Exceeded my expectations
Exceeded my expectations. I've been using Duolingo for 555 days now (it tells you). I'm happy with Duolingo, but I felt I should try a different approach. After reading the reviews here, I decided to try Praktika. Wow. There was an initial assessment of my vocabulary. Then I had to select a tutor, from over a dozen tutors, each having personal characteristics. My first lesson went very well, at the right level. The subject matter was very focused and appropriate - meeting people. Afterwards, I kept thinking about how eerily human my tutor is. We are years beyond passing a Turing test. She explained things, gave examples, provided word game challenges, and gave calm and polite feedback on my responses. No time pressure. No worries about wrong answers (even though I still have PTSD from French class in middle school). I could also ask questions unrelated to the current lesson, and I got intelligent answers. Camila, my tutor, is everything I need in a language tutor. But it's still a bit disconcerting, because Camila is, after all, an AI construct, albeit a very good one! The next day, I wanted to review the first lesson. Thanks to a very intuitive interface, I was able to find a transcript, with hypertext. That is, I could click on a word in German, and a popup would display the definition and the pronunciation. I could also click on a speaker icon and it would read the word aloud. And, I could click on a microphone icon and it would listen to me say the word and give me a grade. Besides individual words, I could click on an icon below each paragraph in the transcript and it would display the translation of the entire paragraph. This is great! Clearly a lot of thought went into the user interface (speaking as a new user and a former software engineer). Kudos to the designers. I have not encountered any glitches or obvious deficiencies yet. I suspect I haven't discovered all the features. I'm very pleased so far. And the cost is quite reasonable. Highly recommended!