It is really fun to try to do this - do you hear that? - in the garage where you hear
every car going by, every leaf blower...I'm only a little bit annoyed.
Hello, language learners!
Today I want to walk through an app that provides access to audio books in a variety of different
languages so that language learners like me and you can use audio books in order to improve
their language learning.
That app is called Beelinguapp.
I think that's how you pronounce it.
In this review, I'm going to talk about five things: we're going to talk about walking
through the app, we're going to talk about how much it costs and what you get for free,
I'm going to talk about what kind of language learner it's for, we're going to talk about
my opinion, and then I'm going to talk about alternatives.
First thing on that list is a walkthrough through - walkthrough through - Beelinguapp.
So the first thing you're gonna see is you're gonna see categories.
You're gonna see culture, in progress, books that I've started but haven't finished, recommended
kind of thing, basics, children's stories, you get a few categories.
Up here, in this top bar up here, you have a few ways to narrow down the books that are
appearing in this feed.
You have language, you can select up two languages that are appearing - side note: this does
not change the language that these books appear to you in.
If you choose Spanish and Portuguese, you're only going to see books that are available
in Spanish and Portuguese.
It does not automatically set the books you are reading into Portuguese, you have to do
that in another section.
We're gonna set it to Spanish, you can do beginner, intermediate, or advanced, of course.
And then you can do categories.
These are the different categories of stories that you can select.
We're gonna look at one of the ones that I am in progress on.
Life in school, why not?
Life in School, La Vida en la Escuela, it says I've read 25% of it.
There's a description: an entertaining description of life in school in Latin America and the
world.
It also shows you who it's written by.
If you go into this link it'll open this Colombian YouTuber, which means that these audio books
are not necessarily professionally created, you're gonna see that a lot, some of this
audio is not the best, you get what you get.
You see that it's beginner level with four paragraphs.
So let's read it.
Now you can see in this view.
So we have Spanish up top and we have English below.
This is great if you're not quite up to this level of Spanish.
If you are and you want a little bit of a challenge, you can go up here, see this "split"?
Click split, and look, no more split!
Put that split back, and now let's look at what it's like to read and listen to this
book.
You can see there how this works, you get the general idea.
You can also hear how the audio is not in the highest quality.
You're not gonna get professional studio grade audio with this app.
The speed is 1/1, which is full speed.
You can slow it down to 3/4 speed or half speed.
Other options, you can increase the text size if you have a hard time seeing it, you can
put it to night mode, which is fun.
Another really great thing that Beelinguapp does is you can select words, let's say we
wanna select frecuentemente.
Go into "select text mode", select this word, you can add it to glossary here, frecuentemente
has been added to the glossary.
We're gonna see that in a second.
You can also translate frecuentemente, in case you don't know what that means.
"Frequently".
You can also listen to it.
Not the best audio.
Go ahead and add a few more words to the glossary.
We're gonna click this book up here.
Look at that, so we have our glossary of the words from this story.
A good idea from here is to take these words and put it into whatever you use for flashcards,
whether it's physical flashcards, whether it's an Anki deck, whether it's on Memrise.
It's a good idea to take these and put them somewhere else.
I know that it has this flashcard icon up here, but look what happens.
Now we have dirige, right, which wasn't there, permitido, wasn't there, ambiguedades, was
not there.
What this does is it puts these glossary terms into like a giant thing of flashcards that
it just like sucks out of stories that you've already read.
Which is not helpful.
If it works for you, if it happens to be picking out the words from the stories that you actually
don't know, that's great, however, it automatically does that, so if you already know these words,
it's just not helpful.
You can translate them right here.
Bastante: quite.
Now remember, this isn't available on the free version, this is a paid option, but we'll
get to that later.
We've seen the glossary, we've seen the flashcards that don't really work, honestly.
Now we see this little image thing, let's click that.
That is the image that comes with this audio book, that's super cute, right?
It's another paid thing, may or may not be worth it to you.
Let's see if this one has questions, a lot of them have questions at the end.
Here's one: Sarah and Her Roomates.
Sara y sus companeras de cuarto.
Okay you see right here, 0 out of 5 questions.
Let's get to the end of it, mark as read.
Some of these books, some of these stories, have questions.
These are comprehension questions, which is pretty nice!
See if you actually understood what the hell you were reading.
Donde trabaja Mary, and you can switch between Spanish and English here.
You can, you know, answer these questions.
You have 1 out of 5 correct answers, would you wanna read it again, see if maybe you
can find the answers.
These are all stories that I have already downloaded in the past, so let's see what
happens when you download a new one.
Dinosaurs.
Okay so see, it's downloading.
Maybe you don't want to read it right now.
Leaving already, do you want to add to favorites, you can add it to favorites, but what happens
when you add it to favorites, what does that mean?
Well, you go back here to the tab My Stories.
I added that story to my favorites, oh see, look, look, there it is, Dinosaurs.
So these are all stories that I've added to my favorites.
You go to the next tab, Download.
You see all the stories that you've downloaded.
And then Glossary, again this is what I was saying with the flashcards, it kind of picks
and chooses the words that it thinks that you might get from these books.
We've gone through the stories, alright, and we understand how stories work, let's see
what else that Beelinguapp has to offer.
This tab, BeKids, is super nice, let's open Talia's Bedtime.
It's like a picture book!
It's specifically meant for smaller kids, or for adults, honestly.
I love to read children's books as a way to get some more vocabulary.
It's a great way to train your brain from the beginner up.
We have this full page picture, if you wanna just see the picture, hold down, you see the
picture!
Hold down again to see the text.
Go to the next page, it's a whole different picture!
Go to the next one, different picture.
Really fun, really nice, right?
That's the BeKids section, which is pretty nice.
Then we have Music.
For us native English speakers, the music section is not great.
I mean you can see it's all, it's almost all in English.
You'd be better off going to Spotify and looking up the languages that you're trying to learn,
because this is mostly for English learners.
So we're just gonna move on from that.
Then we have news articles, which is also interesting.
It's updated probably every couple of days, see the latest one was yesterday, Little Richard
died.
So we're gonna open that.
So it looks like they translated it and they just like stuck an automatic audio onto it,
which is helpful, I suppose.
It's better than nothing.
Finally we have settings, so we're gonna get to prices in a second.
They leave contact info right in the app, which is really nice.
So you have some feedback, you want to make any of these complaints that I've been making,
if you agree with them, you wanna say something else, right in the app.
I do like that.
Lastly we go to settings.
Now this, this is where you change the language that you're learning.
I want to learn any of these languages, they have a pretty healthy collection of foreign
languages for you to learn.
And this is the language that you're learning from.
This is the second part of that split screen where it, you know, translates for you.
That is a walkthrough through the Beelinguapp app.
Now how about prices, what does Beelinguapp cost?
Well, you can get Beelinguapp for free!
They do have free options.
You're not gonna get all of the stories, you're not gonna get all of the glossary options,
you'll just have ads.
The tiers of paid options, most of them are less than 5 dollars a month, which is really
cheap.
The highest tier is like $5.50 a month, which is still super super super reasonably priced.
In my personal opinion, if you do want to use Beelinguapp, you need to at least pay
for access to all of the stories.
Who is Beelinguapp for?
Now Beelinguapp is a good option for language learners who do really well with audio books
in another language, because it has that function where it translates for you, you can listen
to it and you can see the translations from L2, L1.
The translations are really good.
Most languages don't translate exactly, so the highlighted part might be a little bit
off, but it is really great about translating and having you follow.
If you want something really reasonably priced, or free, Beelinguapp is great.
I do like how it also translates news articles and it is updating fairly quickly.
If you do decide that you really like Beelinguapp, my Road Map for Language Learners is a great
way for you to put down Beelinguapp as part of your strategy and develop the rest of your
strategy all around it.
It takes you right through everything you need to know for developing your own authentic
language learning strategy that'll work for you.
Link is below in the description box if you are interested in that.
My opinion of Beelinguapp.
Okay so I have tried so many different language learning resources, it's one of my favorite
things to do.
It's not my favorite.
I will probably never use it for my own language learning strategy.
The audio is really low quality, the music does not help me at all because I'm a native
English speaker.
There are alternatives out there that I like better.
LingQ is another audio book platform where you can find translations and reading practice
and listening practice for books, articles, podcasts, all sorts of stuff.
It's all translated and the audio is pretty decent.
Same kind of idea.
The big difference is there's more available because anybody can upload new content.
You can upload any books you find, any articles, any sort of thing, you can upload directly
to the platform, and it does it for you.
So there's a ton of content on LingQ.
The only caveat is that Beelinguapp supports Hindi.
That is the only language that is available on Beelinguapp that is not available on LingQ,
is Hindi.
I love LingQ, I use it for my own language studies, it is also reasonably priced, again,
link below in the description box for a review of LingQ to see what that is all about.
Another alternative is Readlang.
Readlang has all the languages available on Beelinguapp plus more.
Readlang is a Chrome extension.
It's not as pretty as LingQ or Beelinguapp, it's not pretty at all, but it is useful.
You upload content to Readlang, and it doesn't translate automatically, but if you click
words, click phrases, it translates them for you, you can put them into a flashcard set.
Readlang is also free or reasonably priced.
But I also have a link to Readlang below in my description box.
Readlang doesn't come with all the options, it's a much more simplistic resource, but
it is a helpful resource.
Another one that's similar is Lingvist.
With Lingvist you can take a picture of a book you're reading and it'll import all of
the words for you and spit it out into a vocab list directly from that book, it's pretty
awesome.
Again, link below in the description for my review of Lingvist.
I have a video on there as well where it takes you through that process of taking a picture
of content from a book and just spitting out a vocab list.
If you have a different opinion or if you have another alternative that I didn't mention
in this video, please leave me a comment below telling me about it, I love to look up these
different alternatives, I love to hear your opinion.
Otherwise I will see you every Monday on my blog at CrashedCulture.com and every Wednesday
right here on YouTube.
Have a wonderful week and I will see you next week!