Pros & Cons
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- Accurate
- Has 100+ languages
- Clear learning path and structure
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- Dull design
- Length of program varies by language
Transparent Language Online Specs
| Average Duration of Lesson (Mins) | 10 |
| No. of Languages Offered (Not Incl. English) | 100 |
| Price Includes | 12-Month Subscription |
| Style of Program | Interactive Exercises |
If you are having trouble finding an app that helps you learn an uncommon language, such as Bosnian or Kazakh, you should try Transparent Language Online. The language learning service supports over 100 languages, providing accurate, clear lessons to further your education. Some programs aren't as comprehensive as others, and the interface is in need of a refresh, but Transparent Language Online might still be worth a look if you can't find resources for your language anywhere else. Ultimately, however, you are better off with one of our Editors' Choice winners for the category: Duolingo is the best free language app, Fluenz stands out for its classroom-style instruction, Lingoda excels for live online tutoring, and Rosetta Stone suits beginners especially well.
Price: On the High Side
Transparent Language Online costs $24.95 per month for one language or $149.95 per year; both prices are a little high. To unlock all of its languages, you need to pay $49.95 per month or $249.95 per year. Before you pay for an account, check whether your library has licenses for the service. If so, you might be able to learn all of its languages for free. Otherwise, the app offers a 14-day trial that unlocks access to all the languages and doesn't require a credit card. Transparent Language Online advertises online private tutoring, too, but that's beyond the scope of this review.
(Credit: Transparent Language Online/PCMag)Most other language apps charge somewhere between $10 and $15 per month or between $100 and $150 per year. Rosetta Stone charges $131.40 per year for access to one language and $399 (frequently on sale for $219) for access to all 26 of its languages. Fluenz's pricing model is different, with packages of classes going for anywhere from $187 to $810.
What Languages Can You Learn?
Before you choose any language learning app, you should make sure it has the language you want. Transparent Language Online offers around 100 programs with instruction in English, but that number is much higher if you count those that teach in another language. For some languages, you can choose between lessons with the native script or a transliterated version. Here's the complete list of languages the app offers.
When I logged into an account with access to all languages, I saw even more options than are on the above list, including Bororo, Dakota, Koasati, Nahuatl, Ojibwe, and Taino. Many of the languages that are either not widely spoken or popular among learners have limited course materials and no interactive exercises. They're part of Transparent's 7,000 Languages Program, which aims to make less commonly taught languages widely available. More popular languages have longer courses and interactive exercises.
Another app to try for less-in-demand languages is Pimsleur, which I like more than Transparent Language Online. Pimsleur really teaches you to understand and speak languages, whereas Transparent Online Language primarily gives you words, phrases, and grammar. Another place to look is Mango Languages, but only as a last resort. Mango is tedious, but it has courses in some languages that Transparent Language Online doesn't, such as Cherokee, Malayalam, and Yiddish.
Learning Experience: Inconsistent
In the decade-plus that I've tested Transparent Language Online, my opinion about it has wavered. Sometimes it feels too challenging. Sometimes it feels like it gives the right amount of new material per lesson. And sometimes it doesn't feel difficult enough. The difference comes down to which languages I'm evaluating and how much prior experience I have with them.
Whenever I test a language learning app, I look at one language I know and one that I don't. This time, I refreshed my Romanian and tried to learn a little Korean. In the past, I've also looked at German, Russian, Urdu, and Spanish. In assessing these programs, I weigh my experience against other language learning I've done, not only with apps but also at the School of Language Studies at the Foreign Service Institute, in online or university classes, and with private tutors.
I don't know any Korean, and trying to learn the basics went fine as long as I had a notebook by my side. But Transparent Language Online wasn't challenging enough and didn't give me the right mix of practice to help me brush up on my Romanian. The words and sentences in each lesson seemed arbitrary. I would have liked paragraphs of text to read or longer dialogues to listen to, rather than sentences like "Use my utility knife" and "My utility knife is in the blue tent." In past times testing Transparent Language Online, I enjoyed the German program the most, a language I didn't know, but that used a familiar writing system.
(Credit: Transparent Language Online/PCMag)When you are trying to learn a language with an app, it needs to compel you to pick it up every day. Duolingo does the best job of this out of any service I've tried. Transparent still has not mastered this. You can specify a goal for how many minutes to study each day and set reminders to do your lessons, but I never wanted to dive in. I'm also not sure how it counts the number of minutes you study, since it was often wrong. Transparent isn't visually interesting or particularly fun, either. Its accuracy partially makes up for those downsides, however.
Lesson Structure: Fine, But There's Room for Improvement
Transparent Language Online gives you a dashboard with all your units and lessons in a clear sequence. A widget here shows how many words in your vocabulary are stale, meaning those it hasn't exposed you to in a while. Each unit has multiple lessons and ends with an assessment. If you think a lesson is below your skill level, you can skip ahead to the unit assessment or to a new unit entirely.
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Assessments are short, often taking 10 minutes or less. You have to show you can hear, read, speak, and write all the vocabulary you learned in that unit. If you don't pass, you can still move forward, however. Transparent Language Online never locks you out of lessons. With some other apps, like Duolingo, you have to test out of a section to skip ahead or take a placement test to start at the correct level.
As mentioned, you choose between native or transliterated characters for some language lessons. In the latter case, Transparent Language Online phonetically translates words into the Roman alphabet. If you choose the native option, the app gives you many opportunities to enable transliteration in places. If you pick the transliterated version, you usually have the option to reveal the native writing so you can at least see it. In other words, the app doesn't really lock you into a choice.
(Credit: Transparent Language Online/PCMag)The interactive exercises are about as appealing as the interface design, which is to say, not very. Quite a few of them don't give you any useful feedback. When you learn new words, you hear them and then must record yourself saying them. You can play back the recording and look at a waveform of your speech versus the program's, but this isn't engaging. The app doesn't rate you or provide corrections; if you press the record button and say nothing at all, you get the same result and can simply move on to the next exercise. (Transparent Online Language did assess speech several years ago, but it didn't implement it in a helpful way, so I suppose it's better that it's gone.)
The writing portion is a little better. When you spell something wrong, Transparent Online Language points it out and gives you a chance to edit your answer (or you can override it and click Accept as Correct). Editing my answers didn't feel engaging, nor did it help me retain the information any better.
(Credit: Transparent Language Online/PCMag)Special characters that don't appear on American QWERTY keyboards show up on screen as you type. When you type 't' in the Romanian course, for instance, you get two options: t and t with cedilla (ţ). They get labels, 1 and 2. You can click the letter you want or choose the corresponding number. If you do nothing, the app defaults to the key on your keyboard.
You can also switch to simple typing, which means you choose the letter you need among a bank of them on the screen. This is a little dizzying on the mobile app since the letter bank refreshes after each selection; the letters are constantly changing and moving. I found it too jarring and distracting to use. It also doesn't seem necessary, since smartphone keyboards already have a simple and elegant solution for special characters: press and hold a key. It's pretty easy to install a keyboard in another language on a mobile device, too.
Although the exercises are fairly routine, my favorite one involves hearing spoken words and transcribing them. That's a useful exercise. A similar exercise shows you a character or a word. Then, you have to listen to four audio files and choose the one that matches. It's appropriately challenging and was helpful in Korean, in particular, while I was learning to distinguish some letters that sound similar.
(Credit: Transparent Language Online/PCMag)What Makes Transparent Language Online Different?
Not all language learning apps serve the same purpose. Duolingo, for example, is one that you can pick up and use for two or three minutes at a time, or longer if you like. Other apps give you more of an instructional experience. Fluenz, Pimsleur, and Rosetta Stone are all good examples. With those apps, you are supposed to use them for at least 30 minutes every day. Transparent Language Online falls somewhere in between. It's not an overly rigorous program, but you won't get much out of it if you use it for just two or three minutes at a time. You need to set aside closer to 10 minutes per session to make progress.
Earlier, I noted that some languages have more materials than others, which makes a huge difference in your experience. For example, German has 10 units with five or six lessons each for a total of 52 lessons. I estimate the average person might complete one or two lessons per day. Romanian has seven units, with three or four lessons in each for a total of 27 lessons. Korean has 11 units with three lessons each (33 in total); four extra lessons and an assessment that teaches the alphabet count separately. The upside is that each language program is unique; it doesn't translate a core set of content for each language. (Rosetta Stone does that, and it makes learning dry at times.)
In addition to the lessons, Transparent Language Online gives you more ways to practice and review. You can refresh words that you haven't seen in a while. You can also opt to practice a specific skill, such as writing. A tab in the web dashboard called Browse has even more resources and study materials, but again, they vary by language. Romanian has short videos for reviewing verb conjugations, for example, though I wish these focused more on grammatical cases since they're one of the tougher parts of that language to master. In any event, the videos are somewhat dull. Don't expect Transparent Online Language to suddenly come alive here.
You won't find podcasts or short stories, which is a shame. They're helpful for more experienced speakers who need more challenging work. Babbel has a few podcasts, though Duolingo's are better. Duolingo has articles for a select few languages, too. Rosetta Stone has some good short stories, along with some streaming classes and videos that are much more engaging than Transparent Language Online's. Another language app called Yabla has videos with subtitles and closed captioning options that are useful for more advanced speakers.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Transparent)
Transparent Language Online
Transparent Language Online doesn't have an especially compelling user experience, but it competently teaches languages you won't find anywhere else.