Phil The Pill
2 years ago
This app has potential. When choosing "Filters", make sure you touch the dim checkmark in the upper right corner to save the filter. The "Bekids" section appears to have only 9 very short stories, but are very good for beginners. I subscribed so I'm taking a chance on this app. It may be useful. Time will tell. BE CAREFUL! It's hard to find how to cancel subscription if that's what you are trying to do. I haven't found it yet. They hid it.
Christie Pickel
4 years ago
Great idea, terrible app. I have yet to find a single story for learning Spanish. (idk why, it's not like it's an obscure language!) Worse, you can't even search by language! You can search by genre and difficulty, and you save your languages in the settings, but it apparently means nothing. You have to individually click each story, (which can trigger an ad) to see if it's available in your language (and it's not). If you're trying to improve your English, it's great. Anything else, PASS.
N di G
4 years ago
Amazing mini readings side by side that are a unique and very useful way to truly learn a new language outside of vocabulary lists. One can easily create personalized flashcards with a press of the finger. The variety of abridged reading material is splendid. One can re-read often, that's good! YThe news stories are great. I really loved the songs, but very disappointed that I can only access each song one time. I hope it is a glitch, because one needs multiple times and repetition to learn....
Bree G
4 years ago
Great idea, terrible execution. There are so many little bugs that the overall experience is frustrating: the flashcards don't work, the translations aren't perfect, buttons won't work, no sources for the news articles, the voice won't stop reading aloud after you turn off the sound, or even when you exit the story. I could go on and on. This app feels like it was haphazardly thrown together by people who don't know how to code. The passive aggressive customer service doesn't help either.
Ben Thayer
3 years ago
Amazing content & GREAT way to learn BUT there are PERVASIVE UI ISSUES that make the app slow, inconvenient and less usable. For example, it takes over 10 seconds to translate a single word!! That's a tap, 2 long taps and then more waiting for the app to actually pull up the translation. It takes way too long! AND when you finish listening to a story, it takes you away from the article as soon as the audio finishes! and there's no way to go back! There are other issues - its death by 1000 cuts
Coarse
4 years ago
This app may be useful to you, but some of the things I want to do are complicated for the app. The interface that pops up when in text selection mode is confusing and doesn't make sense. Additionally, I'm unable to select multiple lines. My selection is locked to a single line at a time, which is frustrating when trying to translate or add to my glossary more than one word at a time. I would suggest a better translation interface rather than using the default 2-second long system text bubble.
Alek Sung
5 years ago
Great idea, but very poorly executed (at least for Portuguese). For the handful of stories I went through, I found there was at least some audio issues. Some of the text would not match exactly what the reader was saying. But the most frustrating part of the experience is the volume of the recording would be extremely low forcing me to turn up the volume all the way. Then at some transition between sentences, there would be a very long and disruptive sound (almost like static) and would scare me
Inigo Montoya
3 years ago
Update: unfortunately I've had to uninstall it. The recordings are poor quality and unintelligible, and the app has lots of glitches where you have to click back and forth or it closes early, and is generally difficult to use in addition to being laggy. // Previously: Best app for learning languages I've found so far. I really like it. Was confused by some issue with gold not loading correctly. was confused by the new format but nothing was actually wrong. Thanks for making such a great app
A Google user
6 years ago
Not recommended unless you like the convenience. I'm trying to learn Hindi, which this app supports (good!). Unfortunately, the stories are poorly selected. Most children's stories are in the past tense. This isnt useful when you begin learning - you need a variety of tenses. Also, the Hindi speaker does not speak clearly and his recordings have a lot of distracting background noise. Sometimes they even glitch and his voice drops out. Definitely not worth paying for. Also, copy text doesnt work.
c.e. mcawsom (Cat McAwsom)
3 years ago
This app does exactly what it says it does. The split screen/split language viewing option is great. The comprehension quiz at the end made me aware of when I lose focus. Edit: June 6 I wish night mode was consistent throughout the app (not available when browsing for reading material). Love the broad topics available; in addition to folk tales & abbreviated classics you can read international about news and events.
P Harris
3 years ago
Used to be awesome!!!! Karaoke style text scrolling is amazing. But they now have so many pay walls and it's difficult to navigate to even 3 stories to try it out! After buying lifetime on faith, my score is slightly higher. Without a pay wall, it's better but you still can't highlight across lines in order to add to your glossary - which is very lame. They've got kinks to iron out. I'll be waiting. It's still fairly awesome in terms of comprehensible input. Only LIngua, LingQ, Beelingua and Speakly have a lot of transcriptswith audio. Beelingua is the cheapest app of that bunch and Lingua is a website, so it still has usefulness, it just has some room to improve. Will update review periodically.
Professor Ray
1 year ago
I read several stories & and even took some of the quizzes, but every time I went back to the app, it said "you have 0 stories read this week ". I tried to reach out to the company without success. Customer support is definitely lacking. On the plus side, many of the articles are interesting and they are "bite-sized" so one can get through several quickly. The articles can also be re-read and several of them have accompanying comprehension quizzes, but glitches with saving vocabulary as well.
A Google user
5 years ago
It's perfect for my reading studies. I'm trying to incorporate a natural voice when reading Hangul (Korean), hanzi (Mandarin), and the mixed alphabet of Japanese. It's greatly improved my literacy rate and I've began to easily recognize so many sounds. It's also improved my memory rate on the characters. Overall, it was what I was looking for when I downloaded the app. The only feature I wish it had was a romanization option.
A Google user
6 years ago
I can't get into the app. It opens to a page asking is this the first time you've used this app with yes/no buttons. Clicking on either will advance to 2nd screen covered by full page ad offering discount on first year of premium version for 30 minutes. That's as far as I got. No x button to close, no setting/menu, buttons, nothing. Closed out of app & reopened again but its still frozen on that screen. I'm now going to uninstall from my device's settings. No rating on its intended functions as I never got past their sales pitch page. 0 stars.
Sang Dang
2 years ago
Great concept, extremely poor excution. The free version seem great so i bought it. Then i found out nothing work right. It cant save your progress right, can't sort by reading level right, simply adding story to your favorites and unfavorite them is a problem and a bunch of other bugs. Everytime you reopen the app, everything you have done before got messed up. It's so frustrating. How hard it is for them just to simple code those fucntions to work correctly and stay that way? GEEZZ..
Bill Evans
1 year ago
I'm only able to login by always using the password reset method, if I'm logged out for some reason I have to reset my password again. I use a password mgr so I know I'm not mis-typing it. Also, I paid for an annual subscription on my previous phone, transferred everything to this new phone, purged (and sent back) the other, now I have no subscription. Both problems should be fixable, but I've reached out to the dev(s) twice, it took weeks to get the first response, there was no resolution.
Lianda360
1 year ago
This app I think is good for beginners & Casual learners. With this app you read short stories, and typically the app assigns a few words from that story as your vocabulary, and you can play games with the story's vocabulary and/or take a small quiz after reading. I like the side by side reading of the story, however, I can't read two texts at the same time, so I found myself mainly focusing on the English, but not both. Also, not a fan of how small the assigned vocabularies are.
Filip Wolak
1 year ago
Great idea for learning a new language, good selection of short stories, but the app is very buggy. Stories restart position after screen rotates. Flashcard microphone stops working for no reason. Flashcards no longer provide translation. Can't select more than 1 line of text. Seems like simple things but they ruin the overall experience. Would probably live with that if it was free app but as a subscription all such issues should be addressed.
Elzora Robinson
1 year ago
It's cute, but the voices have no emotion. It's like they're AI generated. So wouldn't help you much with processing native inflections and speech patterns. And I wish they had longer stories so I could listen to them like a podcast while working. Still a good app for the price, and would recommend to a frugal person who just wants to learn by reading. So price pushed it to 4 instead of 3 stars.
Aiden P
1 year ago
I wanted to try out the free version before paying for the rest of the app. However, it's sometimes unclear which features are free and which aren't. It won't even define vocab words for you for free! Ugh. Also, I tried to play the vocabulary "mini game" after reading a story, but it was completely broken and didn't even list the vocab words or anything. And judging by other reviews, I don't think it's worth paying for...