Marta
Madrid
It is hardly ever the quality of the content. Usually it is one of three things: the session you have to squeeze in every day, sentences picked by somebody else that you will never use, or months of exercises 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.
A path of lessons, from basic grammar upwards, with exercises and checks. If what you lack is order, or you are starting from zero, it is the most solid route.
The cost is dedicated time: the lesson has to happen at a moment you have to find, every day, and that is where most people stop.
Spaced repetition brings a word back just before you would forget it. It is the soundest mechanism there is for remembering, and plenty of apps are built on it.
The limit is the material: either you build it yourself, one card at a time, or you use a deck someone else made, full of words that are not yours.
Language exchange apps put you in touch with people who speak the language you are learning. They solve the problem of real context: you are talking to a person, not to an exercise.
They are still an app to open and someone to find at the right time, and what you learn in there is not collected anywhere.
The last route is the least travelled: instead of adding a moment of study, it hooks onto one that already exists. Writing messages is something everybody does every day.
That is where Glotta sits: it is a keyboard, it translates what you write as you write it, keeps the words you actually use and teaches you ten of them a week, with short lessons, review and guided conversation. The review mechanism is the one flashcards use; the difference is that the deck writes itself.
They are not mutually exclusive. A course gives you structure, a keyboard keeps you in touch with the language every day, an exchange tests you against a person.
If you have to pick just one, start from what is stopping you: time, material or practice.
The one you will actually use. If you lack structure, a course. If you forget, spaced repetition. If you lack practice, an exchange with native speakers. If the problem is finding the time, you need something that does not ask for a session: that is the category Glotta is in.
It does not try to. A course gives you the basic grammar in order; Glotta works on the words you use yourself, with short lessons on the verbs in your set and on bringing them back over time. They are two different things, and they sit together well.
Yes. The keyboard, the vocabulary, the week's set, the lessons, review and the widget stay free, with twenty sentences a day translated by the strongest models. Premium removes the daily limits.
No. The whole loop — write, collect, learn the set, 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.
