Language Learning Apps

Learn a new language and play a game at the same time

With the Memrise: Learn Languages app, you can choose from a wide range of languages including French, Spanish, German, Chinese, and Italian. In the introduction, you learn about a tyrant force that wants to overthrow the Alliance and enforce uniformity throughout the galaxy.
You can stop them, but only by learning a new language. That’s where the fun behind language learning comes in, as the app turns a task that many find onerous and boring into a fun game.
As you embark on your language-learning adventure, you’ll take on education in bite-sized chunks. Each day, you’ll have a goal to complete.
Memrise is more like a game than an educational app for adults. It turns your learning into an adventure. Uncover missions, reach goals, and earn rewards. As you progress, you’ll find the words of your new language sticking in your head better than you ever thought they would.

Why we love it

Memrise has a great selection of languages to choose from. In total, here are 77 languages you can choose from, ranging from Afrikaans to Zulu (and plenty in between). I decided to take on Japanese and Polish.
You begin with simple phrases like hello, yes, no, please, and thank you. From there, you’ll move on to other essential phrases. The topics include general greetings and responses, emotions, food, places and things, and handy phrases.
While the Memrise app is free, it does have its limitations. You can only complete so many topics before the recruits get tired and go to sleep. Then you have to wait a few hours to continue your language-learning journey.
If you want a more personalized learning experience, you can purchase Memrise Pro to get native speakers helping you learn, the ability to target difficult words so you’ll always remember them, and a speed review game mode to hone your reflexes.
The only real problem with this app is that it asks you to spell words without focusing at all on the alphabet. Understanding why a word is spelled the way it is can make a huge difference in learning that spelling, especially for languages that use diacritics (accent marks and so forth) in their alphabet.