Nowadays, we don’t count the number of applications available for tablets and smartphones. There are apps for everything, our smartphones will soon pour us coffee in the morning and cure cancer.
In this huge world of apps, you have the language apps, for instance. They help you learn a new language. Most of them are for free and very efficient, but are still limited to vocabulary games, grammar exercises, online learning books, etc. It does sound like something useful, but it can only ever teach you the technical part of the language, which helps a lot, but is not enough. Indeed, computerized speech is still one of the biggest challenge of technology. The subtleties of the language is a mystery that machines have not managed to solve yet. The best way to learn a language for now still has to involve human interaction.
And this is the genius of HelloTalk: connecting people together to practice and correct each other. Now, nothing new under the sun so far, you are going to say that you can always use the traditional chat platform like Messenger or Skype. But these apps were not designed to be used specifically for the purpose of learning a new language. With HelloTalk, however, you have a magnitude of tools at your disposal that will make the exchange much more worth it.
Beside the obvious voice chat, text chat, smileys and other features you would expect from a good chat program, like notifications of new messages, GPS location sharing, text size settings, you will find a Doodle share (draw in the app to visually represent what you want to talk about) for instance. This will help you express something for which you cannot find an existing translation.
You also have translation, transliteration, and voice recognition to help you write/speak your target language, and more importantly, you can mark exchanges (text, voice, images) for studying later, or save the entire chat to refer to later.
All in all, HelloTalk not only gives you the opportunity to train your language skills with native speakers, it also gives you the tools you need to spot your mistakes, correct them and improve on all levels. And of course, it is for free !! What are you waiting for?
Check out their website for more information.
