TutorMandarin Reviews – Lingolistic
The Hype
At TutorMandarin, we’re big fans of Armel Pingault, the former CTO of Chinesepod. So, we were very excited to try out the latest project he’s been working on – a web-app called “Lingolistic”.
The name alone leads to high expectations. A “holistic” approach to “language learning?” A tagline that promises “a new way to become bilingual with your own videos”. Hell yeah! Sign us up!
What is Lingolistic about
Lingolistic is a language learning platform that takes the best of Youtube’s language education content, adds in vocab and grammar from the video and gamified the whole experience with quizzes, progress statistics, badges, and more. While we’re only interested in Mandarin, Lingolistic proudly offers 14 unique languages from 34 different languages, including options that range from French to Dothraki (one of which is said to be the most romantic language in the world).
How to get started
After a quick sign up you will receive a nice confirmation email from Armel Pingault himself.
Once inside the platform, you can really see what’s going on – YouTube videos as far as the eye can reach! Each language has different amounts of videos of different topics. We jumped right into Mandarin with an impressive 242 videos to choose from.
At a minimum level, this immediately gives you a quality selection of learning videos and the necessary vocab to “keep up” while watching the video. In addition, vocabulary is laid out nicely with audio, name, description, and concise translation.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg at Lingolistic. With each video, Lingolistic provides interactive vocabulary quizzes and sentence builders – familiar to many DuoLingo or HelloChinese users. Combined with an SRS-like “strengthening” section, users can progress over time in a natural but measurable way, with the fun of video learning and the opportunity to check their comprehension.
The Big Picture
The big picture though is that users can submit their own YouTube videos for Lingolistification. The idea behind Lingolistic is to realize what many of us have dreamed about – learning a language effectively with a multitude of best resources available on YouTube. Users are not any longer limited in learning by selected pre-made courses in high school or college. Lingolistic gives its users the freedom to create their own customized learning packages by choosing existing videos and also enable them to upload or propose own suggestions of specific videos.
Choose what you want so that it everything fit into your tailor-made learning program.
Overall
For all us home learners that have attempted to create our own curriculums out of free YouTube content… Lingolistic is the answer. It matches especially with those who already speak a little bit Chinese and want to get better in understanding daily communication or those who want who become more comfortable while speaking about special topics. We at TutorMandarin believe learning a language is also about speaking, especially in Chinese language learning. However, we think that Lingolistic is a prime exemplar, how easy it is to learn Chinese language besides the regular workbooks while extending your vocabulary in a playfully way.
Click here to know more about other great apps that help you learn Mandarin. Sign up our free trial to learn Mandarin and download the Chinese App for more Chinese language materials and to learn Mandarin online.