The world right now is vastly more interconnected than it was even a single generation ago. A hundred years ago, getting information from one part of the world to the other often took days, weeks, or even MONTHS at a time, and traveling there took just as long. With the invention of the telephone, and the automobile becoming more and more prominent in our daily lives the world shrunk in size, but being able to talk to someone across the country wasn’t the same as actually visiting them.
Then technology improved. Planes, trains, automobiles, and our communication networks started to become better, faster, and more reliable and what use to take months turned to weeks, and turned to days, and can now even be in minutes. Even in the 90’s, a mere 30 years ago, communication still took time and it still costed money to try and talk to another person on the other side of the world even if you COULD call them up in seconds.
Now with the internet, all of that communication and connection has changed and the world feels so small. It’s not unheard of now for people from various different countries to meet and communicate. Americans can communicate freely with Europeans who communicate freely with Asian people who communicate freely with Indian people who communicate freely with Africans, to South America to Australia and everywhere in between.
Information and data can be sent that can travel the world in seconds, and the global community has been reduced from an amalgamation of nations that communicate with one another to now being an actual community with millions – if not billions – of participants daily from joking, to talking, to data collecting, content creating, video gaming, and more.
Now, more than ever, language and learning another language, is vastly more important.
Before, there really wasn’t much of a need to learn another language save for either work related reasons or to satiate an interest. If you were someone from the United States, unless you planned to go to Germany there wasn’t really much of a reason TO learn German unless you wanted to. The same could be said of any other language of course, but even then you were limited by only what resources you could get in your immediate area, and who was available to teach you the language you wanted/needed to learn
Now? Well that’s the beauty of the internet and its instantaneous connection to the global community. With the Internet there are now various different programs, apps, and other ways to learn a language; a lot of them either useful as a free resource, paid and curated with lessons that are structured around learning conventions, or even access to Freelance tutors on various Freelance platforms who are native with the language who can coach you on enunciation, learning, and where you can get further resources.
The question then becomes though; are they useful? Do Apps and other Language Programs actually help or hinder your development? There are, of course, always a Positive, and a Negative to every choice, so let’s take a look at them – especially if you’re someone thinking of learning another language.
Table of Contents
Help
For those that say that language learning apps help you learn another language, it all simply boils down to this: Learning and accessibility are easier now than they’ve ever been before. As stated above, before the internet when you wanted to learn another language you were fairly limited with what you had on hand.
If you lived in a rural area, or weren’t enrolled in a specialized college specifically to learn that language you didn’t really have a whole lot of choices. You could get resources from a library or a book shop, but unless someone in your area SPOKE the language, it was all based off of what you could read. Of course, at the time there were special programs that you could opt into that would deliver you VHS videos of the languages spoken with work books that you used to help you learn, but those tended to be extremely expensive and extremely unhelpful since you didn’t really have a lot of one on one time.
Now? You can learn at your own leisure with Apps. Most of which are curated with lessons, plans, difficulty lessons and more and they’ll work WITH you on practicing. With the Apps as well you can easily set your own schedule for learning. Want to do it in the morning, and a little bit at night? You could, want to learn on the weekends? You could.
All of this accessibility fits either in the palm of your hand on your smartphone, on your laptop, or even on your desktop while you’re at work if you so choose.
Hinder
On the other side of the discussion are those that believe they hinder you. These claims come with the fact that accessibility doesn’t mean quality and that while these apps could help with garnering your interest, they do little in the way of retaining the information in your head.
A lot of the argument for why they hinder you mostly comes in how we as adults learn. When we’re children our brains are opened and malleable and still forming important connections, so Language comes to us a lot easier. However as adults, we have to practically re-write what we know and how we speak and retain language information. This means that despite the best effort of the Apps, we might not be learning in a way that allows us to retain the information correctly, and wouldn’t help us if it takes us 3 times as long to learn what we could learn if we had actual help from professionals.
Of course, no matter what choice you go with in whether or not you wish to use Language Learning Apps, it is entirely up to you on how you wish to do it. Whether they help, or hinder you doesn’t matter when it does at least help you to garner an interest IN learning.
And really, that’s all that matters. The desire to learn and improve.
