Michel Thomas Language Library

The interface feels dated. Does not support listening to the recordings and reading the resources/scripts at the same time. Not so easy to use.

The course is amazing, this review is for the app!!! The audio player in the app has several buggs that kill the purpose of using the app. The pause button is often unresponsive and the progress bar not in sync with the recording. While listening to the recording phone screen locks so it becomes impossible to pause unless using a headset. As reported other reviews the headset does not help much because of laggy/unresponsive pausing. The UI is poorly designed to say the least. The player buttons take maybe 10% of the screen space while useless image takes up 90%. It seems that very little consideration went into designing and developing the app. Experienced software develop could fix the mentioned issues in a day… Such a shame that the app does not do justice to the course.

Not a review of the content of the language courses (which are great). The player in the app is just a bit bad….. I use an iPhone 11 and pause/playing from my airpod pros doesn’t always work with this player, which results in not being able to pause in time to do an exercise, then having to open the app, rewind etc. the only way to get the play/pause function to consistently work for me is to have the app open, which is a drain on battery and is a pain when walking around, for example. I’m not a developer but this seems like quite an easy thing to fix? Or just let us have the mp3s so that we can play on a better player?

This could be good content but the app is so badly build that the lessons don’t load and keep on crashing. So far I have not been able to access more than 20% of the content. I tried to uninstall the app and install it again which unlocked 2 more lessons. But when I tried it a second time the App blocked me completely saying I cannot have the app on more than 5 devices. I only have it on the same one!!! I tried to contact customer support but the website crashes. I emailed them but no reaction. On top of wasting your money on an absolutely frustrating app you get to waste your time on non existing customer support too! Better try anything else from YouTube to Doulingo or Verbling.

Compared to Duolingo these language apps are way overpriced. I bought Greek, Arabic and Spanish at great expense a few years ago. Michel Thomas only did the Spanish one and there is no doubt he has a gift for teaching. The Greek course also has an excellent teacher but only covers the basics. Inexplicably the developers deleted the sound files and made the courses unavailable (despite having paid for them) I would be very wary of buying any as likely to be deleted again by the developers. The only advantage of the MT method is that you can listen to them while driving as there are no buttons to press and less interaction. That’s probably not a good thing anyway.

Lots of taps to get to the lesson. The audio does not keep the location. Some audio downloads but does not play. Slow on my pro max 13 iPhone. Very poor app.

I quite like the learning process but the app itself is very poor. The bulk of the screen is taken up with the logo leaving a very small space for the play / pause button making it difficult to hit - and you’ll want to hit that button a lot. Pausing also seems to sometimes rewind 30sec too. There also surely has to be a better way to link the text to the audio lesson too rather than hit the tiny chapter button and search through 69 pages of a pdf!! The whole app is pretty amateurish.

I downloaded the app and listened to the free first lesson. I didn’t set an account up and now it won’t let me register. All I have now is the login page which tells me none of my email addresses are valid so I can’t even try ‘Forgotten’ password. Tried deleting the app and downloading the app but no luck. Stuck at the login page forever!

While it’s very useful to have the audio available in an app, The app struggles with the very necessary requirement to play/pause Pros: - Really useful to have all of the audio in an app, audio can be downloaded offline so great if you’ve not always got access to data etc - Great to have the audio and resources available in the same place, resources can be accessed while the audio plays fairly easily. Improvements: - This may be a bug, play/pause doesn’t work as expected while the iPhone is locked. I’ve noticed when you pause from the Lock Screen, it actually skips back 30 seconds which can get confusing. While I can work around the issue by keeping the app open, it means I have to keep the app open at all times. - Sometimes while inside the app, the play/pause button shows the ‘play’ icon instead of the ‘pause’ icon and the audio bar is frozen in the wrong place. Pressing the play/pause icon still seems to act as it should but not clear where you are. - Once listening, going back to the list of audio isn’t very easy, the ‘chapters’ button is very low down on the bottom right corner making it really hard to press. - It would be useful to have some sort of placeholder to remind you where you’ve got up to if you have to come back.

Reviewing solely the app and not the courses themselves, this app is useful when on the go. However the reason it’s not 5 stars is the app lacks a lot of polish, by which I mean there several buggy parts to the application and the UX could be significantly improved.