Marta
Madrid
It is rarely the quality of the content. It is almost always one of three things: the session to fit in every day, the sentences somebody else chose that you will never use, or the feeling of having built an enormous streak without being able to hold a conversation.
It is worth being precise about which of the three applies to you, because they lead to different tools.
Babbel, Busuu and the like offer a more grown-up path and more conversational lessons. If the problem was the quality of the content, they are the right answer.
If the problem was the daily session, though, nothing changes: they ask for the same dedicated time, at a moment you still have to find.
Anki is the most powerful tool in the category, and spaced repetition is the soundest mechanism there is for not forgetting.
The cost is that you build the deck yourself, one card at a time. People who sustain that discipline get remarkable results; most stop before then, and a deck downloaded from someone else brings back the problem of sentences chosen by a stranger.
Tandem and HelloTalk put you in touch with native speakers and solve the problem of real context: you are talking to a person, not to an exercise.
They remain an app to open and somebody to find, though, so a session again — and what you learn inside them is not collected anywhere.
The last category is the least travelled: rather than adding a moment of study, hook onto one that already exists. Writing messages is the thing everybody does every day, in one language only.
Glotta sits there: it is a keyboard, it translates what you write as you write it, and it keeps the sentences you actually use so it can bring them back. The review mechanics are Anki's — the difference is that the deck wrote itself while you were living your day.
It depends on what was not working. For more grown-up content, Babbel or Busuu. For not forgetting, Anki. For talking to real people, Tandem or HelloTalk. If the problem was finding the time, you need something that does not ask for a session at all: that is the category Glotta is in.
No, and it does not try to. A course gives you the basic grammar in order; Glotta works on the sentences you produce yourself and on bringing them back over time. They are two different things, and they sit together well.
Yes. On-device translation, collecting your sentences, review and the widget stay free. Premium adds the stronger models for hard sentences and the reason behind every correction.
No. The whole loop — write, collect, review — is on the free tier.
It is a keyboard, and it explains itself better in motion: on the home page it translates inside a conversation, with nobody having opened anything.
