Having heard about the language drops app, I thought I’d give it a try. I’ll save a full review for later, hence this being a blog post, but I’m initially impressed. This appears to be an SRS type learning system with a nicely designed app with nice little games/exercises. The free version limits you to 5 minutes play per 12 hours. Realistically this means that if you want to stick to some sort of schedule then you’re going to end up doing 5 minutes per day. That’s pretty minimal for my liking but I thought why not try it and see. There actually seems to be a version for each language in the store, which is great. That means I can do 5 minutes per language (by installing multiple apps).

I’ve decided on this selection:

Spanish – which I’ve been studying for two months. So far the words it is giving are a refresher for me.

Japanese – Again, I’ve been studying this for two months. I’m much weaker on word knowledge than Spanish. Also, because the app has a mode that shows only katakana and kanji, I’ve chosen this mode to try to squeeze some kanji into my brain! It’ll be interesting to see how that goes.

Arabic – I thought I should try one that is new to me. So i chose Arabic. The app has started by teaching me the alphabet(?)/script(?). This looks tough!

French – I guess I’d be a false beginner in this. I learnt French for a couple of years at school a long time ago, but have mostly forgotten it. Some of the words it has given me are a bit familiar though.

From my initial practice it seems that the word lists for each language are the same. I’ll play for a while and see how it goes.

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