Learning a language to travel: apps, courses and methods compared

Learning a language to travel doesn't mean becoming bilingual: it means getting to the point of asking for directions, understanding a menu, exchanging a couple of sentences with the person who opens their door to you. For that concrete goal the apps are well worth it, provided you choose them according to how you study and how much time you have before leaving. Here's a comparison based on how they really work, with genuine merits and limits.

The all-rounder apps

**Duolingo** is the most obvious starting point: free, over 40 languages, very short lessons and game-like mechanics that help build a daily habit. Its limit is structural: it stays at recognition exercises and basic vocabulary, and to anyone who already has some grounding the exercises feel trivial. It's a great spark, not a finish line. The Super plan costs around 12-13 euros a month.

**Babbel** is the "serious" alternative: courses designed by linguists, mapped to the CEFR levels from A1 to B2, lessons of 10-15 minutes centred on real-life dialogues and with solid attention to grammar and pronunciation. On the other hand it's essentially a digital textbook: a linear path, little spontaneous conversation practice, and beyond the intermediate level you feel stuck. It costs around 13-15 euros a month. If you like knowing "what comes next", it's the right choice.

**Busuu** focuses on the four skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) and has a card the others don't: you can record your exercises and have them corrected by native speakers in the community. That's its strength and, at the same time, its limit, because without that feedback the experience is less coherent. It covers 14 languages, the main ones, at around 14 euros a month.

Speaking before you leave

If the goal is to **speak** before leaving, switch to a different family of tools. **Pimsleur** is all audio: lessons that simulate real conversations and force you to answer out loud, recalling words and phrases under pressure. It has a mode designed for the car, perfect to use on the commute in the weeks before the trip. It costs around 15 dollars a month and gives little space to grammar and writing: it's a deliberately lopsided choice, weighted towards the spoken word.

**MosaLingua** works on spaced repetition (the flashcards come back to you just before you're about to forget them) and organises everything by practical context: "at the restaurant", "at the doctor's", a "Tourism" section with travel vocabulary. No abstract rules, but ready-to-use phrases, with voice recording so you can compare yourself with the native speaker. Good value for money, around 10 dollars a month or 60 a year. **Memrise** is the cheapest (5-8 dollars a month) and the strongest on memorising colloquial vocabulary, with the "Learning With Locals" videos filmed with real people; conversation, however, remains its weak point, even with the built-in chatbot.

The apps, on their own, rarely lead to speaking fluently. The advice that emerges from almost all the reviews is to combine two of them — one structured and one conversational — and to add, in the final weeks, lessons with a **live tutor** on platforms like italki, where you pay per lesson and choose a native speaker. Half an hour of real conversation a week is worth more than hours of passive exercises.

Language and destination

Which language you need matters too. For **Spanish** the apps are extremely rich and the language opens up half the world: from the less-trodden Spain — the earth-coloured village of Albarracín or Siurana on the Priorat — all the way to the Mexico of Plaza de Romita. For **Portuguese**, useful among the villages of the Alentejo like Mértola or among the rocks of Monsanto, a few phrases are enough to change the welcome. **French** pays off immediately in the villages of the South, from Conques to Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, just as **German** does in the quiet quarters of Berlin like the Heckmann-Höfe.

For the "difficult" languages the approach changes: focus on the minimum vocabulary and on pronunciation. **Greek** helps you even just to read a sign at Monemvasia or among the mills of Dimitsana; **Japanese**, even at a basic level, makes a lane like Kagurazaka or the silence of Otagi Nenbutsu-ji in Kyoto gentler. The same goes for Czech at Nový Svět, Korean at the Seonyudo Park in Seoul, Thai in workshops like Ban Bu, Arabic in the medinas like that of Le Jardin Secret in Marrakech, Turkish among the churches of Fener in Istanbul.

The final rule is simple: choose a method you can manage to use every day, ten minutes, plus a small dose of real conversation. In the places off the main flows, where English can't be taken for granted, saying "good morning" and "thank you" in the local language isn't a detail: it's the key that opens doors.