Fortunately technology can help us learn or improve a language with minimal effort and even fun through our computer and smartphone.
Lyricstraining
For lovers of good music, what better than to learn a second language. This app proposes, as a game, that we fill in the gaps in the songs that appear under the music videos. It has 10 languages that range from English, French or German, to something more like Japanese or Turkish. We can increase the level of difficulty from the basic with a minimum of 32 words to fill, up to the expert level where you have to know the entire song.
Locallingual
The interface is a world map where it is possible to indicate a country and within this the different regions to check how the language varies from one to another. This project also wants to be collaborative and therefore allows the user to include their own recordings, either to provide examples of their specific area, such as, for example, the name of another country or another city in the world in their language.
Busuu
It is more traditional in terms of method, but also proposes some interactive games or conversations with natives to perfect the accent. Its catalog covers up to 12 languages and allows us to try some lessons for free, although we want to take it seriously they have a lot more complete Premium part with grammar exercises, official certificates, offline content availability, and even specific courses to travel.
ABBYY Lingvo Live
This platform, besides helping us with the translations of 15 different languages with more than 140 online dictionaries as a tool (Collins and Larousse among them), has the particularity of being totally participative. As a social network, each user can rate and comment on translations, help solve language problems, as well as share publications and photos related to language learning.
Menrise
This platform contains more than 300,000 courses in more than 200 languages and its method is based on teaching minicourses that can be created by the users themselves and where the use of mnemonic rules to learn vocabulary and gamification is promoted (a method that proposes mechanics of games in normally serious environments to reach an end) to promote the advancement of students through rivalry, since points are obtained with each course completed.
Word of the day
This curious application teaches us a different word to the day, which is accompanied by its meaning, pronunciation and type of word. In this discreet way the app is introducing increasingly complicated words for us to assimilate naturally. The only drawback is that it is only available for the iOS environment and only for learning English.
