Living Language (for iPad)

Looking to pick up a little French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, or Japanese? The Living Language iPad app (free to download, but requires $19.99 in-app purchase) by Random House offers compact lessons in those six languages. As a stand-alone app, meaning without any additional course material or training, Living Language can help you study and practice words and phrases in a new language, but it won't get you very close to fluency. The app's modular teaching tools?games, flashcards, short readings?work best when used in conjunction with a more comprehensive program, including secondary school and university instruction. The Living Language iPad app makes a great study guide.

If the iPad app alone sounds insufficient, you might also consider Living Language Platinum ($179 for one year access, 3.5 stars), the more complete language-learning package by Random House that includes complete access to the mobile content?for iPad, iPhone ($9.99), Android ($14.99), and Nook ($14.99). The star feature of the Platinum account is unlimited e-tutoring, or web-conference style classes, which are not included if you only buy the $20 iPad app.

The Living Language Approach
Living Language doesn't use a total immersion approach to teaching foreign languages, as Rosetta Stone TOTALe (from $249 for Level 1, 4 stars) does. Rather, the instruction, explanations, and additional context needed to learn are in English. I personally find it helpful to have some content in my native tongue, and Living Language still keeps the English to a minimum. It makes sense to teach grammar and the occasional cultural tip in English. Word translations also typically provide more clarity than the immersion method of matching words to pictures.

I tried the Living Language iPad app in both Spanish, a language I've studied before, and Japanese, which was 99 percent foreign to me. I had a very difficult time learning any Japanese whatsoever. The material wasn't sticking with me, and I didn't enjoy it enough to want to come back again and again. Meanwhile, my Spanish was returning quickly. Short bursts of learning on the go or before falling asleep at night seemed to be paying off.

Lessons and Modules
Living Language's modular lessons use flashcards, games, interactive sentence-building exercises, and fill-in-the-blank exercises. It lacks a strong audio component, which is a major weakness of the program. When listening, you'll mostly hear single words and short sentences, rather than stories or dialogue in context. For example, all flashcards contain an audio file that you can play to hear a word spoken aloud. Reading sections also contain audio icons that, when pressed, play spoken words. But it's all very fragmented.

When learning a new language, a lot of people benefit from deep listening exercises of 15 to 30 minutes a day. Pimsleur Comprehensive ($119.95 for digital download, 3.5 stars) and Rocket Languages Premium ($99.95 for lifetime membership, 4.5 stars and an Editors' Choice) both excel in the audio department. Pimsleur, named for the linguist who developed a precise listen-and-repeat methodology for adult language learning, uses audio almost exclusively, while Rocket Languages offers visual and interactive components mixed in. The audio portions of Rocket Language require a good 15 to 25 minutes of exclusive and uninterrupted listening. It's not meant to be broken up with the other learning modules, which can be used separately.

In Living Language, exposure to new vocabulary mostly comes through flashcards. For the most part, you see a word in the language you're learning paired with an image on a card. Click to flip the card, and it reveals the English translation. When you've got a word down pat, mark the card as "mastered." If you don't know the word yet, mark the card as "study." It's rather dry stuff, not very engaging or memorable.

There's another learning module that shows dialogue bubbles one by one, which I think is basically just more flashcards in disguise, because these too have a click-to-flip function with a translation behind them. Both the traditional flashcards and the dialogues contain audio files so you can hear the word or words spoken in the new language, but they are derived of any real-world context.

Short reading passages remind me too much of dry very textbook material. Sure, they get to the point, often explaining a grammatical rule, but I never once looked forward to reading them.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/wMh7oPbd6h0/0,2817,2402088,00.asp

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