Learning a language online: my experience with Mondly, a browser-based app that aims to help you study any foreign language online in a fun way by gamifying the learning experience.
Learning A Language Online: My Experience With Mondly
Company Overview
Mondly is a language learning app that claims to help you “play your way to a new language” and get you speaking “faster than anyone else.” It’s been designed by combining principles of neuroscience with cutting edge technologies.
If you want to know more, here is an overview of the language processing inside the human brain according to current neurolinguistics models:
Alex Iliescu and Tudor Iliescu founded Mondly in 2013. It has been developed by ATi Studios, which is an EdTech company with the goal of “making technology-based learning easier”. The company is headquartered in Brasov, Romania and even though it started with a small team, it has grown to have larger teams in Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom. According to their website, at the time of writing they have over 100 million users.
Mondly launched its first virtual reality language app in 2017, MondlyVR, along with Mondly Kids for 5-12 year olds.
In 2018 Mondly released MondlyAR, which is now the world’s first augmented reality language app featuring speech recognition. With a focus on bringing innovative tech features to the digital language study experience, it appeals to users looking for an alternative to classroom study.
It has quickly become the fastest growing language app on the App Store and Google Play. Its quality was recognized by a lot of brands giving Mondly some achievements.
Mondly’s method
We can find this quote above at Mondly website:
Mastering a new language is needed by everybody for some reasons, such as: education, works and sociality. This app promises to help you learn new languages faster than anyone else.
To keep users highly engaged, it is designed as a fun addictive game. Learners progress through lessons, complete tasks, earn achievements, unlock new content and competition.
It supports both visual and verbal learning style and it helps people speak a new language by focusing on full sentence communication, rather than isolated words, which makes people learn to communicate faster.
To get results fast, the app uses innovative methods to teach speaking and pronounciation. Developers use state-of-the-art speech recognition technology from Nuance, market leader in voice recognition.
Furthermore, Mondly works with professional native voice actors to provide you with authentic pronunciations and natural accents.
People can record their voice and take part in simulated conversations. Recorded conversations can then be practiced hands-free whenver you want, even while running or driving.
Practice real conversations
The Mondly method aims to get you immersed in the language learning process within seconds using chatbots, AR and VR, thereby removing the stress of speaking with actual people until you’re already comfortable conversing.
The Different Ways to Learn a Language with Mondly
Mondly offers a variety of options for learning a language:
- Mondly is the primary language learning app created by the company and this is what I will focus on as a part of my review.
- MondlyWORKS is a version of Mondly available to businesses with bulk subscriptions and dashboards to help employers track the learning progress of their employees.
Would you like to try Mondly out and see if it’s a good fit for you? Click the button below and try Mondly for FREE.
In addition to their standard app and language courses, Mondly also offers virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) learning apps as well, which are designed to complement the standard lessons. This is where Mondly really differentiates itself form other language apps. In fact, the novelty of the programs sort of make Mondly a pioneer in the digital language learning landscape.
Here they are:
- MondlyVR is Mondly’s virtual immersion tool. It’s very similar to the Chatbot in the Mondly app, but using VR technology, you’re put into a simulated situation. So if you’re practicing the “Restaurant” chat, VR puts you in a restaurant with a waitress. If you’re having the “Hotel” chat, you’re at a reception desk.
Here is a video on Mondly VR
- MondlyAR takes a scan of your room and then uses augmented reality (AR) technology to show a teacher and animations for the words that you’re learning. It’s very similar to a classroom lecture, but you don’t have to sit at a desk. Instead, you can interact with the animations, tapping them on your device or even getting up to walk around and get a 360 view.
Here is a video on Mondly AR
Futhermore, Mondly offers special courses for children and for preparing for an exam:
- MondlyKIDS is very similar to the main app, but the illustrations used are more kid-friendly and fun.
Here is a video on Mondly Kids
- Oxford Assessments are special lessons in Mondly, based on Oxford Practice Grammar tests and the Oxford 3000. These practice tests and lessons follow CEFR guidelines.
Would you like to try Mondly out and see if it’s a good fit for you? Click the button below and try Mondly for FREE.
How does it cost
The big takeaway is that Mondly is very affordable: the Mondly premium plan costs around $10 per month, or $48 per year if you pay up for 12 months in advance. Also, you can optionally get lifetime access to Mondly as well, which you sometimes find on sale for around $90 total. This gives you access to learning as much as 41 languages, if you’re willing to.
They also offer many promotions in the course of the year. So, if you want to find out what discount they’re offering now, click the button below!
Mondly can help you master: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, European Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese.
Here is a video on Mondly
Would you like to try Mondly out and see if it’s a good fit for you? Click the button below and try Mondly for FREE.
Free vs Premium Membership
Mondly offers a limited free membership that never expires. With a free account you get 1 vocabulary builder, 6 lessons and 1 conversation with the AI chatbot. The Premium membership unlocks all of the Mondly content and features:
If you don’t want to commit to a Premium membership straight away, start with a FREE membership. Clik the button below to try it for free!
My experience with Mondly
To start learning with Mondly, you don’t need to sign up for an account. You can just head to their website or download the app and start learning.
If you’d like to use the app across multiple devices or save your learning data, however, I would recommend setting up an account. To sign up, you select the language you’d like to learn from, the language you’re learning, and your level.
I chose to learn Dutch and my native language is Italian:
You can also connect your account to Facebook or Google so that you can sign in that way as well.
Once you’ve signed up (or before if you choose not to sign up), you can complete a tutorial. The first half of the tutorial is a series of screens that show you the basic features of the app before prompting you to activate a paid subscription on the final screen. If you’re not ready to upgrade, you can click “Skip” up in the top right corner.
You’ll then arrive at the main Mondly dashboard, which looks like a map. On this map, you’ll see a bunch of landmark icons, which each represent a different topic or theme.
You can scroll from left to right and visualize all these different “landmarks” accross an interactive map.
Here is the map showed me in Italian
Some of these topics include weather, travel, and family, among many others. Within each topic after you click into it, there are usually 6 to 8 lessons. They’re short. Each lesson only takes about 5 to 15 minutes to complete, depending on the day and topic, and they go by very quick. The fact that the lessons are short and engaging is great for working professionals, busy parents and students.
If you choose the free account you have a very limited access. You just get 1 vocabulary builder, 6 lessons an 1 mock conversation. In my opinion, it should actually be renamed “free trial.”
Signing up for a paid account unlocks the remaining lessons. The categories or topics include:
- Hello (this is unlocked with a free account)
- Core Vocabulary
- Family
- Countries & Languages
- Romance
- Seasons & Weather
- Preparing a Trip
- Travel
- Vacation Activities
- Public Transportation
- Food & Drinks
- School
- Sports
- Introductions
- Pets
- Entertainment
- Shopping
- Around the House
- Grammar 1
- Grammar 2
- Grammar 3
- Airport 1
- Airport 2
- Hotel: Reservation
- Hotel: In the Room
- Restaurant 1
- Restaurant 2
- Restaurant 3
- Restaurant 4
- City Tour
- Bank
- Business
- Fun
- Help!
- Doctor
- Emergencies
- Animals
- Fruits & Food
- Colors & Numbers
- Parts of the Body
- Access to all of the past daily lessons currently dating back to 2015
- Chatbot
- AR (only for certain languages – it was available in German, but not Japanese or Croatian)
Even though the topics appear in a specific order, you’re free to complete them in the order you feel is best.
Each lesson is made up of a dozen or so quick-hit, interactive drills and exercises that span the major mediums listening, reading, writing and speaking. These drills include:
- matching phrases to images;
- listening to words and phrases in your target language and then repeating them;
- spelling words and phrases;
- translating sentences between languages;
- listening to a question and selecting the right multiple-choice answer; and completing mock conversations by selecting the correct response.
Would you like to try Mondly out and see if it’s a good fit for you? Click the button below and try Mondly for FREE.
The daily lessons
The daily lessons unlock every twelve hours, and if you complete an entire week of daily lessons, you unlock a more lengthy weekly test. If you miss a day, however, you don’t get access to the weekly test. And if you complete each weekly quiz, you can also unlock a monthly challenge. Getting access to extra learning material is definitely great motivation for coming back each day and keeping up your studies and unlocking quizzes and challenges encourages learners to keep up with their daily lessons.
Mondly is big on consistency and streaks!
Mondly has a competitive element that keeps you motivated
By completing lessons on Mondly, you earn points. These affect your place on a leaderboard, both against all other users in the world and any of your friends who you may have on the app. In my opinion, this all creates a fun, game-like environment, and is good to keep yourself motivated and engaged.
I just started so I was very low but a bit of competitive spirit helped and motivated me to do a few more lessons!
It also provides you with your statistics to keep tracks of your performance.
By tapping to the “Statistics” tab at the bottom of the screen, you can go to the section where your metrics are displayed, including a score that determines what level you’re currently at.
There’s also a diagram of a brain on the Statistics page, and it has recent vocabulary words and phrases you’ve learned suggested for your review.
Lesson Categories
There are over 40 categories, each containing numerous lessons.
The first three categories – Hello, Chatbot, and Daily Lesson – are offered free. The other categories are locked and only Premium users can access them. Among others, I found very useful the Core Vocabulary Category that presents commonly used words, phrases and sentences and the Chatbot.
The Chatbot
I enjoyed learning with the chatbot, which is designed to emulate a conversation, giving me a chance to put the language I’m learning into practice.
While the responses available to you are limited, it gives you the chance to roleplay in a variety of situations you may find yourself in with your new language. As I wrote before, with the free version, you only get one Hello scenario, while there are many more scenarios available for the Premium version. These include: Hello, Restaurant, Hotel, Tickets, Conversation, Shopping, Appointment, and Taxi. For the set phrases, Mondly’s voice recognition is fairly accurate.
Would you like to try Mondly out and see if it’s a good fit for you? Click the button below and try Mondly for FREE.
What I liked about Mondly
Here is what I liked and what I didn’t like about Mondly after personally testing the program:
The Price Point
Mondly is very affordable, especially compared to other language learning programs out there.
Short and quick lessons
The lessons are short and engaging and fast and easy to complete. You can knock out a lesson or two each day in a short time frame and still feel like you’re making progress.
Gamified learning and competitive elements
Mondly tries to gamify the language learning experience, making it fun also with competition among users. This creates a fun, game-like environment to keep yourself motivated and engaged.
Many language options
Mondly offers 41 languages, all of which can be used as either source or target languages.
Useful Vocabulary
Mondly teaches you truly useful vocabulary and phrases. The material you learn consists of words and phrases that you’re actually likely to use in real world situations.
Mondly even offers job specific courses and lessons, which can be helpful for working professionals that might be looking to work or travel overseas.
Would you like to try Mondly out and see if it’s a good fit for you? Click the button below and try Mondly for FREE.
What can be improved
Here is what I thought could be done better:
Limited free version
The free version is very limited offering just 1 vocabulary builder, 6 lessons, and 1 mock conversation. As previously said, I would call it a free trial. Unfortunately, Mondly’s speech recognition tool isn’t available with the free account, so there’s no way to have your pronunciation checked.
Limited grammar instructions
When it comes to grammar instruction, the Mondly program is limited. They just don’t provide much detail, and the explanations are thin. In reality, all you get is that when you click on a verb, you can see a list of its conjugations. As a result, if you have the audio off, when you see new phrases in the exercises, they can be impossible to answer correctly because you’re not given any context or examples.
Not ideal for intermediate and advanced learners
Mondly is not great for intermediate to advanced learners. In fact, the beginner, intermediate and advanced levels don’t even seem to be that much different from one another. Even when you get to the advanced levels, the lessons are sort of basic. But if you’re just starting out with a language, or even starting over, Mondly offers a lot to help.
In conclusion: is Mondly a valid option to learn a language?
There’s a lot to like about Mondly.
The premium version is really affordable, and their lessons are short and engaging. When you combine this with how they gamify the language learning experience, it makes for a pretty fun and interesting learning experience that keeps you coming back each day.
I also think their job-specific courses can be super useful for working professionals and are a pretty underrated feature. Not to mention, their VR and AR apps are truly innovative.
However, like most language programs, there are a handful of disadvantages as well. For example, Mondly doesn’t focus on grammar principles, and the lessons really don’t seem to advance beyond the basics in terms of helping you truly master the new language.
As many other language apps, I think Mondly is a solid all-around program and an effective option that should work well for most people. In my opionion, it can be a good solution for those who want quick and fun lessons on a daily basis and just wants to develop basic conversational skills.
It has a lot of fantastic and useful vocabulary and phrases for a beginning language learner, and even lower intermediate. It’s engaging, enjoyable to use, and has several features built-in to keep you motivated to learn.
Would you like to try Mondly out and see if it’s a good fit for you? Click the button below and try Mondly for FREE.
If you are interested in learning a language online, you can also take a look at these reviews
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