HiNative - Language Learning

The app is full of pay-to-play features, ads, and generative AI for answering questions (which contradicts the premise of the app (i.e. getting help from native speakers)). But having a platform to connect with native speakers is valuable.

The people here are incredibly helpful. Just keep in mind that since they are real people typically doing this for free. So the quality and quantity of answers you will receive will vary depending on who answers your question. (Assuming that your question gets an answer.)

Seriously! I got upset at the idea of canceling my subscription when my wife and I were going through budget and expenses. Worth every penny! The AI is extremely helpful and accurate and the community is very active. There’s nothing more helpful than asking a native speaker and the ability to do so at your fingertips, from across the globe, is remarkable! Thank you HiNative

I used to love this app. Even before searching a dictionary, I would come here and search my question to see if someone has already asked it. Especially when searching for differences between words, who can explain it better than a native? But then there came the AI. I understand the business-wise importance of AI but AI messed up the app. Now I can’t even search among asked questions and I have to ask AI first? And AI doesn’t even gives me a correct answer. I wish at least I could change the AI language to English not my native language so maybe I get a more solid answer. After not using this app for months, I still feel the need for the old HiNative, that’s why I’m writing this. Give me my search bar back :(( Thank you.

I love this app but I feel like there is no need to pay 4 coins to hear someone pronounce something for us that’s in a different language it helps people so much and it makes people get to there language goals faster because in Chinese I had trouble pronouncing 女朋友but by copying a native speaker on this app I was Abel to say it because without that I would still struggle 🥺so you don’t have to if you don’t want to but just make it free for us people that use this app it will make us happy and help us reach are goals

I was familiar with HiNative back when it was called Lang-8, it used to be a nice blogging platform where you would help people learn by correcting their blog posts. HiNative is now is just an annoying, noisy, chaotic app that begs for money. AI bots - The app promotes it's AI chatbot (which it wants you to pay for) and talks about how you can by corrected by AI. AI is often wrong, hallucinates answers, and wastes massive amounts of energy to do so. If I wanted to talk to an AI bot I would not use an app that wants to charge me money to do so. The draw should be connecting with other human native speakers, the fact that AI is promoted as a benefit is bewildering when you have a userbase that wants to learn from other people. AI bots are rampant and not hard to find, native speakers of a language you're learning should be the ONLY draw to your app. Streaming - The app REALLY pushes streaming on you. As soon as you open the app you're greeted with a notification that someone you don't know is streaming, and when you close that, the entire top bar of the site is icons of people streaming, with multiple flashing LIVE buttons on each user. It's EXTREMELY annoying and obnoxious. You're constantly forced to look at the flashing icons that never go away. Streaming COULD be beneficial for language learning, but once you go to the actual streaming page most of the space is taken up by rotating ads begging you to buy streaming currency. If you're familiar with the failure that is the Tumblr streaming service, which was so bad that the users bullied Tumblr into removing it completely, this app is using the exact same one. Again, it COULD be very helpful to have streams for language learning, but as far as I can tell there's only a handful of actual people live at any given moment (when I checked just now there was only three people live), and the rest of the page is taken up by ads or by past streams. The biggest issue I have is the annoying and obnoxious way they're pushing the streaming part of the app, with constant notifications, flashing banners, and ads. Which is really a shame because if it wasn't so annoying it could have real benefits for language learners. But it seems their priority is pushing streaming so you can buy their currency. As stated at the beginning, I've been using this service since before it was even an app, and it's really sad to see how it gets progressively worse and worse over the years with things no one wants and begging for money in

i feel conflicted writing this review. i’ve loved hinative for years and have made lots of great connections. with the new AI update, using the app is frustrating. if i wanted an AI translation, i’d go to deepl. the appeal of hinative is to *speak to native speakers* not AI. the search shouldn’t have changed for the AI. what would be better is a specific AI tab to keep them separate, so you can choose between using AI or getting answers the same way it has been. again, i really love and appreciate the idea of this app, and making it AI is completely against that idea.

I love it:)

HN was great before AI became so ubiquitous. In the old days you would just wait to get a human response that had depth. Now it’s the bland Ai response.

its amazing. i have never learned so much about a language in such a short time. people are really supportive and interactive and helpful on here. but the one thing i hate so much is that you need premium to do anything. you can ask questions and all, but you cant play any voice responses, and pronunciation is hard, so this just makes it harder. PLEASE LET ME LISTEN TO VOICE RESPONSES WITHOUT HAVING TO PAY I AM BROKE 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭