Lingvist

Lingvist allows you to learn a foreign language without ever having to step foot into a classroom. Its loosely structured learning design allows students to develop a curriculum at their own pace, and it relies on a full immersion approach to foreign language to promote rote-driven growth. The core user interface of Lingvist is shockingly sparse and streamlined for a learning app. You won't find a complex layer of menus or encouragement to pursue a wide range of activities as soon as you open it up. It's a clean and refreshingly user-driven alternative to the aggressively gamified trends that dominate so many modern educational apps. Instead, you're simply asked to choose the language you want to learn and then presented with a short sentence that includes a missing word. Your goal is to fill in that word, and that will serve as the impetus for practically all your time within the Lingvist app. That might be a steep hill to climb for new users, but it's an effective one. Guess the word wrong or hit the Reveal button to be presented with the answer. Guess it right to move on to the next flash card. This constitutes the core loop of the app, but it's a surprisingly effective loop. In an unconventional transition away from the conventions of many of Lingvist's contemporaries, the app never seems to openly judge you about your successes or failures. There are no colorful cartoon characters to encourage you after a string of missed vocabulary words, no badges or achievements provided in the wake of a successful streak, and no daily reminders or weekly goals to achieve. You're simply provided with a succession of flash cards that provide you with absent vocabulary. But Lingvist is more complicated than a simple flashcard app, and the streamlined and agnostic design is intentional. The whole framework is built off a sophisticated AI that tracks your successes and failures behind the screen and presents you with the most important vocabulary for your continued growth. Words that build off one another and words frequently missed will appear more frequently, and those you get a better grip on will fall out of favor and return only when you need to refresh your memory. Lingvist's pop-ups gently inform you of where you went wrong with an answer, and as you continue deeper into the curriculum, you'll start to see more nuanced pop-up materials introducing you to new and more advanced concepts. Lingvist lives off the principle that a stripped down approach to learning without distractions is the best way to acquire new knowledge, and this is reflected in the basic UI and non-regimented learning structure. It might not be the best approach for all learners, but it's an innovative alternative to some of the more popular apps on the market.