Innovative Language Learning

This app and website is helping me more than any other platform for me to Learn 日本語 and it makes it super easy!!!

Notes: I am using the Japanese Learning Pathway. The app focuses mostly on the spoken language, which is understandable given the difficulty of written Japanese. The audio portion of the lessons focus on dialog from native speakers, which is important when learning a new language. Lesson Notes include vocabulary, the dialog spoken in the episode, and also how the grammar points would be used outside the dialog. There are quizzes after lessons, which include vocab, grammar, and written Japanese. It’s important to review lesson notes, as quizzes are often based on information from the notes. If you are wanting to learn a new language for travel or for fun, spending time each day on the app will definitely see your skills improve. The app issues I was experiencing before seem to have been fixed, but took a long time for a known issue to be resolved. Including my original review for context. Original Review: “App often hangs up on loading lessons The app often hangs up on loading lessons, with waiting not resulting the lessons loading, and restarting the app doesn’t fix the issue either

If the internet connection is poor for even a couple seconds, the app crashes.

This app works OK the first time you open it after downloading. The next time you use it, it either freezes as soon as you click on a lesson or works for a minute or so and then crashes. The only solution is to delete it, then download it again and start all over. It has been like this for many months now, through multiple updates, and the developer is evidently unable or unwilling to correct the problem(s). A further issue may be that ILL is now attempting to cover too many languages. They have assured me that they release new lessons weekly, yet the upper intermediate and advanced Japanese content seems not to have been augmented or updated in any meaningful way for years. What's there is not terrible, but it isn't great, either – and there's very little of it. In any case, if you're interested in learning a language, rather than wasting your time downloading the same app over and over, you should look elsewhere! (If you're wondering, the only reason I'm still attempting to use this terrible product is that I stupidly purchased a two-year membership, and the app stopped working about nine months in.)

This is a fantastic application. It is very intuitive and is helping me out a lot to learn Spanish. Thank you.

Content wasn’t loading. The app would get stuck on the loading wheel. I deleted and redownload the app. It seemed to fix the issue. However, it was short lived. It keeps getting stuck on the loading wheel, even for downloaded offline content. Please fix.

The greatest app to learn any language

The lessons are great, but the app is full of bugs, you click on things and there is this infinite loop. You need to reset the app all the time.

For the last several months I have been unable to use this app. Everything works fine until I click on a lesson to play it, and which point a loading spinner shows up and never leaves. The only way to get out is to force quit. The issue has persisted to my new phone. Obviously this renders the app unusable.

I used ChinesePod to learn a lot of Chinese back in 2005 and 2017-2020. This company uses the same technique as them. I use this app for JapanesePod101. As I write this review, the basic tier costs $8 and only unlocks lesson audio, and it’s promised to unlock lesson transcripts and lesson notes, but sometimes the transcripts are locked too. The next tier up is a big $17 jump to $25 a month. Even though it offers a lot more, that’s a significant jump, and I think $25 a month is a lot to ask. I’d rather study on my own with YouTube videos and textbooks that include audio files for dialogues and save that $25 a month for a couple of tutoring lessons with a Japanese native speaker. The basic tier just doesn’t seem worth it to me given how restrictive it is.