I love learning new languages, but it's not easy rounding up $120 to pay for 3 months of classes. Besides, I've always been very enthusiastic about languages, so I want to learn more than one. But that would leaver me more broke than I am now (believe me, that's a feat). 

So, as any millenial, I tried looking for apps to help me with my needs. But every app I installed ended up being annoyingly filled with adds, or really expensive, or promised me the moon and gave me a beach pebble. With French it's not so hard to find a cool app, but with Korean or any Asian language, that's another story. I was discouraged to say the least, until I found these 3 apps that have honestly turned my life around. I'm now learning French and Korean at the same time, it's awesome. 

Yes, I think it was obvious that this app would be mentioned in this list. It has gained more and more fame since it was released. I started using it for French and it was cool, but I also wanted to learn Korean and it didn't even have Japanese. But like 2 months ago, I got an itch to look through the available courses and BOOM, there it was: Korean!

It's really cool to learn on Duolingo, because it's interface is so simple and intuitive. You have reading, listening, pronunciation and even speaking exercises! And the part that really helps me is that when there's an exercise I don't get, I can go over other people's comments on that same part, and 99% of the time, someone already asked my same question and got a really good explanation back. Also, there's a desktop version, and there you can even see notes and tips in the corner of your screen about the subject you're learning about! It's awesome.

My favourite part: it has challenges. Okay so I'm a little bit (okay, a lot) competitive. Duolingo gives you prizes if you fill up a class everyday. It also let's you bet. So when a game tells me "I bet you can't go 7 days straight coming to class everyday, I'll bet you 5 rubies", I'm like:

This one was referred to me by a friend who saw me suffering to find a high quality app that I didn't get bored of in a month. Because, even though some of them may be good at teaching, they were just plain boring after a few weeks. He then introduced me to Memrise. 

One of the peculiarities of this app is that there is a dynamic where you text with a bot and it talks back and simultaneously teaches you stuff. It's great to practice your grammar and loosen up those nerves for when you talk to an actual person. Besides that, in the pro version there are actual videos showing you how native speakers pronounce things. It helps so much (and the yearly pro version is really cheap!) And let's talk about its design, it's so cute! It has this nice alien/planet theme going on, and all the illustrations are adorable. In each lesson, you start with a tiny seed, with each correct answer the stem grows and becomes a flower at the end! It's so ahdflkajflkjawlk!

My favourite part: It helps you learn words easily through memes. Yes, MEMES! It teaches you a word, and then asks you if you want to really memorize it. Then, it gives you a meme with a similar sounding word in English so you can associate them! 

This was a surprise app. I love the idea behind it, I think it's a great way to plant words in your head bit by bit. You see, this isn't an app you tap and go into, this appears every time you go to unlock your phone. It's a screensaver. Every time you hit that power button, a screen will appear with a new word, its pronunciation, an audio to hear it and all its possible meanings. Plus, you can also see how it fits into three different sentences.

It can be a bit frustrating at times, because sometimes you're just really in a hurry to unlock your phone, and then this app is like "Hey, let's talk about the importance of learning the word doorknob"  and you're like "GET THE F*CK OUTTA MY WAY". But the good thing is, you can just hit the back button and it will be gone. 

My favourite part: If you don't hit the OK button, the same word will keep appearing over and over again. This is so useful to me, because I don't learn a word if I see it just once. Then, when you feel like you've really dominated a word, you hit the check box  ✅ beside it, and it won't show again.