My Review of Drops Language Learning App
It’s not every day that I come across a new language learning app that I actually like, and I’ve done a lot of product reviews lately – something I kinda swore off several months ago.
What can I say, I’m being retro.
In any case, several weekends ago, I was lying in bed after an evening that may have included a couple beers, scrolling through the Apple apps store on my phone. Every once in a while I just like to browse to see if there’s anything new that I should check out. Games, organization apps, pretty weather reports, etc. This, of course, includes the odd language learning app from time to time.
After a little while scanning through various lists of boring shit I didn’t really need, my eyes land on this pretty little language app with more than a couple stars. Whatever, it’ll do, I say as I tap it.
Sure enough, the next morning I wake up after a night of drinking with a strange language learning app lying in my bed.1
Now, I’ve had one night stands with language apps before, and I figured, whatever, this one’s going to be the same as the others. Meaningless and boring by tomorrow. We’ll do some picture matching, get freaky with a bit of audio, I’ll be solicited by unwanted advertisements and then it will eventually ask me to pay for premium service to continue using.
I prefer not to pay for this stuff.
This time it was different, and I’m really glad I didn’t swipe left.
Drops is a surprisingly effective, strangely appealing language learning app for both Android and iOS that uses a system of picture/word matching (I know!).2
Each word corresponds to a simple hand-drawn image. You simply match the word to the image through a series of mini-games, not totally unlike Mindsnacks from way back in the day, before it was murdered by Apple and the apathy of its pay-to-play model.
In any case, Drops’ games can consist of everything from working out a word puzzle to popping matching word translation bubbles.
You can see a few of them here.
The Pros and Cons of Drops
When I write these, I like to outline all of the pros and cons of a given product, and then break down each aspect in a little bit more detail. So, here we go:
Pros:
- Excellent way to bulk up vocabulary
- High quality audio for clear pronunciation
- Very broad array of topics to choose from
- 5 minute per day limit makes it way more exciting than it sounds
- Free for both Android and iOS users
- Excellent for short-term travelers looking for survival terminology
- A broad selection of languages including some less-often-taught and even endangered tongues from around the world
- Separate courses dedicated specifically to learning the writing systems of several languages (Scripts).
- High quality, attractive, hand-drawn artwork for each and every card
- A generous mix of simple and uncommon vocabulary makes the app suitable for both beginners and intermediate learners.
- Skip words you already know by heart.
Cons:
- Can only be used for 5 minutes per day
- Free accounts can access all content, but they have to do it in order, starting very simply.
- Paid accounts are a bit pricey.
- Doesn’t offer much by way of speaking or writing experience and listening is limited to pronunciation, not conversation
- Limited grammar instruction
- Advertisements on free accounts3
In this case I do believe that the pros don’t simply outnumber the cons, they outweigh them.
Let’s dive a bit deeper:
Who is Drops best for?
One of the great things about this app is that it is perfectly suitable for most learners at a beginner or intermediate level. It functions primarily as a way to attain bulk vocabulary while focusing very little on grammar. This may not be ideal for advanced learners or grammar nerds, but this app was never designed to be the be-all, end-all of language learning tools. Nobody expects you to only use Drops 5 minutes a day then call it quits. Vary your tools!
This app is also fantastic for travelers looking for a quick, easy and fun way to grab some basic survival vocab without having to dedicate a ton of time to complex grammar exercises or spend a heap of cash.4
But, that’s not to say that it’s not also useful for “serious” language learners. Drops is a great way to supplement your other learning materials with an enhanced volume of words. This is a problem I often face with German. I have other resources to understand grammar – and mine is alright. I simply suffer from a sufficient lexicon to pull from – Drops is ideal for that.
Drops as a primary or secondary language learning resource
Drops is the archetype for secondary language learning tools.
I explained this a few years ago in much more detail, but to put it simply, a primary language learning resource is one that provides 3 or 4 out of my primary aspects for language learning; reading, writing, speaking and listening. Anything providing only 1 or 2 of these is a secondary resource.
Drops is very basic, and that’s okay. Being a secondary resource does not necessarily make a tool inferior to another, and in fact they can often be much higher quality than primaries, it simply refers to the scope of a program’s offerings.5
While the app does technically offer a little bit of experience with reading, writing and listening, almost all of its content is comprised of individual words and in some cases very short phrases. I give it lots of credit for its high quality audio, though.
Once again, though, the lack of speaking and intensive writing or reading doesn’t make it bad! It’s very good for such a lightweight, gratuitously satisfying program and a perfect accompaniment to your learning toolkit.
In addition to all of this, Drops has a companion app called “Scripts”. Scripts offers courses dedicated to learning several different writing systems. This app provides a modicum more writing and reading practice. Using the two apps together, assuming you are learning one of the languages that utilize these scripts, could be very beneficial.
What’s the deal with this whole 5 minutes thing?
Learn a language in 5 minutes per day? Uh, no. Sorry. This is a marketing gimmick used by many, many companies and no company selling their product actually stands by this literally, including Drops. There is no way you will ever reach fluency in anything with just 5 minutes a day of any single app.
However, my favorite aspect of Drops is that you only get 5 minutes per day to complete as much as you can. Each session is timed, so the pressure is on to get as much as you can out of it as quickly as possible.
It’s more fun than it sounds, and I think that without this particular aspect, it would be less appealing to me. They’ve gone and employed reverse psychology on users, virtually taunting us with such a tiny window of study time, and I literally cannot get enough.
I don’t think this was strictly speaking their intent, but if it keeps you motivated, who cares?
Paid users can unlock unlimited access. However, I’m a bit mixed on this because the time constraint is kind of what makes it special for me.
Drops’ offerings
For such a straightforward app, Drops packs a pretty sweet array of content from a lot of languages into easily digested, bite sized packages. The language selection is pretty great, and features a few gems.
They have:
- English (Both US and UK)6
- Arabic
- Portuguese (European and Brazilian).
- Chinese (Cantonese)
- Chinese (Mandarin)
- Spanish (European and Latin American)
- Danish
- Dutch
- Esperanto
- French
- German
- Hawaiian
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Icelandic
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Maori
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Russian
- Samoan
- Swedish
- Tagalog
- Thai
- Turkish
- Vietnamese
With a selection like that, especially considering the inclusion of a few endangered and less common languages, these offerings are pretty rock solid.
In addition to these languages, Drops also provides courses specifically for learning various writing systems via its companion app Scripts. Those offered include:
- Cyrillic (Russian)
- Latin (English)
- Devanagari (Hindi)
- Kana (Japanese)
- Hanza (Chinese)
- Hangul (Korean)
These are really great if you also happen to be pursuing one of these languages from scratch. Many apps, such as Duolingo, will just throw you right into the mix without teaching you a new script, which sets you up for a bit of failure at first.
Looking forward to Arabic!
Topics covered
I am very happy with the broad spectrum of language topics one can choose from with Drops. Many apps, such as Memrise and Duolingo, (mostly) require you to complete lessons in a certain order, so you have to finish your animals before you can learn your colors and shapes. It can be frustrating for those of us who may already know our beasts to have to slog through them word by word, over and over, just to get to the shapes and colors we didn’t know yet.
Drops lets you choose what you want to do relatively freely.
New users will start with the left-most category, which offers probably around 20 words. You can skip the ones you are confident you already know, which is nice for more advanced learners who don’t want to repeat “beer”, “wine” and “coffee” over and over. Both beginner and intermediate modes are available as well.
Once you finish a section, it unlocks the next level to the right. You can’t tell from the image, but there are between something like 10 and 17 levels per section. There are dozens and dozens total, so it’s a lot of words. Something like 2,500ish, I think.
Perhaps most importantly, Drops recently released a new section, “Travel Talk”, which you can see above. It comes completely unlocked even to free users, and covers a very wide range of survival vocabulary. It seems to be designed specifically for travelers, people visiting for business, or others who don’t necessarily seek to commit to long-term study or fluency in another language. It is rare that an app or program pays heed to this particular need and fills that role so elegantly.
Artwork and app design
Each and every word or phrase is paired with a hand-drawn image in Drops’ style. It’s a minimalist but quirky style that manages to put a face to a lot of words you might not think could be illustrated, so they get tons of points for that.
The only issues I encountered were images that were too similar due to similar words in a topic. For instance, some of the weather words might cause a bit of confusion. You might have one for snow and one for snowflake, or one for rain and one for storm. The worst I’ve come across are the different ticket types for public transportation. Many of the images look very similar.
Ultimately, this issue is quite rare and nothing to get too worked up about.
Otherwise, the app is small in size, lightweight on your device, and loads smoothly.
The deal with Premium
Full disclosure – I am not a premium user. I will be listing what features I can, but I do not have much first-hand experience with them. I may change this space later if I ever do upgrade.
If you upgrade to the premium version, you will be able to unlock all levels of each section, giving you a lot of flexibility when it comes to choosing topics you’re interested in. You will also no longer be confined to simply 5 minutes per day – premium users can use the app to their hearts’ content.
It also features a dedicated bank for the words you struggle with, unlocks a listening game designed to help with comprehension, it’s advertisement free, and a offers a few other minor perks.
The downside? It costs $9.99 per month and $69 per year with a lifetime purchase of around $160. It does seem to go on sale fairly frequently, though. Unfortunately, this was enough to scare me away, but the free version is still great.
Gamification
One of this app’s central points is making language learning fun. I’ve long had mixed feelings about the gamification of language learning apps. Generally I support it, but also believe that it can become a bit of a crutch among users who become more focused on beating the game than on actual retention.
I have not experienced this problem with Drops, so that’s nice.
As a user progresses, they will be met with a variety of different “mini-game” type activities, some of which are more fun than others.
As you gradually master each word in a lesson, a progress bar (seen on the bottom right in the image above) fills. You finish the lesson when it is full, but it can always be reviewed later.
Much like its peers Duolingo and Memrise, Drops has a daily streak counter, but does not have a leaderboard at this time or the ability to let you follow friends.
Conclusion
Drops is a satisfying little addition to your mobile collection of language learning tools and the pros very much outweigh the very limited number of cons. There’s basically no reason for you not to use the free version of this app.
Again, I myself have not used the premium version, so I really cannot speak to its efficacy. To me, at first glance I have a hard time justifying the price. That may change in the future as these deals continue to fluctuate, but unless someone drops a pot of gold at my feet it is unlikely that this will change any time soon. Besides, the 5 minute timer is part of what makes it so much fun!
It’s important to remember that when it comes to language learning apps – especially freebies – that there is no obligation to be monogamous. In fact, using multiple apps is probably the best way to go, especially when one of them only works for the duration of your coffee break.
The app enjoys a generally very high rating on both the Google Play store as well as Apple’s store of around 4.7. They enjoy around 1.5 million monthly users and have won a number of edtech and related awards.
Drops is available for free here on both the Google Play and Apple Store. You have nothing to lose other than a few megabytes of phone space.
Have you used Drops yet? Leave a comment about your thoughts.
Apex-editor of Languages Around the Globe, collector of linguists, regaler of history, accidental emmigrant, serial dork and English language mercenary and solutions fabricator. Potentially a necromancer. All typos are my own.
