You know how to replace the word pigeon with something else… but because the tool you’re using is grammar-focused, you don’t necessarily have many other things that you could be the king of.Īlso, you may not have realised this, but when you’re speaking the language, you kinda sound like a robot. You understand for the most part WHY the sentence works that way. You understand how to say “I am the king of the pigeons”. Let’s assume you’re using Duolingo to go through the lessons, and your grammar is getting pretty top-notch.
OK, but you’re reading this, so English is your native language, right?Īs a native or near-native speaker of English, I still see an important place for uTalk in your language learning journey. Whether you’re Filipino and learning French, or Spanish and learning Swahili, it’s doable with uTalk. With uTalk, there’s 20,000 possible language learning combinations. Spanish speaker wanting to learn Japanese? This isn’t such a selling point for native English speakers again, if I head to something like Duolingo as a speaker of English, I’m very lucky: I can learn around 30 languages.ĭuolingo has nothing but a 40% completed English course. There’s also the benefit of flexibility that comes with uTalk, because you don’t need a source language. Languages are incredibly diverse in their grammar, syntax, vocab, idioms and more, so even basic tailoring to so many languages wouldn’t be doable.įrankly, you’re not going to be able to get anywhere near fluent with uTalk alone, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a valuable part of your overall language-learning journey as long as you recognise these inherent limitations.Įspecially considering it’s a tiny fraction of the price of Rosetta Stone, I feel like it’s value for money. There are some inherent limitations in trying to teach 140 languages on one platform with the same themes and vocab The language offerings aren’t tailored for the rules of the languages in any way, unlike Rocket Languages for example which really teaches how the pieces of that particular language fit together.īut that doesn’t mean that what uTalk does isn’t valuable in and of itself. If you’re expecting fluency from one app, this is definitely not the app. What I hadn’t really understood at the time was that, as uTalk’s product manager Simon explains:įor those seeking fluency, one app is never going to be enough (ours included!) I had access to Rosetta Stone in primary school, and all I’d learned from it was to internalise the idea that I probably wasn’t any good at language learning. uTalk’s plethora of language combinations In other words, you’re learning to speak in the same way that a first-language speaker does, without needing to involve your native language at all. It uses the same basic system for all the languages, so you don’t even need to know English you could be a French speaker learning Mandarin, or a Bhutanese learning Greek. There’s over a hundred languages on the app, from lesser-known languages like Tibetan and Yoruba to the most popular languages like Spanish, French, Mandarin and Japanese. This gets you speaking faster and improves your listening skills.
Not just how it’s written (unlike many language-learning methods) but also how it sounds. You can then use the uCoins to unlock languages and features. There’s also an in-app currency call uCoins which you can earn by completing lessons (or purchasing them). UTalk is an app for Android, iOS (includes “offline mode”) and web that lets you “learn any language” through visuals you see the pictures, you listen to what they are, and you play a variety of games designed to help you commit the meaning of your new vocabulary to memory.
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