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Do you like learning languages on your phone? I do. I like the convenience of not having to lug books around when I’m traveling or opening my laptop in bed just so I could take my Korean lessons in the wee hours. And with so many language learning apps out there, it’s like having a library in the palm of your hand.
One of the apps I’ve tried recently is Mondly. It’s also one of the most popular language learning resources in the market so you’ve probably heard of it. Maybe you’ve even considered using it but weren’t sure it’s worth the hype.
Well, I’m here to help you out! By the end of this Mondly review, you’ll understand how the app works, what its best features are, and whether it can help you achieve your learning goals.
What is Mondly?
Founded in Romania in 2013, Mondly is an app that teaches languages through fun, gamified lessons and high-tech, innovative features.
Mondly’s language courses are designed by experts, making them intuitive and effective. Through bite-sized lessons (you can play for as short as five minutes if you’re pressed for time), you’ll gain new vocabulary and develop some grammar knowledge.
Most of the words and phrases you’ll learn on Mondly are also available as audio recordings which feature native speakers. This means you can learn the correct pronunciations too!
Aside from the main Mondly app (which is available on iOS, Android, Huawei, and as a web app), the company also offers Mondly VR. This review, however, will focus solely on the main Mondly app.
What languages can you learn with Mondly?
Judging by numbers alone, Mondly is likely to be a favorite of aspiring polyglots. The app covers a whopping 41 languages such as British and American English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Portuguese, Dutch, Indonesian, and more.
The best part? You can learn 41 languages in multiple combinations! This means you can learn Finnish from Vietnamese, Urdu from French, Hindi from Danish, and so on.
But while all 41 languages are available as target languages, not all of them can be source languages. Case in point: you can learn Tagalog from most of the languages but you can’t learn any of the 41 languages from Tagalog. If you plan to study a language that’s not particularly popular like French, Spanish, Italian, or Chinese, it’s best to check the list of available languages on Mondly’s website first.
How much does Mondly cost?
Mondly’s introductory section is free to access. This includes six lessons, one conversation, one vocabulary section, and a chatbot conversation. You can also unlock a free new lesson daily and get weekly quizzes and monthly challenges to test your progress.
For a free app, that sounds like a good deal already. But not when you see what the premium plans can unlock for you:
- 250 lessons organized into practical topics
- 41 conversations covering day-to-day scenarios
- 36 vocabulary builders
- Over 3,000 daily lessons (as of writing) which you can unlock right away, weekly quizzes, and monthly challenges
- Accurate speech recognition
- Conjugation tables and grammar tips
There are three Mondly subscription options. A monthly subscription, which costs $12.90, gives you access to one language. A 12-month subscription, which also gives access to one language, costs $61.92. Lifetime access goes for $105.00 and gives you access to all 41 languages.
If you’re using Mondly to learn new phrases for traveling, the monthly subscription should suffice. But if you’d like to explore various languages and learn long-term, lifetime access is your best option.
Plus, the longer your subscription is, the more you save. If you want more savings, it’s worth checking out Mondly’s limited-time offers.
Learning with Mondly
Now, onto the fun part — mastering new languages with Mondly! The app includes a variety of features that can bolster your language learning journey.
Course lessons
Mondly’s lessons are categorized into different practical themes such as greetings, self-introduction, romance, travel, school, grammar, and more. As you “travel” further into the map, the topics get more complex.
You can also access specialized business courses, teaching foundational language for areas such as in-flight service, hotel service, and healthcare. The available courses vary per language. The French and Spanish courses, for instance, offer more lessons, expanding even to business negotiations, project management, and marketing.
Each theme typically includes five or six core lessons, which you can complete in more or less two hours. You also don’t need to take the lesson in succession; you can skip to whatever lesson you like if you’re on the premium version.
Mondly lessons are great for both visual and auditory learners. Exercises include matching words with the correct images, swiping up or down, translating sentences, and answering multiple-choice questions.
After the main lesson, you have the option to practice your listening and speaking skills by using the hands-free mode and the word list. Both modes are also great for reviewing what you learned!
The hands-free mode should come in handy if you’re driving or doing chores at home. You can simply repeat after the audio recording of a native speaker and the app’s speech recognition software will get to work. From my experience, this feature’s accurate enough.
The word list feature is also great for reinforcing vocabulary. Here, you can see the new words and phrases you’ve gained and hear individual audio recordings of them. It doesn’t hurt that the audio can also be slowed down.
Daily lessons
If you’re not yet on Mondly Premium, a great way to test out the app is to take the Daily Lessons. This feature is designed to beef up your knowledge in as short as five minutes a day with bite-sized, easy, and effective lessons.
The lesson format is the same as the rest of the lessons in the app. It comes with a hands-free mode as well. You simply have to set your preferred time to learn and the app will send you a reminder each day.
Unlike the core lessons though, you can’t choose a topic to study in the daily lessons. But you can still find yourself on the leaderboard if you play daily and get high scores.
Core Vocabulary and Conversation
Apart from the core lessons, there’s also a special section called Core Vocabulary, which contains six lessons covering core words and phrases you actually need in daily life. This section also includes one conversation practice that allows you to simulate a conversation by repeating after the speakers.
I would have loved it more if Mondly allowed you to simply act out as the second speaker in the Conversation mode without hearing the recording first. It would have been better if this feature could be done hands-free and didn’t require holding the mic button to record your voice.
That said, both features can be really helpful in boosting recall of gained vocab.
You can also go back to what you learned in a separate section aptly called “Review” which lists all of your acquired vocabulary.
Chatbot
One of Mondly’s most interactive features, the Chatbot module allows you to practice your listening and speaking skills through practice dialogues.
Like in the hands-free mode, the lessons are presented in conversation format. But you’ll have to press the mic button to record yourself. The bot will say a sentence and then give you a few different prompts on how you could respond. You then say your chosen phrase out loud, and the bot will answer you and continue the conversation.
For fun, I’ve tried giving answers that weren’t included in the option. The chatbot would sometimes recognize and accept my “own” answers, but not all the time. I find that the bot doesn’t recognize my response when I don’t pronounce it correctly or when I say a word that’s not in the target language (like saying white instead of blanc on the French course). Totally makes sense, since the goal is to improve my speaking skills.
This feature is really fun so it’s a bit of a letdown that it only contains eight topics.
Other features
Verb conjugator
Another awesome feature within the Mondly lessons is the verb conjugator. To access it, simply click or tap on any underlined verb to see or hear its conjugation. The conjugation tables show you the forms of certain verbs for the past, present, and future tenses.
Statistics
Mondly uses cool graphics to represent the various vocabulary and grammar you’ve learned so far by marking them as data points on the image of a human brain. When you click on each point, you are taken to a page that reminds you of all the words you have learned so far.
The stats page also allows you to see how many days you have logged in in a row.
Leaderboard
There’s a reason why gamified learning apps are thriving: we learners love some competition. Mondly knows this too, so they made the leaderboard a visible feature.
The leaderboard shows three lists: your ranking among your friends, among people in your country, and global users studying the same language. Way to keep the competitive spirit alive!
What I love about Mondly
Now, here’s the fun part of this Mondly review. It’s time to find out what makes Mondly an effective language learning tool. After months of playing with the app, here are the things that I loved most.
Short, fast lessons
Devoting an hour per day to studying a new language is considered a luxury these days, and even thirty minutes can be hard to squeeze in for some people. Mondly’s bite-sized lessons are exactly the thing for busy people like you and me.
Each lesson can be completed in five to ten minutes. This might not sound like much but doing it daily for months will do wonders for your vocab and speaking skills.
Personally, the short lessons made it easier for me to commit to my Korean and French lessons. I love that I have the option to take as many or as few lessons as my time could afford on any given day.
It also helps that Mondly highlights stats and rankings. Even if I’m not that competitive, knowing my progress motivated me.
Hands-free mode
I don’t advocate multitasking while studying but I have to admit that Mondly’s hands-free option adds a layer of practicality that other apps don’t have.
As soon as you press go, the lesson begins, with dialogue bubbles popping up as the app reads the same aloud to you. When it’s your turn to respond (usually by repeating back vocabulary), the voice will prompt you and the microphone will automatically turn on — no tapping or clicking needed.
It even has a “pocket mode”, an excellent feature that helps prevent unintentional actions on the touchscreen while your phone is in your pocket. This is one of the few truly hands-free solutions I’ve seen in an app, let alone a language learning one!
Simple but useful vocabulary
Most language students become overwhelmed when they try to take on too much vocabulary in one go. I love that Mondly doesn’t overwhelm you with too many words or phrases. Instead, the app eases you in, letting you build on what you’ve learned as you go through the course.
That being said, Mondly also doesn’t dumb down its courses. It keeps things simpler and easier to cater to beginners. But it does teach essential, high-frequency vocabulary that you’ll likely encounter when conversing with native speakers.
Repetition, repetition, repetition
Like many language learning apps, Mondly has its unique spaced repetition system (SRS) that ensures you don’t just acquire vocabulary but actually remember it.
Mondly focuses on key vocabulary that gets presented through various exercises throughout the main lesson. Then, you can extrapolate through the hands-free mode and do a quick refresher with word list in the Review section. You will encounter the same words and phrases multiple times.
While this might feel repetitive to some, if you’re anything like me, sometimes you’re able to fluke your way through answers without really understanding why it’s correct. Having many chances to review lets you make sure you fully understood what you learned before you move on to the next lesson.
Some areas for improvement
No app is perfect for every learner and despite glowing reviews of Mondly, it’s got its shortcomings too.
Limited grammar
At a glance, it’s easy to see that Mondly is heavily vocabulary-based. It does have verb conjugator charts and three grammar units in most of its language offerings. These units work the same way as regular drills, except they’re more grammar-oriented and less focused on teaching vocabulary.
For an app, it’s a good start. But I wouldn’t recommend relying on Mondly alone if you’re serious about learning grammatical structures and rules.
To be fair, there are very few apps that teach grammar successfully. I’d still go back to good ol’ grammar books for that.
Not the best option for learning writing systems
While Mondly is great for building vocabulary and improving your conversational skills, it doesn’t help much with writing.
Aside from arranging random letters to spell out words and arranging words to letters, there are no actual writing drills on Mondly. It would have been nice to have finger-tracing exercises or typing using built-in keyboards.
It also doesn’t introduce the writing system, which is crucial when learning languages that use non-Latin scripts. It does have an icon in the lower left corner that lets you toggle between Romanization and the writing system for the language you’re studying. But this only becomes useful if you’re already familiar with the writing system of the said language.
Not ideal for advanced learners
Mondly is an awesome app if you’re just starting out with a language. It’s also great if you’ve stopped taking lessons and need refresher courses. But if you’re an upper intermediate or advanced learner, you’ll need a more challenging resource.
As I said earlier, Mondly is vocab-heavy and has limited grammar. For newbies, this might not be an issue. As you progress, however, you’ll want to explore more topics and strengthen your knowledge of grammar.
And while repetition may not bother beginners, it can bore advanced learners.
My verdict: Is Mondly worth it?
Even the most inexperienced linguaphile will love learning languages with Mondly. It makes the whole process easier, more fun, and more interactive. So yes, Mondly’s worth it!
Weighing all the pros and cons of this app, I can safely recommend Mondly to beginners and lower intermediate learners. It’s a quick and engaging way to acquire essential vocabulary, learn basic grammar, and practice your listening and speaking skills.
If you’re an upper intermediate or advanced learner, fret not. You can still use Mondly as a supplemental resource on top of more advanced materials. Either way, Mondly is a helpful tool for just about any type of learner.
FAQ about Mondly
Can you become fluent with Mondly?
Probably not. Using Mondly to learn a new language is a great start though. Mondly’s lessons highlight frequently used expressions and basic grammar so it’s great for setting a solid foundation. But you’ll need more tools to achieve fluency.
What languages can you learn with Mondly?
Mondly offers courses in 41 languages such as British and American English, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Korean, German, Hebrew, and more! Here’s the complete list.
What level does Mondly get you to?
Mondly caters to language learners of all levels, but its courses are ideal for beginners to lower intermediate learners (A1 to B1), or even up to upper-intermediate learners.
Is Mondly free?
Mondly has a free app. It comes with the introductory (“Hello”) unit, which includes six lessons, one conversation, one vocabulary section, and a chatbot conversation. You can unlock a free new lesson daily and join weekly quizzes and monthly challenges to test your progress.
The premium version offers more content and features though.
How much does Mondly cost?
Mondly Premium comes in three Mondly subscription options.
The monthly subscription costs $12.90 and gives you access to one language. The 12-month subscription, which also gives access to one language, costs $61.92. Lifetime access goes for $105.00 and gives you access to all 41 languages.
Check out Mondly’s limited-time offers to snatch a discount!
Is Mondly Premium worth it?
Yes! With Mondly Premium, you can access over 250 lessons, all the conversation drills and vocabulary builders, plus all the daily lessons ever created.
What’s the best way to learn from Mondly?
Mondly topics are presented in order of complexity so it would be best to follow the recommended route. But if you’re a Premium user, you can skip to your preferred topic.
Complete the main lessons, practice hands-free, review the vocabulary list, and converse with the chatbot from time to time. Doing this daily will build the habit and even find yourself on the leaderboard!