Linglinkapalooza: Articles from language app blogs

In my quest for employment, I’ve started looking into companies that develop language learning software. Most people have heard of Duolingo and Rosetta Stone, but a slew of other apps exist. Listicles of “best language apps” commonly recommend about 8-15 of them, but this list on Langoly contains 51!

Many of these companies have their own blogs, with articles about…what else? Language stuff.

So I’d like to share some of the more interesting posts that I found. These articles are on the simplistic side – the authors are probably writing for broad audiences (including non-native English speakers) – but they contain some engaging pearls nonetheless. (Warning: Each blog unsurprisingly plugs its own company’s product.)

• Mango Languages blog

  • What are the Easiest Languages to Learn?
  • What are the Hardest Languages to Learn?

• Memrise blog

  • 3 language lessons from hyper-polyglots

• Mondly blog

  • Shakespeare’s Words: 36 Words Shakespeare Invented That We Still Use Today
  • Popular English Slang Words and Phrases – How to Talk like Gen Z
    • (Skip to the list of words starting with “Lit” – the rest of the article is quite basic.)
    • (Some of these terms, like hangry and salty, have been around for long enough and become mainstream enough that I question whether they can be attributed to Gen-Z, but maybe also I just have a case of the getting-old gripes.)

• Lingvist blog

  • How Learning a Language Changes Depending on Your Age
  • For Francophiles:
    • Unique Québécois French Words and Expressions
    • 8 films from around the world to improve your French

• Minionese!!

  • A whole Wiki page on the constructed “language” used by the Minions in the Despicable Me animated movies.
  • (I forgot which language app blog I found it through, but I LOVE that this exists.)

To end on a meta note, here are a couple of non-app-blog articles that evaluate the effectiveness of learning another language via software:

• MSUToday – New study gives insight on effectiveness of language learning apps
• The New York Times – 500 Days of Duolingo: What You Can (and Can’t) Learn From a Language App
  • Worth a read for several intriguing details, although the basic gist is that:
    • “[…] language apps are not other humans. It sounds like an obvious observation, but the entire point of learning a language is to communicate with other people. You can learn as many words or sentences as you want, but until you’re able to have a conversation with another person, you’ll never be fluent.”

*Photo attribution: “Le Hero ou le Héraut (1939) – Vieira da Silva”