Comment by accidentalrebel
1 day ago
Thank you for sharing this.
I've been learning Arabic, and I noticed that the app uses Arabic script right from the start. This can be quite challenging for beginners who haven't learned how to read it yet. May I suggest adding an Englishized (romanized) version of the Arabic text to help ease the learning curve?
It also seems to not listen to me when I asked to give me shorter sentences. It seems to not care that I'm struggling despite my pleading.
I later switched to Spanish, which was a better experience. This one seems to listen to me better. I can ask the tutor to repeat what they said in English and give me shorter sentences, and thankfully, it does.
Interacting with the tutors does feel I have to drive the conversation which is taxing. Compared to a human tutor, where I feel assured that I can be guided properly.
Still an interesting app. Would love to try Spanish some more, in the future.
A Japanese learner here (not commenting on this platform). I do recommend start using your target language script as soon as possible, maybe even earlier. The only exception are ideograms where you have to learn like 2000 unique characters, and even then you should learn the most common ones and start using them immediately.
Reading in a non-familiar script becomes much easier the more you do it, and the longer you put off learning it, the more opportunities you miss for using it.
I think you should only be using the latinized scripts in the absolute beginning where you are learning the most basic words and phrases like: “hello”, “yes”, and “no”, and “what is your name?”. This should only be for your first couple of weeks. After that you should have learned to read new words in the new script (albeit slowly). Learning the script makes everything much easier afterwards.