If you already have a tutor, most language apps are the wrong tool

I've watched this go wrong the same way for years. Someone books a weekly hour with an italki tutor, has a genuinely good lesson, and then downloads Duolingo because it seems like the responsible thing to do between sessions.

Six weeks later they've got a 42-day streak and they still can't produce the subjunctive their tutor drilled in week 2.

Both things were happening. They just weren't happening to each other.

The one question worth asking

Every roundup on this query grades apps on features, price and how fun the lessons are. For a tutored learner all of that is beside the point, because you already have the expensive part.

Here's the only test I'd apply: does this app do anything with the material from my lesson?

Whether it teaches Spanish well is a question for someone with no teacher. You have one. Your problem is the 6 days between seeing them.

That test cuts the field hard. Most of the apps on any "best language apps" list are course apps: fixed syllabus, their content, their order. They fail the test by design, and a few of them are still worth running for reasons I'll get to.

Your tutor may already have solved this

Before any of the apps, the honest version of this page has to start here.

A tutor who assigns homework and then actually checks it at the start of the next lesson has already closed most of the gap every app on this page sells against. The homework makes you produce the material instead of reading it, and the check creates a real deadline. The material is also the right material, which is the thing no course app can offer.

If that describes your lessons, do the homework and close this tab. I'd rather say that than pretend a subscription improves a system that's working.

The gap that's left is timing, and it's narrower than app marketing suggests. Homework tends to get done in one sitting, usually the night before.

Cepeda and colleagues put numbers on the timing in 2008. Across more than 1,350 people, the gap that produced the best retention was about 20 to 40% of a 1-week test delay. On a 7-day lesson cycle that points at a first review 1 or 2 days after you walk out, though a week sits at the very short end of what they actually tested, so read it as a direction rather than a prescription.

So I'd split the homework across 3 short sittings instead of one. That's my number, not theirs, and it costs nothing.

Plenty of tutors don't set homework, or set it and never look at it again. That's when the week goes quiet, and that's the reader the rest of this page is for. The full routine is in what to do after a language lesson.

Pimsleur: the car and the walk

Pimsleur fails my test and I'd still recommend it to a lot of tutored learners, because it does one job nothing else on this list does well.

It's audio-first. You can run it driving, walking the dog, or doing dishes, with no screen and no hands. If you commute, that's found time that was never going to go to your lesson notes anyway, so it isn't competing with anything.

The method also has real spaced-repetition ancestry, which is worth conceding plainly. Pimsleur's four named principles are anticipation, graduated interval recall, core vocabulary and organic learning. Graduated interval recall means learners "are reminded of new words at gradually increasing intervals," which is the same idea a modern scheduler automates. Pimsleur was doing it on tape decades before the apps.

Two tiers exist, Premium for one language and All Access for all 50+ languages, both with a 7-day free trial. Pimsleur's own subscriptions page publishes no dollar figure, but its blog says both cost "around $20 per month," and that's the only first-party number I'd quote.

The limit is fixed content. When your tutor corrects the way you're using por and para, Pimsleur has no idea that happened and never will.

Babbel: grammar between lessons

Babbel is the other genuine concession, for a different job: structured grammar you keep getting wrong.

Say your tutor has flagged the imperfect versus the preterite 3 lessons running. They can explain it again, but explaining it a fourth time is an expensive use of an hour with a native speaker. Babbel has a course unit on exactly that, lessons "most take around 10-15 minutes," and it'll walk you through it as many times as you need without checking a clock or charging by the hour.

Babbel's Review feature does use spaced repetition, with vocabulary from completed lessons added automatically and sessions scheduled for you. Babbel doesn't publish the interval ladder, so I can't tell you how it compares to FSRS, and anyone who tells you they can is guessing.

On price, Babbel offers 1, 3, 6 and 12-month plans plus lifetime. The annual works out around $9 a month, though I'd take that with salt: the figure comes from Babbel's own coupon page, so it's a discounted rate rather than a standing one, and Babbel discounts constantly.

One thing worth knowing if you found Babbel while shopping for lessons: Babbel Live is no longer available to individual consumers. If you want live teaching, that's italki, Preply or a local tutor.

Duolingo: a hobby that happens to be in Spanish

Duolingo is the app tutored learners actually download, and it's the one with the weakest case.

Let me be fair first, because a lot of pages on this query are stale about Duolingo and stale is how you lose an argument. Duolingo published and open-sourced a real spaced repetition scheduler: half-life regression, in Settles and Meeder's ACL 2016 paper. That's peer-reviewed work, which is more than most competitors on this list can claim. And the old line that Duolingo only gets you to A2 is now out of date, since on 22 April 2026 Duolingo said its Spanish course teaches content through CEFR B2, across 9 courses. That's a claim about what the course contains rather than about learner outcomes, but repeating the A2 line in 2026 is just wrong.

It's also genuinely free. The core course is there, ad-supported, gated by Energy, which replaced hearts as the free-tier limiter. Super Duolingo removes that, with a 14-day free trial on the US listing and App Store prices running from $9.99 to $119.99 depending on term and plan.

Duolingo is built to be your whole course, which is exactly what you don't need. It has no mechanism for learning that your tutor spent 20 minutes on se me olvidó, so it can't put that back in front of you on Thursday.

The streak is the sharper issue. It's very good at making you show up, and the 15 minutes it collects each night are the 15 minutes your lesson material needed. Doing Duolingo feels like language study, so the itch gets scratched and the notebook stays shut.

If you enjoy it, keep it. Just put it in the same drawer as a crossword, and don't let it be the reason you skipped the review.

Quizlet: fast to fill, nothing due

Quizlet at least passes my test in principle. You type your lesson vocabulary in, and it's your material.

What's missing is the schedule. A full-text scan of all 164 English articles in Quizlet's help centre returns zero hits for "spaced repetition", "Memory Score", "scheduled review" or "forgetting curve". Anyone can re-run that search and get the same result. Learn is described as "built on learning science principles and powered by machine learning" with a "personalized study path," which names no algorithm and no intervals.

What ships instead is Progress, and it's worth understanding precisely: it buckets terms by how often you got them right (Not Studied, Still Learning, Mastered) with no time dimension at all. No due dates, no next-review calculation. You decide when to come back.

For a tutored learner that's the wrong shape, because deciding when to come back is the exact task that fails. By week 3 you've got 3 lessons of vocabulary in one place and nothing tells you which 9 items are about to go.

Worth conceding: Learn and Test are both paid for individuals, but students in a teacher-created class get unlimited ad-free Learn and Test on sets added to that class page. If your tutor runs a Quizlet class, that's real and it's free. Quizlet's audio is also free in Flashcards mode, though it's machine text-to-speech rather than native recordings, and Quizlet warns some languages have no TTS at all.

Anki: the strongest free answer

Anki is the honest recommendation for most tutored learners, and I'd rather send you there than oversell what I've built.

It ships no language content of its own. For anyone else that's the weakness; for you it's the whole point. An empty scheduler is what you want when the content should come from your lessons.

Building the cards yourself has its own effect, too. Slamecka and Graf named the generation effect in 1978: material you generate is remembered better than the same material read. Typing up your lesson items is itself study.

One correction to something you'll read everywhere. Anki's default scheduler is SM-2, the 1987 SuperMemo algorithm, not FSRS. FSRS has been built in since Anki 23.10 in October 2023, and it's excellent, but you enable it yourself at the bottom of the deck options page. SEO blogs claiming FSRS became the default in 23.10 are wrong, and it matters here: if you install Anki expecting a modern scheduler and never touch the settings, you're running a 1987 formula.

Turn it on and you get FSRS-6, which fits 21 parameters to your own review history and lets you set a desired retention target (the default is 90%). More on the mechanics in the FSRS post.

Cost: desktop is free on Windows, macOS and Linux, AnkiDroid is free, and AnkiWeb sync is free. AnkiMobile on iOS is US$24.99 one time, which funds development. Regional prices differ.

The failure mode is specific. Card-making happens after the lesson, when you're tired, and a good card takes a couple of minutes to write. Skip 2 weeks and the backlog is what kills it. I've written up the manual system and where it breaks in Verbamor vs notes and Anki.

Verbamor, what it costs, and who shouldn't buy it

Verbamor exists for one narrow case: you keep paying for lessons and keep losing them, and you've already proved to yourself you won't build the cards by hand.

It records the lesson and pulls out the words and phrases you got wrong. Those become the cards, scheduled with FSRS so each one comes back near the day it would have gone. The material is your tutor's material. That's the entire pitch.

Now the part I'd want to read if I were you, and the part Anki wins on. Anki publishes a scheduler you can inspect: FSRS-6, 21 parameters, a 90% retention default. I can tell you Verbamor runs FSRS too, and there my evidence stops. I have no retention number of my own to show you. Verbamor hasn't been in enough hands for long enough to produce one that would mean anything, and a percentage invented for a comparison page is worth less than nothing.

So hold me to the bar I set below instead of a statistic. Everything measured on this page was measured by Karpicke, Cepeda and Slamecka, and it's evidence that retrieval and spacing work, not proof that my app executes them well. Judge that part on the trial.

Since I've published everyone else's prices, here's mine. Explorer is $19.99 a month. Native is $129.99 a year, which works out at about $10.83 a month, and the 7-day free trial is on that annual plan. Prices are USD and the App Store converts regionally.

The comparison I'd actually make is against the thing you're already buying. A full hour on italki commonly lands somewhere in the $10 to $30 range, though tutors set their own rates and trial lessons run cheaper, so a month of Verbamor costs roughly what one lesson costs. That's the bar I'd hold it to: if it doesn't save you at least one lesson's worth of material a year, it isn't worth the money, and you should cancel it.

The evidence underneath it is the same evidence I'd cite for doing this on paper. Karpicke and Roediger had students learn 40 Swahili-English pairs and then varied what happened after the first correct answer. Items that kept being tested came back at about 80% a week later. Items that were only restudied came back at about 36%.

Karpicke & Roediger 2008 · Swahili vocabulary, one week later

0%

recalled when items kept being tested after the first correct answer

0%

recalled when items were only restudied after the first correct answer

That last detail is the uncomfortable one. The students couldn't feel which method was working, which is why "I'll just review my notes, it feels fine" survives contact with reality for so long.

Two things I won't claim. Verbamor won't make you fluent, and it does nothing about the fact that speaking is frightening, which is a separate problem with its own research and its own post on speaking anxiety. It also won't move you off an intermediate plateau on its own, because plateaus are usually about the kind of input you're getting rather than how many words you've retained.

Where each one lands

Nothing here is a ranking, because the right answer depends on a fact about you rather than a fact about the apps: whether the manual version survives past week 3.

Questions people actually ask

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Sources

Every load-bearing claim Verbamor makes is traced to its paper on the research page. Prices were checked on 11 August 2026 and change often, so verify before you buy.