Beelinguapp: Language Learning 4+

Monolingual anglophone no more!

I love this app! I needed a consistent way to practice listening to and reading German, but traditional sources required me to stop and look everything up. It was also hard to find interesting, adult reading material at my elementary/ middle school German reading level. This app’s texts are interesting enough. I like that there is breaking news incorporated into the app as well delivers by notification. I recommend adding guilty pleasure celebrity news and song lyrics as well! With the English text just below the German text, I can test myself to see how long I can go reading only the German until I really need to stop and check the English to ensure comprehension. I love that you can press and hold each word for translation and to hear the pronunciation. Selecting entire pieces of texts allows you to do the same. Please fix the app so that I can change the translation to my own translation because sometimes it’s wrong or sometimes I can word it better for my own memorizing. Requested improvements? At the moment, when you select text for translation or pronunciation, there’s a spinning processing wheel showing that feels like it’s not done working. Sometimes the app gets sticky and doesn’t let you select things or scroll down. Otherwise I Love love love! This will be a game changer for me to practice on my own when I’m not with a language partner or tutor.

Developer Response ,

Thank you so much for taking the time to let us know your great feedback! We are happy that you are enjoying the app. We took note of all your suggestions and will definitely take them into account as we improve the product. It would be great if you could send us a video or screenshot showing the issues you were experiencing, so that we can better understand and fix them. Please write us to feedback@beelinguapp.com. Thanks so much!

Amazing App, But…

This app is a literal game-changer. What completely sets this app apart from every other app is that instead of just learning a bunch of words and forgetting them, you learn words and get to keep reinforcing the knowledge by reading. However, there are a few things with the development that make the extra features of the app difficult or even unusable. For example, there is poor integration for users who are learning more than one language. I may want to review vocab I learned in Portuguese, but the app only shows me the words in Japanese(even if I only ever read the story in Portuguese, and have my preferences set to Portuguese). This makes it impossible to track your progression or do review in each language. Also, the post-story games just straight up don’t work. I love this app though, and the stories alone make it worth it for me to subscribe to premium. If they fix their app usability(and maybe change the name to something easy to say + therefore be promoted by word of mouth) this app will absolutely surpass Duolingo in popularity and functionality.

Developer Response ,

Thank you so much for taking the time to share your experience! it's great that you are enjoying the app. We will fix the issue about the Vocabulary section as soon as possible. Would you please explain us the problem regarding the games a bit more in detail? A video or screenshot would also be really helpful. Please write us to feedback@beelinguapp.com. Thanks so much for your help!

I can do better myself

I learn German with this thing. It’s fine, it has a decent basic mechanism and various materials. However, much of the texts feel machine translated from English, very poorly too, which is terribly, terribly disappointing, because my entire point of using this app is to consume and learn from materials better written and spoken than I currently can. The second article I read on the app literally says “zu entspannen und zu entspannen” and “dem Aufschlagen des Sacks” (respectively “unwinding and relaxing” and “hitting the sacks” in English text). At this point I simply cannot trust the material anymore. Like, do you even read your own collected articles?? Exercises after reading also feel insufficient, the quizzes are super short and monotonous, often not very helpful. For the dictionary, it would help if it has roots or prototypes of words, which it currently doesn’t. Different forms of the same words are treated as different words. Translations are also often wrongly matched with the words, it’s not misleading but it’s an annoying glitch. Overall, I feel like I can make for myself a better collection of materials. I would look forward to thoughtful future updates, but it is far from a sophisticated product and does not deserve the rating it currently has.