Living Language Comprehensive Review | Daxdi

The best language-learning software hooks you and motivates you to return day after day.

It should feel rewarding to work through the program, as you see your knowledge of a language grow, but also challenging in that each day offers something new and a little beyond your reach.

On these fronts, Living Language Comprehensive falls flat, given its dated interface and limited interactivity.

The lessons aren't memorable.

Games are dull.

Living Language used to offer e-tutoring in the form of live, small classroom-style video conferencing, but those are now gone, as are the mobile apps.

There are better choices for learning a language.

Yes, Living Language offers accurate materials, as well as a decent number of languages, but until this program gets the reboot it deserves, try Editors' Choice Duolingo or Rosetta Stone (Limited Time Only - Master Unlimited Languages with 10% OFF a Lifetime Subscription, only $179! at Rosetta Stone) .

And if you're opposed to those programs, I'd recommend giving Fluenz or Pimsleur a whirl.

Languages Offered

Living Language has several different types of courses.

If you count them all, it offers 61 languages that English speakers can learn (not counting the fictional language Dothraki).

Not all of these languages come with full online courses, however.

The best courses for beginners are Comprehensive, Essential, and Complete.

The Comprehensive course is the one that's online, and it's what I tested for this review.

The Essential and Complete courses use books and CDs only; there's no online program.

You can pick one of 21 languages for the Comprehensive course: American Sign Language, Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog, and Vietnamese.

There's also an English language course for speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish.

Living Language has a few more programs, too.

There's one for travelers called Passport with options in 10 languages.

Another is a Business course available in Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), and Spanish.

There are a few specialty courses called On the Job, with options such as American Sign Language for Librarians and Spanish for Law Enforcement.

Finally, there are a few dozen flashcard-only programs.

See the full list of options on Living Language's website.

Prices and Programs

To get Living Language Comprehensive, you pay a subscription fee for online access.

It's advertised at $150 per year, although when I went to renew courses for Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese the payment screen listed each one at $99 per year.

(I reached out to the company for clarification and did not receive a reply.) If you're not ready to commit to a full year, you can pay $75 for six months, $50 for three months, or $39 for one month.

Compared with the cost of other online language-learning programs, the full-year subscription is decently priced (especially if it's $99 and not $150).

The $39 one-month price seems too high, however.

Other language learning apps typically charge $10-$15 for a one-month subscription.

With Living Language Comprehensive, you can try one free lesson, but you don't get a trial period to explore all the content.

The good news is one lesson gives you an adequate taste of what you can expect in the rest of the course.

The bad news is it's a bit underwhelming.

Living Language does have some content that's free and unlocked for anyone.

It's the interactive practice material for people who buy Living Language Essential or Complete—the courses that comes as books and CDs.

It contains a lot of the same exercises and games that you find in the Comprehensive course.

If you want more of a taste of what's in Living Language, go there.

Living Language Lessons

When you buy a subscription to Living Language Comprehensive, you get unlimited access to everything online for the time period you purchased.

It includes up to 46 lessons covering vocabulary, grammar, cultural notes, short audio conversations, games, and access to a forum.

Living Language no longer has mobile apps.

Everything is available via the web only.

In testing Living Language over the years, I've used Spanish and Japanese, and dabbled in a few other languages.

To get a fresh look this time, I perused some of the Dutch course.

No matter what language you choose, the exercises, interface, and user experience are nearly identical.

The material is divided by level of experience: essential, intermediate, and advanced.

You can jump around at will.

Flashcards

Exposure to new vocabulary mostly comes through flashcards.

Typically, you see a word in the language you're learning paired with an image on a card.

You press a play button to hear the word spoken.

Then you click to flip the card, and it reveals the English translation.

For languages with a different writing system than the Roman alphabet, you can choose to see transliterated text on the front of the flashcard beneath the native writing.

That's okay, but in the past when I tried it with Hebrew, it wasn't enough for me to feel like I was really learning and retaining anything.

For this reason, I wouldn't recommend Living Language Comprehensive if you're trying to read and write a language with a writing system that's unfamiliar to you.

For that, Transparent Language Online is a better program.

It teaches you the names of new letters or characters and how to pronounce them very early in the course.

The flashcards in Living Language works fine if the writing system and sounds are already familiar.

Then, you can speed through the deck and move onto other exercises.

When you have memorized a flashcard, you mark it "mastered." If you don't know the word yet, you mark it "study." After you run through all the vocabulary, you can go through the ones you marked to study.

It's a dry system, and not very engaging.

Exercises

Living Language is modular.

In addition to flashcards, it has interactive sentence building, fill-in-the-blank exercises, listening sections, games, and reading material filled with grammar lessons, cultural notes, and other content.

If you use mobile apps regularly or play video games, the design and interactivity in Living Language will seem dated.

One of the exercises has you translate a sentence from English into the language you're learning by choosing words from a word bank and dragging them into place.

It looks and feels like interactivity circa the early 2000s at best.

All the exercises do.

The games are just as lackluster.

In one, bubbles containing words in both English and the language you're learning appear on screen.

You have to click on the words with the same meaning to pop the bubbles.

Another game is just like the card game Memory, only with vocabulary.

Again, you match up words in the foreign language with words in English.

It's fantastically boring and didn't help me remember new words at all.

Forums

Online forums connect Living Language learners to one another.

You might see discussions about grammar, idioms, or using the program.

Within the forums you can find discussions of each language, plus general forums for support and other issues.

There are no incentives for participating, and the activity is inconsistent.

Message boards can easily go dry for long stretches of time.

Some of the boards haven't seen anything new in years.

From time to time, I've seen professionals drop in to the forums to answer questions and even assign homework when students ask for it.

But overall, they don't seem to be used regularly.

If you're hoping to interact with speakers of the language you're learning, I recommend trying HelloTalk (Free at Apple.com) because it's an app designed around human interaction.

You can also look for language meetups in your local area on Duolingo.

How You Learn

In Living Language Comprehensive, you can jump around at will, which, as a new learner, distracted me from focusing on one thing and completing it.

It may be better for people who are reviewing a language they've studied before, rather than someone learning from square one.

With a new language, I like to be told what to do, how often, and in what order.

If you like that kind of instruction, Simon & Schuster Pimsleur Comprehensive, Rosetta Stone, and Duolingo will be much more to your taste.

Another reason Living Language is tough for beginners is that you don't learn from doing the exercises exactly.

Rather, you learn through the flashcards and by reading the bonus material, if you choose to read it at all.

Those readings really ought to be better integrated as core content.

The exercises merely give you a way to practice and remember new vocabulary through repetitive exposure.

At no point in the exercises do you learn through process of elimination (a technique Rosetta Stone uses) or how to reuse a word or phrase you learned earlier in a new way.

As a point of contrast, Duolingo locks you out of content that's too advanced for your level.

You have to pass all the preceding lessons to unlock new ones or test out.

With Living Language, there's nothing stopping you from plowing onward.

Living Language could be better if the content from the flashcards and reading materials were more directly integrated into the interactive exercises.

In other words, the experience of learning and the interactivity have to be unified.

What's Missing

While Living Language Comprehensive exposes you to new vocabulary and games to play, it doesn't fully engage all the skills you need to use while learning a new language.

Living Language formerly offered e-tutoring, which were webinar-style classes with a live instructor who was allowed to go off script while teaching.

The program got rid of these classes in 2018, which is too bad.

They were by far the program's best asset and provided opportunities to use a range of skills.

When it comes to listening in Living Language, you can play short dialogues and read the translation, but you don't get anything more interesting or challenging.

Duolingo has a podcast now for English speakers who are learning Spanish, which gives you a fresh opportunity to listen to something different.

Pimsleur emphasizes the importance of listening with each lesson, as they all open with a dialogue that you hear in full and then spend the rest of the lesson learning how to decipher.

Yabla is another interesting resource for practicing listening skills because it teaches through online videos and has great content for people who are well beyond the beginner stage.

Living Language also doesn't give you any reading passages in the language you're learning.

There's an app called Beelinguapp that does, however.

Give it a try if you need to brush up on your reading skills.

Not a Compelling Teacher

With e-tutoring gone from the picture, Living Language Comprehensive doesn't have much compelling content left.

Compared with other online language-learning courses, the material is dry and unmemorable.

The program also doesn't steer your learning enough.

It doesn't provide guidance as to how many lessons you should complete in a day or let you know when you're ready to move onto a more challenging material.

There are no tests at the end of a unit or other ways to assess your progress.

It's not very motivating.

The whole program feels like it needs a refresh.

For learning a new language from scratch Rosetta Stone and Duolingo do a better job than Living Language.

Duolingo is Daxdi's Editors' Choice among free language-learning programs, while Rosetta Stone is the Editors' Choice for paid language education software.

If you've tried Rosetta Stone and simply don't like it, I recommend Fluenz, which uses a completely different teaching method but is similar in that it's a full language-learning course delivered through a contemporary online experience.