Good-ish, some big usability problems – Learn 33 Languages with Mondly Review

It’s a nice change of pace from others like memrise, duolingo or babbel. It’s a bit more playful, and I find some aspects better for helping to retain the lessons. But, it’s not great. Today I found my first impassible lesson, which required the user to manually translate a long phrase consisting of three polysyllabic words, none of which were reviewed anywhere outside of that one phrase, and which were only just introduced in the previous lesson. I knew this would happen eventually because in much earlier lessons, I noticed similar issues, but they were passable because of my existing knowledge. But it’s clear these lessons are not as carefully constructed as the developer is implying. It also sometimes offers impossible this-or-that choices. For example, ‘noche’ which might mean ‘evening’, or might mean ‘night’, presented both translations in the same this-or-that question, with the same context photo, but still marking one answer as correct and the other as incorrect. There is also the issue of the male voice in the Spanish course. He sounds like he’s speaking while having a difficult time on the toilet, but more importantly, he is nearly unintelligible. The recording quality on his voice is poor, and he’s speaking much too fast to distinguish his words. He also seems to have a starkly different accent from the female voice to the point that when he says “yo” it sounds like “hay”. Pros: - a little more playful than other software - nice variety of quizzes and games to break up the monotony. - lots of content - the female voice is very clear and easy to follow - there are some interesting AR lessons that are fun, but ultimately pretty much just a gimmick. The real learning is in the coursework and daily lessons. - the voice recognition is quite good. Questions are rarely failed because of bad voice to text. Cons: - dumb app 101 things, like no landscape mode - not even remotely algorithmic; app clearly has no idea how well (or badly) you’re doing - the questions sometimes hit an insanely steep learning curve only to then abruptly return to reviewing how to translate ‘taxi’ to... ‘taxi’ - you’re sometimes quizzed on things that haven’t been covered at all - lessons are static. They will be nearly identical every time you complete them. - there is a star grading system for each lesson that is somewhere between pointless and discouraging. You start with three stars and lose one each time you get something wrong. But since most of the learning has a reasonably good curve to it, you only notice the stars when you lose them. It’d be better if you started with no stars, and then earned them by answering tough questions or something. - the point system is arbitrary, and seems to be a hamfisted attempt at creating a leaderboard that offers no value anyways, again serving more to discourage than anything else. - the male voice is really, really, really bad. - Spain Spanish only - keyboard translation questions (for example, type the translation of this phrase with the keyboard) are brutally unforgiving. It will auto mark an answer as correct when it’s typed, however, if at any point you have to use the backspace, it will not auto mark the answer, and instead you’ll have to cross your fingers and hope. This behavior is fine for word and letter jumbles, but for keyboard questions it’s so easy to accidentally mistype a word (especially when there is no landscape mode), there is no way to trial and error through the question, and you’ll get them wrong a lot, even when you’re very close to the correct answer. - in most questions the phrase you’re working with can be tapped to examine each word and the various tenses. But this behavior seems to disappear when you need it most. Or, more often, some words can be examined, while other words arbitrarily cannot, as was the case with today’s collection of three brand new polysyllabic words in the same phrase. None of those words could be examined, while others I was already familiar with could be. In conclusion, if you’ve already used up the other apps, this one is fresh and worth playing with. But, I got it for like $1 in a sale somewhere. Unfortunately, it’s almost definitely not worth whatever they’re charging for it now. App needs a lot of work, but has the potential to become one of my favorites.
Review by bpetruzzo on Learn 33 Languages with Mondly.