Reviews: Linguno – A Very Comprehensive Language Learning App

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Written by: | Last updated on February 28, 2024 | Est. Reading Time: 3 minutes

Linguno is a very interesting language app that could really help you improve your listening, grammar, and vocab skills. The app covers several languages, including German, Spanish, French, and Italian, and it also covers Portuguese. Not only does it cover Portuguese, but it actually covers both European and Brazilian Portuguese.

It’s one of the few apps that doesn’t draw a hard distinction between the two, allowing you to learn one or the other while also hearing Portuguese spoken by someone from the other side.

The site is still in beta mode, which means there are still some issues. This is mainly limited to there being a few “Brazilian” sentences in the European section, but it isn’t really a big deal.

Looking for more apps? Be sure to check out Practice Portuguese, which exclusively covers European Portuguese.

Strengths & Weaknesses

linguno statistics

Linguno covers three areas: grammar conjugation, listening, and vocabulary, and there’s a very cool statistics are which shows you how much you have practiced each area.

The last one, vocabulary, is something that a lot of apps like Memrise already cover and it wasn’t an service that was desperately lacking.

That said, Linguno has some features that other apps don’t. For starters, when you are learning a new word you can listen to the audio from both European and Brazilian Portuguese speakers. That’s definitely a big plus.

You can also search for sentences that use that word (complete with Portuguese and Brazilian audio) and see similar words or synonyms.

The other areas, grammar and listening, are two areas that many apps don’t cover.

For the grammar section, simply select your level (e.g. A2 European – Level 1, 2, or 3) and you’ll then be given a series of grammar tests and games.

The listening section is similar, select your level and whether you want European or Brazilian speakers, and play listening games.

No app or course is perfect, however, and what Linguno doesn’t cover is speaking. This is something you’ll need to work on yourself, either doing tandem exchanges through an app like HelloTalk or Tandem or paying to practice with a native speaker on iTalki.

Alternatives

The most similar app to Linguno is probably Clozemaster, another great app that uses sentences from the tatoeba database, but they’re not quite the same. It also has similarities to Conjuguemos but, because Linguno does more than just grammar, it’s also difficult to compare them.

Linguno essentially does the work of several apps in one app, and that’s why you should definitely start using it.

Costs

Currently, Linguno is completely free to use.

For more information, visit Linguno.com

Written by

James Cave is the founder of Portugalist and the author of the bestselling book, Moving to Portugal Made Simple. He has visited just about every part of Portugal, including Madeira and all nine islands of the Azores, and lived in several parts of Portugal including Lisbon, the Algarve, and Northern Portugal.

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