Last month I decided to push myself to learn more German words. I set myself the goal to complete 100 words revisions on Lingvist, each day for one month.
After these 30 days, it’s time to draw some conclusions on the efficacy of the app.
I was able to “learn”, or better, I was exposed to, 613 new words. By itself, this result looks quite impressive,
but if you think about it it’s an average of 20 words per day. If I would continue with this effort, I would complete
the german course on Lingvist in less than 8 months.
Now, it is the best way to learn a new language? The answer, at least from my experience, is a resounding no.
Here’s a list of a few reasons why:
Each word that is presented in the app is embedded in a sentence. This makes it hard to transfer the newly learned word in real life. Depending on how often you have encountered the word, it might be easy to understand the meaning when you encounter it during real-life conversations or reading material, but it’s going to be hard to use it with confidence when communicating. In my experience repeatedly hearing a new word from native speakers and understanding the context in which it can be used is the best way to really assimilate it.
When repeating your already learned words, you can take all the time that you need. In the real world, unless you are writing, you don’t have much time to retrieve the correct word every time. Before you can retrieve it promptly you might need several revisions. But sometimes the appropriate word just doesn’t come to mind that easily. In those cases, you can use more general words, give a description of the word, describe the purpose/function, approximations etcetera. We often use those strategies in our native language as well, but we might not notice it. Therefore it’s paramount to learn them also in the language you are learning.
I believe the app has some data integrity issues. Sometimes I get presented a word like “new” even though I saw it several times already. Moreover, some words that are considered new are just a different form of another word you might have learned. For example, you might have learned the singular of a word and get presented the plural as a new word.
Conclusion
All in all, I think using Lingvist to learn and repeat words is still better than no training at all, therefore I will continue using the app (also I have already paid for a full year). But I don’t suggest it to other people since it’s quite pricey and in my opinion, there are better options in the market (maybe I will write another post on this).