š”š”š”š”
Said it was free and it was NOT! I could not get through two lessons before I had to pay pleas go find an asl app without in app purchases it will save you from this scam š”
Would be better if you didnāt have to pay
Itās okay but they only give you two lessons and the rest you have to pay
Yes do it!!
I love this
Amazing!
I was looking to learn ASL for fun and so far this seems to be the best app I have found!
ZERO STARS IF I COULDā¦
YOU HAVE TO PAY TO GET PAST LEVEL TWO. I DIDN'T EVEN HAVE THE APP FOR 30 MINUTES AND IT TOLD ME TO "SUBSCRIBE TO KEEP LEARNING". ALL I WANT TO DO IS BE ABLE TO INTERACT WITH THE DEAD AND HARD OF HEARING AND IM NOT PAYING TO DO THAT! HORRIBLE APP!!! DO NOT DOWNLOAD UNLESS YOU WANT TO GET SCAMMED INTO PAYING TO LEARN AND INTERACT WITH FRIENDS!!!!!
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Sign language learning
Itās a good app to learn signs if youāre deaf or you know someone who is deaf and you donāt have to have a subscription!
Streak/work lost
Iāve been learning daily with this app for 500 days. While Iāve missed the rare day, Iāve been dedicated to the lessons. I got on a week ago and my streak was gone even though I had just been on hours prior. I messaged the app twice to have my streak restored. Iām so bloody disappointed.
Donāt waste your time
It was nice at the start but after 10 lessons they told me that I would have to get a subscription to continue using the app. Would not recommend.
Love this app!
Iāve learned so much! Itās super easy and user friendly. I enjoy the visual dictionary for reference. I also enjoy being able to practice before starting another lesson, especially if Iāve had too long of a break.
great!
i am 8 yrs old and this helped me! i love learning asl!
Why I love this app
I love this app because I have wanted to learn asl from a book I read and the app helps me so thank you app makers
Great!
This can help teach ASL in a week! Try this out to learn ASL!!!
I absolutely love!!!
This app is amazing. So many cool features and I love the deaf community themselves are teaching. Very easy to use anyone can do this. Would give 10 stars if I could!
3.8 stars
Great app, teaches very well but you cannot go past day two without starting a free trial, and after that you canāt use the app without paying.
BEST & EASY APP
I wished I learned ASL before. Thanks to this app I am learning now, best part how was it is. Great job to the developers! Thanks!
.
If youāre looking to learn asl on your own and for free donāt rely on this appš it charges you by chapter two.
I love this app!
I only just started using it and I already feel comfortable using asl
Best ASL app ever
I love this app It teaches me so well for a Pearson with adhd it amasing
Easy
Easy
Room for improvement!
My (VERY extensive ā youāve been warned) thoughts after completing the full Lingvano ASL course in 87 days:
Overall, itās fine. I learned a lot and the structure of the lessons reinforces vocabulary very well. But a lot of small inconsistencies drove me nuts so often that what started out as fun became a chore by the time I reached the last two units.
Hereās a rundown of what Iād love to see improvedā¦
MORE TEACHERS
Iād estimate that 75% of the course is demonstrated by the same teacher, so you donāt get much experience with individual variations. If you encounter people in real life who sign differently than the primary Lingvano teacher, youāre possibly not going to be able to tell if their sign is a variant of something you already know, or a new word entirely.
MORE CONSISTENT and/or LENIENT PHRASING FOR ANSWERS
This is by FAR my biggest complaint with Lingvano. Because you have to type so many of your answers in, thereās a lot of room for really irritating mistakes if you donāt phrase your answers just right. For instance, āleft-turnā vs. āturn-left,ā ārunā vs. ārunningā, ācampā vs. ācampingā, āsurfā vs. āsurfing,ā etc.
The verbs are particularly annoying because there doesnāt seem to be any rhyme or reason behind which ones require the ā-ingā suffix to be marked correct and which donāt. Youāve just gotta remember which form of the verb has been arbitrarily deemed correct.
[Aside: I submitted a support ticket for the ā-ingā issue and was told that repetition indicates the difference between signs for nouns and verbs. (Two movements = noun, and one movement = verb.) But there are a couple problems with that response.
1. I wasnāt asking about nouns vs. verbs. I was asking about verbs only. āThey like to campā and āThey like campingā both mean the same thing, and both use verbs. Both would be signed exactly the same way. But Lingvano will only accept one of these two forms of the verb as correct. (I donāt have a screenshot, so I donāt remember whether ācampā or ācampingā is considered correct.)
2. āCampā and ācampingā are IDENTICAL in the Lingvano dictionary.]
Consistent word order was also a big issue for me. Take the different versions of āaloneā: itās āalone-meā and āalone-you,ā but āthey-alone.ā
The one that really made me want to throw my phone out the window was ālanding-plane.ā Youāll get marked wrong if you answer āplane-landing,ā or ālanding-airplane.ā To add insult to injury, āplaneā isnāt even in the Lingvano dictionary ā only āairplaneā is. So why did they choose ālanding-planeā instead of ālanding-airplaneā in the first place?
Then thereās the whole telephone category. Three signs related to non-landline phones are introduced in one lesson, but thereās no consistency in the wording of the answers. One is āCELLPHONE-hearingā while another is āSMARTPHONE-deaf.ā And if itās the third sign, which doesnāt indicate whether the user is deaf or hearing, the correct answer is āMOBILE phone.ā Why canāt all three of these answers share the same base word for phone??
This extra layer of memorization is an entirely unnecessary barrier in my opinion. Iām already working to learn hundreds of new signs ā having to also memorize arbitrary and inconsistent phrasing just because of the way the app is programmed made me downright resentful.
ACCEPT ACKNOWLEDGED ALTERNATES
Alternates are taught, but then not accepted. For example, Lingvano explicitly tells you that āanywayā and āanyhowā use the same sign. But when I typed āanyhowā to answer the very next question, it was marked wrong ā only āanywayā was considered correct. THEN WHY DID YOU TELL ME THEYāRE THE SAME?
REDUCE GROUPS OF SIMILAR SIGNS
I didnāt care for learning groups of extremely similar signs, such as āchat,ā āchatty,ā āchit-chat,ā ālong-chat,ā and āshort-chat.ā Some of these were real a pain to differentiate on a small screen. But more importantly, in a beginning course Iād much rather maximize my vocabulary by learning five unrelated words than learning five words that mean basically the same thing.
MORE NATURAL/ACCURATE TRANSLATIONS
The translations often donāt sound like native English. Theyāre stilted or textbooky. Try these on for size:
āOh, I really pity her. I have plants to make tea. Doesn't it matter to you, can you bring her some?"
"Did you ever use that new thing wrong?"
āPsychologists know many medicine books. They need to read and dive into them.ā
I realize that sentences in language classes are often going to sound contrived just for the sake of utilizing limited vocabulary (kind of like āSee Spot run!ā) but NOBODY TALKS LIKE THIS. How am I supposed to understand the meaning of a sentence that doesnāt even sound right in my own language?
More exasperating were the several instances where a word appeared in the translation/answer, when I hadnāt seen the sign in the example/question. Confused, Iād rewatch the example to see how Iād missed an entire signā¦only to discover that IT WASNāT THERE. Of course, translations cannot always be word-for-word. Thereās gotta be some leeway to account for different shades of meaning between different languages. But for heavenās sake, donāt bulk up translations with words that are not there at all ā especially if itās a word/sign your student actually knows and expects to see in the example.
Another issue concerns this/that, which I struggle with even when translations are clearly worded. On a number of occasions, the sign and gloss both said āthat,ā but the translation used āthisā instead. Ex: āTHAT WAY MY FAMILY ME WALK ALWAYS WEEKENDā was translated as āThis way my family and I are always walking on weekends.ā No wonder I canāt get it right in my head!
If youāve made it this far, youāre probably either autistic and fuming right along with me, or neurotypical and rolling your eyes at all my nitpicking and hair-splitting. So be it. This is what happens when a hyper-focused linguist scrutinizes a language app.
Overall, itās fine. I learned a lot and the structure of the lessons reinforces vocabulary very well. But a lot of small inconsistencies drove me nuts so often that what started out as fun became a chore by the time I reached the last two units.
Hereās a rundown of what Iād love to see improvedā¦
MORE TEACHERS
Iād estimate that 75% of the course is demonstrated by the same teacher, so you donāt get much experience with individual variations. If you encounter people in real life who sign differently than the primary Lingvano teacher, youāre possibly not going to be able to tell if their sign is a variant of something you already know, or a new word entirely.
MORE CONSISTENT and/or LENIENT PHRASING FOR ANSWERS
This is by FAR my biggest complaint with Lingvano. Because you have to type so many of your answers in, thereās a lot of room for really irritating mistakes if you donāt phrase your answers just right. For instance, āleft-turnā vs. āturn-left,ā ārunā vs. ārunningā, ācampā vs. ācampingā, āsurfā vs. āsurfing,ā etc.
The verbs are particularly annoying because there doesnāt seem to be any rhyme or reason behind which ones require the ā-ingā suffix to be marked correct and which donāt. Youāve just gotta remember which form of the verb has been arbitrarily deemed correct.
[Aside: I submitted a support ticket for the ā-ingā issue and was told that repetition indicates the difference between signs for nouns and verbs. (Two movements = noun, and one movement = verb.) But there are a couple problems with that response.
1. I wasnāt asking about nouns vs. verbs. I was asking about verbs only. āThey like to campā and āThey like campingā both mean the same thing, and both use verbs. Both would be signed exactly the same way. But Lingvano will only accept one of these two forms of the verb as correct. (I donāt have a screenshot, so I donāt remember whether ācampā or ācampingā is considered correct.)
2. āCampā and ācampingā are IDENTICAL in the Lingvano dictionary.]
Consistent word order was also a big issue for me. Take the different versions of āaloneā: itās āalone-meā and āalone-you,ā but āthey-alone.ā
The one that really made me want to throw my phone out the window was ālanding-plane.ā Youāll get marked wrong if you answer āplane-landing,ā or ālanding-airplane.ā To add insult to injury, āplaneā isnāt even in the Lingvano dictionary ā only āairplaneā is. So why did they choose ālanding-planeā instead of ālanding-airplaneā in the first place?
Then thereās the whole telephone category. Three signs related to non-landline phones are introduced in one lesson, but thereās no consistency in the wording of the answers. One is āCELLPHONE-hearingā while another is āSMARTPHONE-deaf.ā And if itās the third sign, which doesnāt indicate whether the user is deaf or hearing, the correct answer is āMOBILE phone.ā Why canāt all three of these answers share the same base word for phone??
This extra layer of memorization is an entirely unnecessary barrier in my opinion. Iām already working to learn hundreds of new signs ā having to also memorize arbitrary and inconsistent phrasing just because of the way the app is programmed made me downright resentful.
ACCEPT ACKNOWLEDGED ALTERNATES
Alternates are taught, but then not accepted. For example, Lingvano explicitly tells you that āanywayā and āanyhowā use the same sign. But when I typed āanyhowā to answer the very next question, it was marked wrong ā only āanywayā was considered correct. THEN WHY DID YOU TELL ME THEYāRE THE SAME?
REDUCE GROUPS OF SIMILAR SIGNS
I didnāt care for learning groups of extremely similar signs, such as āchat,ā āchatty,ā āchit-chat,ā ālong-chat,ā and āshort-chat.ā Some of these were real a pain to differentiate on a small screen. But more importantly, in a beginning course Iād much rather maximize my vocabulary by learning five unrelated words than learning five words that mean basically the same thing.
MORE NATURAL/ACCURATE TRANSLATIONS
The translations often donāt sound like native English. Theyāre stilted or textbooky. Try these on for size:
āOh, I really pity her. I have plants to make tea. Doesn't it matter to you, can you bring her some?"
"Did you ever use that new thing wrong?"
āPsychologists know many medicine books. They need to read and dive into them.ā
I realize that sentences in language classes are often going to sound contrived just for the sake of utilizing limited vocabulary (kind of like āSee Spot run!ā) but NOBODY TALKS LIKE THIS. How am I supposed to understand the meaning of a sentence that doesnāt even sound right in my own language?
More exasperating were the several instances where a word appeared in the translation/answer, when I hadnāt seen the sign in the example/question. Confused, Iād rewatch the example to see how Iād missed an entire signā¦only to discover that IT WASNāT THERE. Of course, translations cannot always be word-for-word. Thereās gotta be some leeway to account for different shades of meaning between different languages. But for heavenās sake, donāt bulk up translations with words that are not there at all ā especially if itās a word/sign your student actually knows and expects to see in the example.
Another issue concerns this/that, which I struggle with even when translations are clearly worded. On a number of occasions, the sign and gloss both said āthat,ā but the translation used āthisā instead. Ex: āTHAT WAY MY FAMILY ME WALK ALWAYS WEEKENDā was translated as āThis way my family and I are always walking on weekends.ā No wonder I canāt get it right in my head!
If youāve made it this far, youāre probably either autistic and fuming right along with me, or neurotypical and rolling your eyes at all my nitpicking and hair-splitting. So be it. This is what happens when a hyper-focused linguist scrutinizes a language app.
Show more
