App Review: ListLang
I just discovered this new app which is simply focussed on teaching the top 5000 words. All it does is provide a short sentence with a word left out, then it gives you four Russian words to choose from. It let's you know whether you are right or wrong and then you continue on to the next sentence. In the background a spaced repetition system works to serve you sentences at the optimal time for creating strong memories.
Another great feature is that you can create your own lists, you just enter words you want to learn and it will automatically look up a translation and then find example sentences using those words. This is an amazing feature I didn't even know I wanted.
The creator of the app made it for themselves to help them learn Russian and because of this an effort was made not to inflate the word count with all the different cases:
"The dictionary form of the word is used, so learning all the grammatical forms of a word counts as one word. For example, “eat”, “eats”, “ate” count as one word. This makes the frequency list more meaningful as it’s not bloated with many forms of a word that essentially mean the same thing".
I don't necessarily think this app is good for an absolute beginner because it uses generated audio for the pronunciation rather than a real recording. But for someone like me who has been studying for a while and who has a good sense of how words should be pronounced it's really useful.
The only other app I use is Speakly, which also focuses on the most frequently used words but the exercises are a bit more convoluted and some also rely on speaking into the phone which I don't want to do in public. ListLang is an app I can use when I'm out and about and is another way for me to hammer on the most frequently used words.
The more often I do that the quicker I'll acquire them. My tool set at the moment is Speakly, LingQ, Glossika, Anki (for word Russian roots). ListLang is a very useful tool to add to the list.
Get ListLang for free here:
If you want to read more about the app, they answered a bunch of questions in this Reddit thread. I built an app to learn the 5000 most frequently used words in context
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