Daily Dose of English 75
Language Apps
Daily Dose of English 75
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about language apps or language learning apps because, oh my God, there are a lot of them. If you go onto the App Store or Google Play Store and you look up language learning or learn English or anything like that, you will see hundreds if not thousands of different options and results. Some of them are really well-known. They're famous in the entire world, like Duolingo, maybe Memrise, Italki, but then there's some that are tiny that nobody knows about that are like 10 people use. I don't know their names, but there's just so many out there. And I wanna take an episode to talk a little bit about language apps, what they are, what they aren't, and how you can more effectively use them to learn English. So the first thing to say is that there is no app that will teach you all of a language. That does not exist, it is not possible. That's just not how we learn. We need to have thousands of hours of exposure to different kinds of language and practice over the course of a long time. And a phone app just isn't going to do that. It can help you with some things, yes, but it can't do everything for you. There are some apps that do more things than others and some that are better than others, but no one single app is going to do everything. It's like if you, oh, let's see, what is it similar to? It's like trying to cook everything in one single pan. That just isn't going to work. There's different pans for different things. Sometimes you want a pot, sometimes you want a giant one, sometimes you want a little one, sometimes you want stainless steel, sometimes you want cast iron, right? There's all of these different things that make a complete kitchen. There's all of these different skills and abilities that will make you into a very good English speaker and user. And you're not going to find all of them in one app. Especially the apps that, how do I phrase this? That are too focused on the app side of things. Because there is a reality of, business and the world that we live in where companies are trying to generate more money, not necessarily make the best product. And that's something that we can see with really everything on the internet, because for many, many years, it was focused on generating users, building more users. And now we're in this time where a lot of companies are trying to make more money. A really good example is something like Uber. I'm sure you've heard of that at some point. You might not use it in your country, but it's very, very popular in the US. And it started out really, really good. Like a decade ago, it was really cheap. It was easy. It was fast. revolutionary. It was something brand new and amazing. But nowadays it's really expensive, quite slow, and the drivers aren't getting paid anything, and the company still isn't making money. And so it's pretty obviously going to be a bad deal for everybody. It's just so popular and known that that's what people use. Sort of the same thing happens with Duolingo. Duolingo is the most well-known language learning anything in the entire world. Their marketing is really, really good. But the app does not work to help you learn a language. That's known. The CEO of Duolingo has said that. It's been proven to not be a useful thing for language learning. However, it's a very addictive phone game, and they have millions of users who play their phone game every single day. It can show you a couple of words and phrases here and there, yes, but it is not an effective language learning tool. However, they're not really trying to fix that. They know that, and they don't really care. Duolingo, as a company, wants to generate more money, and so they don't really have an incentive to teach people a language. They have an incentive to have people spend money. Incentive, by the way, is when there's a reason to do something, right? So if somebody gives you an offer, like they say, hey, if you learn, if you listen to Ben's Language Lab, Daily Dose of English every single day, I'll give you $10. That would be an incentive to listen to the podcast every day, even though it's amazing, right? You obviously want to because it's such a great podcast. And so Duolingo has an incentive to charge more money and earn more money on the platform, not to make a better language learning tool. A lot of language learning companies, that's what they start out with, right? That's their niche and that's who they're focused on and trying to help. However, at a certain point, if you go to become a public company or there's all sorts of things going on, the shifts can happen from not actually helping people anymore to learn a language, but actually just being a better app that makes more money. And so like a good example is the Memrise app recently removed a feature that a lot of people really liked because it was not really making them money and it was costing them money. And so then somewhere at the business, at the headquarters, they decided, you know what? We can't support this anymore because while it is good for our users, it is bad for our business. And those are often going to be, um, different desires and needs. And so whenever you're using a phone app, especially an app made by a large, large company, think about like what they're trying to get you to do. And if you don't necessarily follow that, then it can actually be a very useful tool. However, if you fall into the quote traps and you might end up spending more money than you should and not actually getting something out of it, right? If you're spending money and getting something out of it, that's great. A good example is italki. Italki is a platform to connect you with tutors and teachers and you pay for their time. But most of that money does go to the teacher, which is great. And so that sort of thing is a good option. You're doing more classes, you're paying to a person. Yes, I think 15% goes to Italki. And at some point in the future, if that goes up, you might want to rethink whether or not italki is worth it. But currently, it can be a fantastic way to connect to native speakers of any language and take a lesson with them. In fact, a couple of years ago, I taught on italki as well for quite a while, and it was pretty good, honestly. However, there's issues with it. I'm not going to go into that too in depth. So, I want to end this talking about how you should be using apps, because the primary thing that apps are good for is showing you little bits and pieces about the language, like new words or phrases, but then you have to go out and explore and find that phrase or word in the real world. If you are, let's say, I don't know, Busuu is another popular one. Let's say you're doing your Busuu lesson and it brings something up like a new word, like incentive. If you don't come across that word in a real context and actually experience it relatively soon, you're going to forget it. That's just how our brain works. Even if you just review it in Busuu every day, it's not really going to stick the same as when you come across it in a YouTube video or a TV show or something like that. And so you have to be exploring and engaging with the language as your primary source of learning. So you can use an app like the YouTube app is a language app in a lot of ways and you can make an account in English and you can subscribe to this channel and you can watch these videos. You can get a reader app and read books or comics or anything like that. Other podcasts are great. There's tons and tons of podcasts in English for native speakers, which you can learn from. There's apps like Netflix, Disney Plus, any streaming service, honestly, can be a great learning tool. And those are what I recommend that you really look towards. Yes, one or two of the sort of game-like apps can be useful, but you don't want to rely on them too much. That's the big thing that I want you to learn from this episode. I actually barely use my phone for language learning. I almost always learn on a computer because I find that it's way easier to focus and learn from what I'm doing, even if I could be doing the same thing on my phone. When I do learn on my phone, it's typically because I have to be out and about and it's almost always YouTube. I just watch YouTube videos in Czech or in Spanish because that is the easy thing for me to do on my phone. I don't like like studying on my phone as much. I will also review Anki cards, which I talked about a couple episodes ago, but that is only when I'm traveling or I can't review my cards on my computer for some reason. And yeah, okay. That is all that I have for this episode. I hope that you got something out of it. I know that I didn't give you a really great answer to any question, but I hope that this episode helped you to learn something, maybe you picked up a new word or two, and hopefully you enjoyed. But that's enough for me today and I hope to see you again tomorrow for a brand new episode of A Daily Dose of English. See you then. Bye.
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