SPANISH MINDSET

What is the best app to learn a language? You may think in Duolingo, Babel, or similar ones, but, none of them are the step-up you are looking for. Actually, to speak a language, they are childish, incredibly boring, repetitive, and the most important disadvantage is that you cannot find either interesting material or personalized material, and they are not meant to help advanced or intermediate students.

Let me tell you that if you want to know a serious app to learn a language, neither a game nor a childish one, but a serious and professional app where you can link it with YouTube or Netflix, web pages, or even eBooks, keep reading, and I will tell you what the best app to learn a language is. .

This app is LingQ. I will tell you why LingQ is the best app to learn a language, no matter which language you want to study.

I want to begin by saying that there is a huge problem in apps for language learners, and this is the «booby traps» apps. I would say most of the apps on web pages to learn a language are useless and just booby traps. Yes, as you have just heard, they are just looking to get all the money out of you. The reason is that they are perfectly adjusted to be a commercial product instead of actually offering you a good app that has every single tool that is needed to certainly immerse in a language.

Just reflect on these two offers:

1. «What is more effective? Ten minutes daily doing a game, and you will speak Spanish.»
2. «One hour daily reading and listening, and you will speak Spanish.»

Of course, the first one is the most persuasive. They’re perfect for the market because they are just offering you a simple task, but they do not aim to take this seriously. Playing a game for just five to ten minutes per day will not help you to speak Spanish.

We can find the same problem with courses or common classes of language. You know, those ones that say: «You will speak Spanish like a B1 in just three months starting from zero.» There’s no such magic trick that will make you speak like a B1 in Spanish in just three months.

I will recommend you by far to choose a good tutor of your target language to study one hour per week rather than waste your time using useless apps. With a tutor, you will be more immersed in the medium of the language. You have to speak, you have to listen, you have to do tasks, and you will read a lot more than in an app.

Now, I will tell you why LingQ is the best app to learn a language.

LingQ is an outstanding subscription platform where you can not only access several language libraries but also import your own material—movies, eBooks, series, and even take classes with tutors. Currently, this app has 47 languages to learn, and they are still adding new ones, such as Hindi.

These are just some features. I will tell you more later in this video, but let’s get to know the author.

LingQ was launched in late 2007 by Steve Kaufmann, a 70-year-old Swedish man who has learned more than 20 languages and who still continues learning them. The most impressive thing is that he has learned most of his languages at the age of 60. He is an incredibly impressive man; all his content is worth watching. I will leave the link to his channel in the description.

His extensive experience backs up this app, and he has made an extremely useful and optimized system. LingQ is a fun, simple way to learn languages from genuinely interesting content.

Now, let’s talk about some features of LingQ.

In LingQ, as I mentioned before, you have 47 languages to study. You can access a large library and import your own material. Most apps or platforms on the internet do not have a way to import your own material or something outside of them, and if you do not consume interesting material to you, reading and listening to exciting stuff, language learning becomes super boring.

The first feature, as I mentioned before, is to import your own material. If you are a beginner in language learning, you may not realize how important and necessary this is. In LingQ, you will find four ways to import content:

1. Import a lesson.
2. Import vocabulary, just like Anki.
3. Import eBooks. These are some eBooks I am reading now in English. You just click here, choose your eBook, wait a minute, and you can see your eBook available to read. Here, you can see how many words you know, how many you don’t know, and how many you are still learning.
4. Import audio automatic transcription by AI. This is one of the most recent tools—importing audio. This is very helpful to use with podcasts or streams in your target language. You just have to download the audio, and then the transcription will be made automatically. This might take some minutes, though.

The second feature is tracking and leveling words. In LingQ, you can track and tag every word you find in the lesson. You can do this by letting LingQ do it automatically, or you can choose to do it yourself.

When you track them, they are included in your statistics and in a list of flashcards that you can access on your phone. You can level words in five levels: new, recognized, familiar, learned, and known. Depending on what you choose, each word will be marked differently.

Tracking words is an excellent way to get to know your level. These instruments let you measure and know your improvement in the language.

Now, the third feature is the automatic voice reader. The automatic voice reader is an excellent tool that helps improve your listening skills. Sometimes, we cannot understand someone speaking in a series or singing a song, so this tool helps a lot.

Another great tool is statistics. As I told you before, when you track every word, they are saved in your statistics. Here, you can see how many words you know, how much you have read, how much time you have been listening, your streak, and a large number of different types of statistics.

Finally, we have the tutor section, in which you can have classes with a native or someone who is teaching your target language.

And now, as I said at the beginning of this video, I will give you the gift I told you about.

But first, let me tell you one last thing. LingQ costs $15 per month at the moment (2024). I think this is extremely cheap; everyone can afford it.

Thanks for reading, and goodbye!