Logged into LingoDeer and saw a new app advertised. I played a few levels of what they had to offer for free. It appears to take the aspects of LingoDeer that didn’t really have a great methodology for reinforcement and gamified them. Vocab games, grammar games, and conjugation training.
After playing with it tonight I have a couple thoughts. 先ず, the UI is beautiful. The vocab kind of builds on itself in each game. Learn the word, recall the word, and then spell the word. I think WaniKani is much better because you are going to learn the kanji and memorization strategies.
The best game in my opinion is the sentence evaluation one. If this had been incorporated into the LingoDeer app I may be a little more thrilled but I don’t think I’ll be making a purchase. Grade A development though.
It looks interesting. I love lingodeer but the fact there’s no srs is not great so it looks like a good solution. They should have added it to the regular app though. I don’t really want another subscription based app… If they don’t have a one time fee then I’ll pass.
It’s a no-go for me as long as there’s a subscription. I paid for the lifetime subscription for Lingodeer already, and there isn’t anything in Deer Plus that you can’t find in the main app or a free Anki deck.
The best thing I ever did for my studies was to make my own anki deck based on the material in LingoDeer, because, I agree, the lack of a decent SRS is LingoDeer’s biggest flaw, but it’s a really big one. The individual LingoDeer chapters have an abundance of example sentences which is great for learning new material, but it’s excessive for review. Five variations on the same grammar point in your reviews means you’re spending 5x longer than you really need to while reviewing and you might never get through it all and miss some content entirely, especially seeing as how the review section kind of sucks. There’s almost 1000 sentences across LingoDeer’s 65 Japanese 1 chapters.
I’m building an anki deck that contains all of the example sentences in the “learning tips” section only for much more efficient grammar review now and I’d be happy to share it when it’s finished up.
Bumping this thread cause they finally made it available for iOS but the prices are pretty steep compared to the Android launch. I wonder if anyone has used it for an extended period of time to pitch in their thoughts?
As someone that uses LingoDeerPlus daily, I felt I would hop on here to leave my thoughts. As one of the people using the iOS version, I can say I don’t have a single complaint at all, and I cannot recommend a better app to help practice.
To sum up the games, the app covers vocabulary, grammar, phrasal construction, and listening comprehension (can’t remember what free offered). In each of these sections there are usually two games with similar tasks. Their differences are quickly apparent, as one game focuses taking time to get the right answer, and the other is answering similar questions quickly; both have their place, and are incredibly helpful.
To be honest, I do not have any real gripes about the app at all. Even so, there are a few things that did throw me off at first:
I first attempted to use it in tandem with the LingoDeer app. When working with Japanese, there were a lot of games I couldn’t play early on, just because the content hadn’t been covered. This was especially true when it came to the two verb games in the grammar section, as verbs weren’t even touched until the 3rd (maybe 4th?) section. Really, it’s not a huge deal since you can still make use of other games, and of course all games without the app.
Loosely tied in with #1, the daily achievements usually ask you to play games you have no business playing, yet. It took me a few days, but I just started ignoring them all together, until I could make use of all of the games. Even then, there isn’t much use for the in-app coins yet, but if you have achievement OCD (like myself), you’ll want to complete these one way or another; best to know when you can.
As for the price, I hate subscription business models, so being that it offered great games covering multiple languages that I plan to learn, I just paid for the lifetime membership during a special ($49USD). Since then, I have seen 3 more specials offer it at the same price since, so if you want to go this route, it won’t take long to run across the same special (that or just ask support if they would give you a special price. Support team seems pretty cool).
I hope that helps! As a new member here, I wasn’t sure what would be expected, so if there is a question I didn’t answer, by all means ask away, and I’ll be happy to answer.
Depending on the app, level one covers mainly N5 and lvl 2 covers N4… not totally sure, I’m like 20% through lvl 2.
My own fault for my need to rush things and not make use of the review when it comes to haunt me.
Also the main app has this new feature called Fluent Japanese, which has new weekly lessons which focus on speaking practice and some new-ish grammar points.
