The market is chock-full of Language-learning websites and apps that boldly guarantee fluency in free or four weeks or promise to reveal the secret to “learning a language like a child”. However, in most cases, their promises turn out to be empty.
So, it can happen that you end up spending time and money in vain and not manage to improve your language skills. But, language-learning programs live up to their claims. Let’s start with Transparent Language Review and see is it one of them.
Transparent Language Review: Languages
If you’re looking to learn a new language chances are high that Transparent Language has it. This app and website have programs for more than 100 languages. Having in mind that you can find languages from the most popular ones to those with few speakers worldwide, it’s clear that Transparent offers the most languages of any language app I’ve seen.
Let’s see that long list of languages:
Afrikaans, Albanian, Altai, Amharic, Arabic (Modern Standard, Egyptian, Iraqi, Levantine), Armenian, Azerbaijani, Balinese, Baluchi, Bashkir, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Buriat, Cambodian (Khmer), Chechen, Cantonese Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, Cree, Croatian, Czech, Dakota (Standard and Sisseton), Danish, Dari, Denaakk’e (Koyukon), Denesuline, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French (European and Canadian), Georgian, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kalmyk, Kazakh, Koasati, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Maori, Mirandese, Mongolian, Nahuatl, Nepali, Nogai, Norwegian, Oji-Cree, Ojibwe (Standard, Central, Northwestern), Pashto, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Quechua, Romanian, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Slovak, Somali, Spanish (Latin American and European), Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajiki, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen, Tuvan, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek (Cyrillic, Latin), Vietnamese, Welsh, Wolof, Yoruba, and Zulu.
Transparent Language Review: Pros and Cons
Pros
- Offers instruction in more than 100 languages
- Clear learning path and structure
- Excellent speech analysis
- Appropriately challenging
Cons
- Writing and spelling exercises could be more polished
- Some languages have more content than others
- Pricier than others
Transparent Language Review: Specs
Product Category | Education & Reference |
Package Reviewed | 12 Month Subscription |
No. of Languages Offered (Not Incl. English) | 100 |
Average Duration of Lesson (Mins) | 10 |
Transparent Language Review: Pricing
Transparent Language Online costs $24.95 per month or $149.95 per year. We can say it’s not cheap since a large number of other language apps charge around $10-$13 monthly or $100-$150 yearly. It also offers online private tutoring, but that option is sold separately.
There are two ways of getting it for free:
- 14-day free trial (no credit card required) that includes access to all the languages, jumping between languages, and saving your progress with each one.
- Trough your library if it has licenses to Transparent. If that’s your case, you can create an account from home and get access to the program (just as you would if you purchased it)
Transparent Language Review: Experience
While testing Transparent Language, my opinion about it was like the ride with a roller coaster. There were moments when it felt too challenging. Sometimes it felt like it teaches the right quantity of new material per lesson. But from time to time I felt it’s just not challenging enough.
In my experience, this difference comes down to the languages I used while testing the app and my level of experience with them.
I’ve used Transparent Language Online to learn German, Russian, Spanish, and Hungarian. I’m not a native speaker of any of those languages. However, I have a lot of experience with Spanish and Russian, but zero points with Hungarian. When talking about German, I’ve learned some words and expressions on my own, but just enough to be able to understand and say a few travel phrases.
Russian and Spanish were not challenging enough for me and Transparent Language didn’t manage to keep my skills sharp. Hungarian lessons were extremely difficult for me as I had to take extensive notes while completing the exercises and use them going forward. However, Germany gave me just the right level of challenge.
Transparent Language Review: How It works?
When you enter in Transparent Languages website or app, you will see a dashboard. You can find all your units and lessons (sequentially numbered) under the heading My Learning Path. On your right side, you can find a chart that shows your progress – how much vocabulary you’ve piled up over time. In the same chart, you can see a number of words you haven’t been exposed to in a while.
Each unit contains numerous lessons with an assessment at the end. If you think a lesson is too easy for you, just skip ahead to the unit assessment. What’s more, you also can delete it from your Learning Path if you want.
Assessments take about 10 minutes or less. You need to show you can speak, read, write, and hear all the words you learned leading up to them. But don’t worry, you can move forward with your learning even if you don’t pass an assessment.
For languages that use a different script, like Russian, you need to choose whether you want native characters or a transliteration – the words are phonetically translated into the Roman alphabet. In both cases, it’s not a strictly either/or proposition and you have the option to reveal the native writing alongside the transliterations and vise versa.
Transparent has a cool option for languages with new-to-you characters and letters that can help you learn more about the writing system while you study. So, you can find more information about the characters while you’re doing exercises, simply by clicking on them.
Final Thoughts
Transparent Language Online Isn’t the flashiest app on the market, but it offers excellent education in a huge number of languages. It’s quite comprehensive and offers a variety of teaching methods (from writing to speaking, reading, etc). At $149 per year, the price is a bit high. If you want a more affordable option, consider using Ling App for a reasonable $60 for a year.