Not to discourage you, but you’re in for a long haul. Nobody sprints their way to learning a language.

Some days you just won’t feel like doing your lesson, and that’s when you begin to lose momentum. I’ve found it’s not the length of time you spend on each lesson, but how regularly you do them. So it’s crucial to your success to find a language-learning app that engages you rather than bores the hell out of you.

Luckily for you, there are tons of apps with a bunch of different approaches, so finding one that’s the right fit is easier than it’s ever been. I’ve tried most of the major ones out there. Here are the ones that are worth your time and money (and the ones that aren’t).

the best that pass the test

• The Most Effective: Pimsleur
• For Social Butterflies: iTalki
• Natural Video Lessons: Memrise

The Most Effective: Pimsleur

No app taught me as well as Pimsleur. Even though it’s an app, the core of its teaching goes back decades to before apps even existed. Each audio lesson lasts for 30 minutes and involves listening to and repeating sentences. You don’t get graded or have to select anything on the screen, just correctly say the phrases prompted by the narrator.

Because I could hit the play button and then not have to look at my phone for 30 minutes, I’d put on lessons while doing chores around the apartment. They’re structured to repeat bits of previous lessons frequently through subsequent ones, which did a fantastic job of driving them into my long-term memory.

There are 51 languages to learn, some with more depth than others. But all that I encountered in Spanish, French, and Swahili were well made. Every lesson evolved and solidified my understanding of the lesson without any filler. The app’s interface is also cleanly designed and easy to navigate. While I would’ve liked the flashcards and quizzes to be harder, they’re clearly afterthoughts that complement the main audio lessons.

Check out my Pimsleur review.

For Social Butterflies: iTalki

Years ago when I first stumbled across this novel app, it wasn’t a guide or a recommendation from a local friend who clued me into iTalki. It was the app’s strong international user base gushing about it on a forum. ITalki works differently than most language apps. Rather than lobbing a bunch of standardized course lessons at you, iTalki has you practice with real people.

There are two paths. The first is a free method that acts as a matchmaking service for you and somebody either learning a language you know or who knows a language you’re learning; ideally, both. Then you simply chat. In my experience the switch-off from teaching my language to them teaching me theirs was seamless and natural, and the conversations were actually interesting because we were two real people. No stilted sentences about where to find the nearest hotel.

The other path is buying credits to hire a tutor who instructs you over video. The quality varies widely, and the lessons are completely at the tutor’s discretion. Most I saw had degrees from respected institutions and were responsive to queries, and some even offered discounted or free trials before committing.

Read my iTalki review.

Natural Video Lessons: Memrise

Does the idea of speaking over video to a hired tutor terrify you, or the scheduled lessons that comes with that feels suffocating, but you still like the idea of learning by watching and hearing real people speak real sentences with a natural cadence? Same. Most language apps include sample sentences in over-enunciated, slower-than-normal spoken sentences that bear little resemblance to the way people actually speak. Easy to learn, like training wheels on a bike, but I think it gets in the way of being able to understand actual conversations.

The core of Memrise’s lessons are videos of sentences spoken by real people, with real accents. You can take the lessons anytime you want, since they’re pre-recorded. In my experience using it for Spanish, a language I know somewhat well, and Russian, a language I barely know, the people on video sound the most natural of all language apps, by far.

Too often I find myself able to understand the very slowly spoken language in a learning program and then struggling to follow along when listening to somebody outside the classroom speak that language. Memrise did the best of the apps to smooth over that transition and taught me, from the get-go, to understand these languages the way their native speakers actually speak them.

how i tested

For each app I took lessons in Spanish, a language I’ve been learning for many years and which I consider myself intermediate already. I can get by conversationally, but there’s still plenty left in my language learning journey.

And then I’d also pick a language of which I had a very basic knowledge, such as French or Russian. Practicing both on an app let me know when I was receiving bad advice, such as outdated slang or clunky language that nobody uses outside of a classroom, because I’d know better frrom my experience with Spanish.

And on the other extreme it’d give me a window into how effective an app was at teaching me a language as a rank beginner, when I had not much prior experience in grammar, syntax, and basic vocabulary.

Other Language Learning Apps that we considered

Look, I already know I’m going to catch a lot of shit for not including Duolingo as a favorite app. I’m speaking from a place of experience. I’ve used it extensively. At one point I had a 550-day-ish streak on the paid version of Duolingo, and that doesn’t include the other, shorter streaks broken before and after. I’ve used it for Spanish, Swahili, French, and Russian. It’s a lot of fun, and it has a lot of heart, and it’s amusing, but it functions (at best) as an occasional tool to help you not forget vocabulary words. It never brought me all that much closer to being conversationally adept.

I’ve reviewed Preply, Rocket Languages, Babbel, and Rosetta Stone, and while they all worked better for me than Duolingo, each of them has something that holds me back from awarding them a “best of” ribbon.

Babbel was the best of the rest. Its lessons were traditional mixes of spoken and written content. Nothing flashy. It worked, but I felt it was outshone by Pimsleur, iTalki, and Memrise when it came to effectiveness in my learning.

Preply was tied entirely to finding a single tutor and taking regular video classes with them, sort of like iTalki offers but with no free inter-community way to practice languages with your peers and less ability to swap instructors.

Rocket Languages has a very high one-time cost that doesn’t break with the monthly subscription-based apps for several years.

And Rosetta Stone’s “learn like a child” method was slow and inefficient for me.

what to look for in a language app

I wouldn’t say that you need to find an app that’s fun, but it should at least be engaging. If you’re bored out of your skull, then it’s going to be a chore every day to get yourself to do your lesson. You might not feel like you’re progressing at first. That’s normal. Stick with it.

But if you’ve given it a couple of weeks and feel like you haven’t learned at all, then maybe that app just isn’t for you. Try another app. Maybe Rosetta Stone’s “learn like a child” process doesn’t work for you, and perhaps you’ll find that Pimsleur’s audio lessons lead you to retain information in the long-term more effectively.

getting to fluency

Fluency is the yardstick that many use to measure their language-learning goals, but I’d say achieving a conversational level of a language is a more useful and measurable goal. I’d say that when I hear people talk about fluency, it becomes something so ill-defined and elusive, not just to achieve but to define, that it leads to a lot of unnecessary angst.

Can you be fluent if you don’t understand the slang just right, knowing when not to use an outdated saying, and how to deploy the right idioms and obscure vocabulary words rarely used but understood by native speakers? Forget it. If you can understand the language’s jokes, rarely (but not never) have to look up a word, and can both understand real spoken conversations and make yourself broadly understood when you speak, then you can confidently say you’ve learned the language.

pairing with other resources

Any kind of instruction, be it an app, computer program, book, or in-person tutor, is only one tool in the language-learning toolbox. You shouldn’t omit it, but you also shouldn’t expect it to be your only tool. I find that these types of resources are crucial for laying down a foundation of basic, frequently used vocabulary words, as well as an understanding of syntax and grammar.

Once you’re more intermediate in your lessons, begin to mix in movies and TV shows in your target language with the subtitles on, listening to songs in your target language and dissecting the lyrics, reading books and the news in your new language, and striking up basic conversations with people.

Trying to do these things too early will just result in frustration, but don’t fail to take advantage of them once you have the language’s foundational basics. Keep doing your lessons as you continue to mix in these new resources, too, because they complement each other.

how long it’ll take you

This is one big variable built in a laboratory out of many lesser variables. How long it takes for you to become conversational in a language depends on many, many things: your native language, your target language and how dissimilar it is to the languages you already speak well, the amount of time you spend learning each day (longer than an hour per day and the benefits diminish sharply, in my experience), your regularity in practicing (much more important than the amount of time per practice session, again in my experience), and how motivated you are to learn.

the bottom line

Learning a language is hard. If it weren’t, then it wouldn’t be an $85 billion industry. Anyone who’s serious about achieving a conversational level in any language, no matter how similar it is to their native language, needs to make a commitment.

Take it from me: It sucks when you pour a ton of time into a method, only to learn that it’s not clicking for you and that you’ve wasted your time. I’m not a huge fan of most language apps, but with these we’ve tested here you should be able to find the one that clicks for you. (Honestly, just go with Pimsleur, trust me.)

From there, you just have to stick with it, day in and day out. Fifteen minutes a day, every day, is far more effective than an hour done every few days.

Kwaherini!