langblr/studyblr

Will knowing how to say "aiguille à tricoter" in French be useful for your exam ? Probably not, but who cares ? You're listening to spoken French AND you're learning a manual skill !

Youtube is full of wonderful tutorials in many languages, everything is there just waiting for you ...

And why stop at manual skills ? Philosophy ? History ? Astrology ? Hop hop hop, in your target language ! Want to learn something about Egypt ? The Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona has a coursera course on it.

"But I won't understand anything" I personally prefer to understand 20% of a lecture about a sacred temple in the middle of the desert than understand 60% of the most boring standard "what do you like to eat for breakfast" textbook learning material.

Kana Memory DJT Kana Learn Kana Practice Hiragana&Katakana Duolingo

These are the apps and links I currently have on my phone to study Chinese:

SuperChinese: my main study resource. There are currently 7 levels, level 7 (still incomplete, they are still slowly adding lessons to it) being HSK 5 stuff. Each lesson has vocabulary, grammar and a short dialogue where those are used in context (I love context). It has a few free lessons in the lower levels but after that you have to buy a subscription. There are many sales though. When I was a beginner I used HelloChinese instead, which has more free content, and switched to SuperChinese when I finished all the free content there. It also has social network features and chat rooms I don't use.

TofuLearn is like a flashcard app with many pre-made decks (you can also create your own on their website and import decks from Anki) and the option to practice writing hanzi. Anki didn't work for me, but I find Tofu very helpful. Practicing writing helps me with character recognition, and it also helps me remember the tones thanks to the audio in the pre-made HSK decks.

Dot is a reading app with new texts being added every day. It used to be completely free, which actually seemed too good to be true, and then they put practically everything behind a paywall and very strict limits for free users. After a couple of months they made it a little less restricted though - we still can't choose the articles but we can read as many as we want as long as we do the vocabulary exercises after each article (plus, during the Spring Festival, they made all articles available for free for 3 days and we could save the ones we were interested in to read later). It follows the new, not-yet-implemented (and harder) HSK levels, so you should start one or two levels below yours and if the texts are too easy move up.

Google Translator: not the best but helpful when I need to translate whole sentences, plus I can point my camera or open an image and it translates writing.

Pleco: best Chinese to English dictionary.

Stroke Order: not an app but a website, does what it says in the tin: shows stroke order for a specific character.

YouGlish: also a website, you can put a word or phrase and it shows videos where people say that word/phrase. Very cool.

Todaii is a graded news app that has only two levels: easy and hard. I'm around level HSK4 and the "easy" level is quite hard though (but I admit reading is my nemesis).

It's free, it's open-source, and it's better.