FluentU Review: Effective Video Content For Language Learning?

Whether you’re learning from the video content, audio lessons, or taking a beginner course, you can add any word to a custom deck. There isn’t a limit on how many custom flashcard decks you can create. You can compile words to learn for your language learning goals, like how to order foods, ask native speakers how they are, etc.

The ability to customize flashcard decks helps with vocabulary acquisition, where it becomes easier to target specific words. It’s a helpful tool for beginner and intermediate learners targeting specific phrases.

Excellence of The Learning Material

FluentU focuses on teaching its users by immersion in the target language with authentic videos. You watch real-world videos that show how native speakers use their language. This teaching approach exposes learners to the language in a contextualized way.

While immersion through real-world videos certainly helps, FluentU breaks each video into short language lessons. For every word and phrase in the video, there’s an interactive caption that provides in-depth detail. You see the definition of words, example sentences, pronunciation, and grammar usage. After the videos, you practice what you learned with quizzes.

Each quiz takes about ten to fifteen minutes. The instructions are straightforward. You select words from a word bank to complete phrases and translate them into your native language, spell, and pronounce them. 

With all these, users get over a hundred hours of study time. Going from the first level of beginner to the last of advanced can take months with so much video content and quizzes. 

Overall, teaching material relies on video lessons and quizzes. However, during app testing we found that the reading, writing, speaking, and grammar skills acquired from these vary as the exercises don’t cover everything equally.

Grammar Instruction

FluentU offers grammar explanations throughout the videos contextually. While this helps pick up grammar as you go, it won’t be enough for most learners. The creators know this and provide some more comprehensive courses. When you click on an adjective, verb, noun, or any other language part, the FluentU app shows the definition and detailed explanations.

These grammar explanations come with example sentences to help users understand grammatical concepts. The grammar exercises are a part of the quizzes, which appear occasionally. Users should take notes from detailed explanations to build a solid grammar foundation.

This way of learning grammar works in favor of language learners that want to learn languages with simple grammar from context. We found it works really well with Mandarin Chinese. For languages with challenging grammar structures, it’s best to pair FluentU with another tool.

Verbal Practice

FluentU doesn’t have comprehensive exercises to practice pronunciation and intonation. Still, the app asks the users to pronounce words and phrases throughout the quizzes. While this helps with some speaking, the app isn’t very accurate. This is because FluentU doesn’t use speech recognition technology. Therefore, you don’t get much feedback on your pronunciation.

Although there isn’t a feature to practice conversation skills, you watch native speakers constantly. By listening to native speakers, you can copy their mimics and expressions as you learn. 

Whether you learn with videos or by taking the beginner course, you’re constantly hearing how the words and phrases are pronounced, which helps with speaking and listening comprehension to a degree. Nevertheless, this is often not enough to build conversational skills. Like advancing grammar, it’s best to pair FluentU with another tool to improve speaking skills. 

Reading

FluentU puts a big emphasis on reading. It features detailed captions and bilingual subtitles you can interact with to learn more about new words or see their grammar explanations. The app makes you follow the subtitles to understand the context better. It improves reading comprehension while exposing language learners to different sentence structures.

While this helps understand short passages, FluentU exercises don’t cover large reading materials. The reading-focused practices benefit beginner and intermediate learners, but those advancing in the target language may need larger reading materials.

Writing

FluentU doesn’t offer much writing practice. The only exercise closest to it is selecting individual letters to form words and phrases. These usually occur when you make multiple mistakes while forming phrases or sentences from a word bank. The spaced repetition system focuses on these phrases, asking you to structure phrases letter by letter.

You can improve your speaking or writing skills a bit through grammar practices, vocabulary building, and reading comprehension, but FluentU doesn’t offer much writing practice. FluentU users who want to focus on writing should use additional language-learning apps, such as Drops or lingQ.

Vocabulary

FluentU shows how many words the user knows before watching a video or starting a unit in the beginner course. With this feature, you can branch out from what you already know to learn vocabulary. This makes learning new words much more effective than plunging yourself into entirely unfamiliar words – something that not many language-learning apps offer.

The custom flashcard decks and searching videos to learn a category take this further and allow users to focus on what they want. These tools to build vocabulary help users learn a language for a specific goal. 

Repetitiveness

FluentU has thousands of native speaker videos with different topics and variety. You can watch news stories, interviews, movie scenes, music videos, and more. The diversity in the videos maintains an entertaining learning environment.

Although the language learning programs that use spaced repetition feel repetitive initially, FluentU doesn’t. You can mix what you’re learning by watching videos that cover different topics. You can then bring everything together using the review feature.