Who wouldn't like a cute honeybee, a well-designed interface, an amazing variety of games, an advanced review system, and a low cost? Fun Easy Learn has all of these - and yet, a poor understanding of how people acquire languages.
First, let's look at how Fun Easy Learn works.
It's organized into nested honeycombs of vocabulary and sentence categories.
Each section "teaches" you 4-5 vocabulary words related to the given topic. By "teaches" I mean that it pronounces the word, shows you the word (in both pinyin and Chinese characters), and shows you a simple picture related to the word.
Then comes an amazingly big collection of "games" to help you practice the words.
There are games to help with hearing, reading, and writing the vocabulary.
After you've successfully finished these games for a given section, you're considered to have learned them. You can go back and practice learned vocabulary in the "review" section.
To unlock all features of this app, you'll need to buy a subscription, but it's not expensive.
With all these fancy features, why don't I recommend this app?
Most of the games give you only 2-4 choices. This makes it easier to guess the right answer because the options prompt your memory. Then the app assumes you are learning the word when you successfully choose it from a limited number of options. It has no way to assess how hard it was for you to guess the word, or whether it was a lucky guess. You'll learn much faster if you have to recall completely from scratch and then grade yourself on the difficulty of recall.
Also, our brains aren't built to memorize vocabulary in categories. A better approach is learning words in order of usefulness or frequency.
Curious to know what tools I do recommend? Click here.
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