material that is about 90% comprehensible to you, so you learn remaining 10% by context. If you have some specific interests (like video gaming or history) you can of course try to watch this content in your TL, but I found out that watching drama TV shows (which is what I normally don't watch in my native language) is also very effective, since you learn words of everyday usage.

As for learning new words I have 2 tips:

Never learn words without context, because if you don't you won't be able to use them in speech.
Always learn words fully, e.g. when there are no global stress rules, such as in Russian, treat it as being part of a word. I made a mistake of not doing that when I began learning Russian, because my non-native teacher didn't say it was important. IT IS (and I still haven't fully recovered from this, lol).