Lingodeer

EASE OF USE
	Lingodeer is very easy and intuitive to use. There are a few oddities though, like having to swipe to the right to see the grammar explanations that you don't know are there unless you do.

DESIGN
	This is a nicely designed app, and I'm a sucker for animals in glasses.

FUN
	There's enough variety in the exercises to keep it from getting boring, but the ordering of the exercises is a bit predictable.

WORDS
	The review section isn't that great and I just have the general feeling that I learnt words better with Duolingo.

GRAMMAR
	Lingodeer gives grammar explanations (even if it is a little unclear how to get to them) and has a logical course structure that focuses around the grammar you need to know.

I was studying Japanese on Duolingo when I first heard of Lingodeer. As I got nearer and nearer the end of the Duolingo course, the numerous bugs and problems started to get to me and I wanted to switch. LingoDeer was a breath of fresh air.

Firstly, whilst Duolingo is more a collection of sentences that have been organised into topics, Lingodeer is a designed course that’s organised according to topics and grammar. Further, Lingodeer actually explains the grammar as well. In every category that’s a full(ish) grammar explanation before the lessons themselves (although you do have to kind of look for it as it’s not immediately obvious that it’s there).

For me, the difference between Duolingo Japanese and Lingodeer Japanese was like night and day. Where I often sat before Duolingo thinking “What? Why? Am I really wrong?”, with Lingodeer the whole process was just much smoother and seemed to flow. I also really appreciated the fact that I could download the course content for offline use so that I could truly practice when I want to.

Lingodeer uses recordings of native speakers. To be honest, I didn’t notice the difference between this and Duolingo’s Text To Speech voices. Perhaps that’s because I was a beginner or perhaps it’s because I was learning Japanese and Japanese is one of the easier languages to make Text To Speech for (The Amazon Polly voices that Duolingo seems to tend to use are generally very good). It could well be that I’ll appreciate the recorded voices later on, but I’m not really in a position to judge right now.

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