Drops: Language Learning Games

Just took my first 15 minute lesson and it was really fun and easy! Love this!

So amazing this has helped me so so so much and I am literally English and so I have never ever ever like being able to experience Spanish. I knew you were at first but now I know a lot more thank you to this app.

1/28 UPDATE: Ugh. I really like this app for a lot of reasons but what is this new update?? I loved being able to freely choose topics and have one queued up that I’m working on, and now the homescreen is replaced with a horrible “path” feature. This emphatically goes against what the app was good for, which is being selective with what vocab you want or need. I always avoid the packs that have full sentences as I find them clunky and useless in a vocab-drilling context. Yet now those are mandatory to progress. You *can* still go onto the explore page, however… major bug there now too. Doesn’t matter if I’m on WiFi, off WiFi, with good service, nope - about 70% of the time it’ll tell me I have a poor internet connection and the pack won’t load. Seems like it gets stuck like that. Some packs are more buggy than others. Literally just makes me shut the app in frustration. I’m not sure what the thought process was on this update, but please devs, fix it!! Thanks for fixing the pause at least - that works fine now. I’m on a 380+ day streak and have Premium, so I feel like I’ve given more than enough time to fully get a feel for this app. It’s really good for expanding vocab and *some* conversational pieces, but don’t expect to learn anything past that or be able to hold a basic conversation from just using this app alone. You’ll need to learn using other sources and more traditional language learning routes to get there. Not that this is a fault of the app - just a heads-up to others. I use it primarily for Japanese, and generally do 1 session a day. I’ve gone through a lot of the topics and still have more to do over a year later, so that’s great! Lots to do, and other languages to explore when I have done basically everything. Hopefully more topics are introduced over time! That being said, for having paid what I did for lifetime Premium, the support for this app needs to be miles better than it currently is. The feedback form on the app is broken; I couldn’t even see what I wrote past a certain point the last time I tried it, let alone the fact that you don’t really see what happens with that feedback - it just goes into the void. My biggest complaint is that the pause feature is currently totally busted. At least for me - maybe others’ apps are fine, but I do keep mine updated. If I use the pause feature or even pull down on my iPhone info center to check notifications, it pauses my session, but then restarts the session clock at 5 minutes. It’s only 5 minutes, sure, but if I’m almost done with my session and it restarts… that’s SUPER annoying. So when I start a session, I can’t leave the screen whatsoever or it’ll restart. OR, even worse, a notification in the app for a new challenge or something will pop up, and that ALSO restarts the session. Can’t win! I bought Premium fairly early into my Drops usage, but if I had known that support was going to be this poor, I don’t think I would’ve bought it. Would’ve just stuck with the free 5 minutes a day. I was using it a lot before my trip to Japan, but like I said, it does have a limited use case. Hope things are fixed soon!

Frequently, the pictures are so small and confusing that It’s hard to differentiate between what they intend you to see as the correct answer. Also, I find that the time that they allow for you to see what the answer is is less than 1/2 of one second. If they just gave you a a second more time to figure out that you got the right answer and what it was, it would be very helpful. Now they have added a listening portion to the app. this is extremely helpful and their pronunciation of the words is very good and very helpful. I feel like this is one of the best additions this useful app. This app has many languages and is very useful because it uses phrases instead of words. It’s a very good way to learn to use and language more quickly and usefully. I think they need to put some time into improving their app, allowing more time to see what you've gotten wrong and the correct answer, making the pictures bigger and using pictures that are more consistent with what they are trying to describe.

This is the worst update thus far. Stop making changes to the layout.

It is helping me so much and if is a very good app

Love I learned A lot

Great for vocab

I like that it has Nigerian languages that Duolingo will never get

Using the Thai language part of this app. In order to continue to the second section you have to pass a test that requires you to correctly transliterate a Thai consonant or vowel into English. The problem is two-fold: first, it’s irrelevant that you should have to correctly spell (in English) the Thai alphabet. Second, their transliteration is absolutely horrible and does not conform to any system I’m aware of. As such, you have to spend more time memorizing the way THEY want you to spell it rather than what the letter or vowel actually is. Furthermore, there are several consonants that are improperly displayed because they are taller than the box that they are shown in for the interface, therefore they get cut off and in many cases the part that’s cut off is integral into seeing which letter you’re being quizzed on. Attention to detail is paramount when learning languages. It seems clear to me that appropriate due diligence was not done, spending more time on the gamification than the actual important aspect of learning an Indic-scripted language. Please do better. Update the requirements for learning Thai. As it stands now it’s very poor. If this first section is indicative in any way of the rest of the Thai learning in this app, it will be a bad experience.