FluentU Review: Language Immersion App Put to the Test

FluentU is an app that lets you learn a language by watching and interacting with videos.

It offers authentic video content and an intelligent learning system.

FluentU used to be one of my favorite language-learning tools but has since been surpassed by Yabla.

Still, there are reasons why FluentU may be more suitable for you than Yabla.

We’ll discuss all in this review.

Learning a Language through YouTube Videos

FluentU is like YouTube for language learners.

It’s a collection of translated and subtitled YouTube videos in 10 languages. And its learning system allows you to learn the videos’ content by taking quizzes.

Now, YouTube offers much, much more videos than FluentU ever could — and I’ll give you some exact numbers in a minute — but in essence, FluentU allows you to learn a language through a YouTube-like experience.

Here Are the Languages You Can Learn With FluentU

When FluentU started, it only offered Chinese.

Today, you can use FluentU to learn the following languages:

• Chinese (Mandarin)
• Spanish
• French
• English
• German
• Japanese
• Italian
• Korean
• Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese)
• Russian
• English for Spanish speakers
• English for Japanese speakers
• English for Korean speakers
• English for Chinese speakers

One subscription gives you access to ALL languages.

And this is an important reason why you may prefer FluentU over Yabla. With the superior Yabla, a subscription gives you access to a single language only. With FluentU, you can switch languages whenever you like and you can learn more languages than with Yabla.

However, not all languages have the same number of videos available. But all have enough to keep you busy for a long time.

To find out how many videos FluentU offers in your target language, check out the following graph.

The FluentU team, led by Alan Park, keeps adding new videos so you’ll probably never run out of videos to learn from.

The Video Player

FluentU’s video player is where a big slice of the action can be found.

The “distraction-free” video player comes with:

• The possibility to listen to each word of a video as many times as you need.
• Bilingual subtitles you can enable or disable to your liking.
• Hover in-context dictionary you can even use while a video is playing. While hovering over a word, you will also hear a robot voice saying it.

And of course:

The Loop button

…that allows you to infinitely loop individual parts of a video — giving you the time to really study the difficult passages.

A simple feature? Yes, but if you’ve done some language learning before, you’ll understand the usefulness of the Loop button.

Let’s say you’re watching a video segment that’s driving you nuts. You just can’t hear what they’re saying! So what do you do? Just loop the segment until you catch on!

How FluentU Helps You Master the Content of the Videos

If you had to learn a video’s content just by watching the video, it would take forever.

After watching it for the 500th time, maybe you’d understand five words.

Not very efficient…

What you need is some extra help. Some method or feature that could speed things up.

The loop button I mentioned earlier is one such feature.

Another one is FluentU’s Quiz.

After watching a video, you can access the quiz for that video.

The quiz takes the video apart bit by bit. It puts you to the test with fill-in-the-blanks, multiple-choice, and more.

Every question has accompanying video segments, but not necessarily of the same video. This is done so you can hear a word or phrase from different sources.

I think the FluentU team made the right decision here. If you learn a word from a single source in a single context, your learning will be limited.

So, good call…

Another great feature is that the words you’re learning are automatically added to the built-in spaced-repetition flashcard system.

For those of you who don’t know:

Spaced repetition in its purest form, is simply reviewing or repeating learned material just before you would forget it. It’s been proven to improve memory retention.

And FluentU has got you covered:

When it’s time to review your learned vocabulary, you’ll get notified of this on the homepage of your FluentU account.

But despite these helpful features, the quiz isn’t perfect.

It sometimes feels a little clunky, but that’s not even my main gripe.

You see, what I don’t dig is that the video player used during the quiz is too small. I think they should keep the video pretty much in your face, just like they do with the main video player.

By displaying the videos in a larger window, you’d feel more like you are really there. And that gets you pumped up. It’s motivating. It sucks that FluentU’s quiz displays the video segments in such a small frame.

Yabla, FluentU’s main competitor, does this much better in most of its learning features.

Something for Everyone

The FluentU video database is sorted by difficulty, topics, and format.

The topics are:

• Everyday Life
• Arts and Entertainment
• Kids
• Culture
• Food & Cuisine
• Health and Lifestyle
• Politics and Society
• Science and Tech
• Humor
• Travels
• Business
• Fashion & Style

These topics are broad. You can look for more specific stuff by using the search engine.

You can even search for words or phrases you want to learn. The search engine will then return all videos in which the words or phrases appear.

This is significant.

If you read some word you don’t know yet…

Or you hear it while conversing with a native speaker…

You can look up the word in FluentU and master it through video content. 21st-century language learning, indeed.

Not all is peachy when it comes to FluentU’s video selection, though.

One disappointment, though understandable from the point of view of the FluentU team, is that there are few videos on a particular topic.

If you are a soccer fanatic and you’d like to learn French through videos about soccer, you can’t.

I find it works best to select a broad topic and then look for videos that interest you.

Since people can rate the videos, you can also sort them by popularity. This is a great new feature since not all videos are that interesting. For better video content, I recommend Yabla.

By sorting the videos this way, you can filter out the boring videos from the cool ones. BTW, you can also sort by: recommended, difficulty, date, length and title.

Speaking of the videos, did you know that FluentU can be a bit creepy?

Why?

Because…

FluentU Knows You…

Well, at least after playing with it for a while.

You see, another feature of FluentU is that it tells you how many words of a video you already know, before you’ve actually watched it!

How?

FluentU keeps track of the words you learn through the videos and flashcards.

It does so by registering what words you add to the flashcards (automatically or manually), and through the novelty that is the “Already Know” button.

By clicking it, the FluentU system learns that you already know the word. This ensures you won’t see that word featured again in either the quiz or in the Flashcards.

There’s also a “Don’t Know” button for when a question is still too hard for you.

With these features — especially the “Already Know” button — FluentU personalizes your learning experience.

Green Bars

Below each video, you’ll see a green bar indicating how many of the words in the video you already know.

The more time you spend playing around with FluentU, the more accurate it becomes.

If you’re an absolute beginner, it will be accurate from the start, obviously. You know nothing!

But even if you’re an intermediate learner of your target language, FluentU is pretty fast in displaying a reasonable estimation of the number of words you already know.

It’s a cool feature. You instantly see which videos you “should” watch.

Watching a video of which you only know 15% of the words, is a waste of time.

Your time is better spent with a video that offers more familiar words, say 75% or so. This will help you learn from context, and thus faster.

You can leave that 15% video for later!

Don’t Break the Chain

Similar to Duolingo, FluentU now also has a daily goal feature.

That means you can set how much time you want to spend each day on FluentU.

You can choose between 1, 5, 10, 30, and 50 minutes.

Of course, if you want, you can spend more time on FluentU, but these amounts serve as a daily guide.

And FluentU tracks your day streak (the number of consecutive days you meet your daily goal). If you don’t meet your daily goal, your streak ends unless you activate ‘Streak Freeze’ which costs 1000 points.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not big on the current gamification offered by language apps. It’s more a distraction than anything else for me. Yet, I appreciate this particular feature.

Starting each day with a small-time commitment goal that’s easy to hit and easy to exceed, is helpful to keep you going in good spirits.

If you show up every day, it’s hard to fail. And most days, you probably exceed your daily goal. And this helps you stack points for a rainy day when you can’t get to your daily goal and need to active ‘Streak Freeze.’

Newbie Courses

If you’re just starting to learn a new language, FluentU may not work for you.

These types of apps require that you already know some stuff about your new language.

But of course, the FluentU team wants its slice of the pie and tries to be everything to everybody. They also want to get beginner learners on board which make for the biggest market.

Thus, there are now Newbie courses and beginner playlists that consist of audios and videos that increase in difficulty.

It’s decent progress, but I still think that:

FluentU is not Really for Beginners…

Learning through videos simply doesn’t lend itself very well to absolute beginners.

FluentU is a tool that primarily caters to intermediate and advanced learners. These people need to engage the real-world version of the language, not some course’s version.

For them, FluentU is a good tool.

And it’s fluent…

That is: they keep adding new videos all the time. So you can keep learning new stuff even if you’re at an advanced level.

In the quiz feature, you simply indicate which words you already know, and rapidly, you’re learning more of what you need to learn and less of what you don’t.

A more traditional language course/app can get you to an intermediate level.

Then, to become fluent, you need to converse and use real-world materials.

FluentU is of the apps that can help you with the latter.

Android App

FluentU also has an Android app.

It largely works the same as the desktop version, and you can sync between them.

Since there are so many different smartphones, some people have reported problems with the app. But it worked flawlessly on my Samsung A03.

The FluentU team is pretty proactive when it comes to correcting bugs and improving the app. You can even shake your phone to report problems with it.

iPhone App

If you have an iPhone, you’re not out of luck either. There’s also a FluentU iPhone app. But since I don’t have an iPhone, I can’t comment on it.

How Much Does FluentU Cost?

The Basic Plan costs $29.99 a month.

You can get a 33% discount for both plans if you purchase a year-long subscription.

Though FluentU also offers a stripped-down free version, it’s pretty limited. It only gives access to free videos.

For the rest of the videos AND all the features, you have to pay a monthly fee.

So, FluentU is not free… and it couldn’t be.

Why?

Because the FluentU team keeps adding new videos all the time.

They have to transcribe, translate, and subtitle them…and make them work with the FluentU learning system.

That’s a lot of work. But it makes it unlikely you’ll ever run out of videos to watch and learn from.

Mainly because of this continuing expansion of the FluentU video database, they charge a monthly fee.

You can try FluentU and all its features free of charge for 14 days. If you cancel your account before the 14 days are over, you will not be charged.

Note: For the last few months, FluentU has been offering hefty lifetime discounts. When you visit FluentU.com, you can often get lifetime discounts of 40%. That means that as long you stay a subscriber, you’ll keep paying the same low fee.

FluentU Alternatives

Yabla

The most obvious alternative to FluentU is Yabla.

And while I used to favor FluentU over Yabla, I don’t anymore. I think Yabla, gives you more of an immersion experience than does FluentU.

Yabla’s main strength is its video database, which is more engaging than FluentU’s video content.

Yabla’s content is more aimed at adults. Its drama series are a motivational force. They keep you interested while you go about learning the videos’ content.

Yabla also keeps the videos more at the center of your learning experience, which is a big plus…

And they’ve kept improving their app by adding more and better games to it.

If you want to find out more about Yabla, read my review here.

CaptionPop

CaptionPop is another FluentU alternative.

It has a limited free version and a $10/month premium version.

It works with any YouTube video that has subtitles.

CaptionPop has been improving recently. It now has a few interesting features, though not as elaborated as FluentU or Yabla’s learning games.

You can save video segments for later study, slow down the speed of the videos, and even do flashcards with your saved video segments (premium only).

Right now, it’s not yet a serious competitor to FluentU and Yabla because of its technical limitations. Still, it’ll be interesting to see how it develops.

Also, if you can’t learn your target language of choice with either Yabla or FluentU, CaptionPop may be an option for you as it supports many more languages than those tools.