I’m doing ok with Babbel which is German — not Canadian but also not American
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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Awesome, we have the same goal and I’ve been looking at European alternatives wherever Canadian one doesn’t exist.
Subscribed
Language Drops is seriously awesome
Mauril seems pretty good for English or French and is published by the CBC.
I read about this app here and checked it out. I'm a French noob, and I'm so happy they start their lessons with small conversations instead of theory! This is what my schooling has missed my whole life.
Woah that looks perfect.
My wife watches French CBC shows to keep practiced already, never heard of this app
The best language learning app IMO is Anki. It's FOSS and very powerful (although the UI isn't great).
Seriously, once you learn how to use it, it's incredible how well it works. However it is also much less forgiving than Duolingo. You really need to use it everyday. If you skip more than 1 day, you'll be so behind that it gets tough to catch up
Does Anki come with content? Like where do I get the flash cards from for a certain language? The website makes no mention of this
You can download shared decks. On the mobile app, there's a little floating button with a plus sign that takes you to the shared decks, but I find it better to use the desktop app to import so that I can go ahead and fix any formatting issues I have too (i find the default font size to often be too small).
Sweet, thanks
AnkiDroid on F-Droid, Ankiweb only links to Google Play from their website: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.ichi2.anki/
I like memorion on android, it looks like a more user friendly anki with ability to import deck from it and many other language apps
For ebooks, Kobo is a Canadian subsidiary of a Japanese company (Rakuten).
Edit:
Apparently Kobo does audiobooks as well, but not sure what the selection looks like.
Also, you can check out books from your library and read them on Kobo devices (probably - check out your local library).
I'll check out Kobo's audiobooks. My wife has been very into our library's audiobooks, though I'm not sure how that works.
LingQ seems to be Canada based but I have not tried https://www.lingq.com/en/about/
Long is a tool for advanced learning in my experience.
Excellent at what it does though.
Lingodeer is Chinese owned
Innovative language (languagepod101) appears to be Japanese (address listed as tokyo)
Not Canadian but it gives you non-US options depending on your needs
I've been using Lingodeer to learn Korean and have been pretty happy with it.
+1
Busuu (who are German, I believe)
Busuu is soooooo much better than Duolingo!