Pricing: 3 months (€33.60), 6 months (€51.66), or one year (€72.36)

Positives

Appropriate for visual learners
Unique, non-linear approach for learning
Great price for what is offered

Negatives

Lack of feedback on pronunciation
Needs to be installed locally

Summary

A unique course program (computer or mobile) for Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian with hundreds of high quality lessons and exercises.

Unfortunately, it must be downloaded and installed.

Try Ouino

Alternatives

The Ouino platform was specifically designed to help people who are serious about learning a language and get to grips with how their target language works.

Instead of being like playing a game, Ouino focuses on the core elements required to improve.

This review contains the pros and cons of Ouino, and how it works.

You can also select the language you’re learning to learn more about each course:

Ouino features

Ouino has four main languages — Spanish, German, Italian, French and Portuguese.

It works in a non-linear way, allowing language learners to study different lessons in the order they choose.

Ouino also features a calendar and a ‘progress and achievements’ module to monitor your progress.

Progress and achievements module

The progress and achievements section of Ouino is very handy. Here’s why.

Although many platforms let you track your progress within the platform you’re using, Ouino goes beyond this.

It lets you add a badge to your calendar that helps you monitor when you’ve studied outside of the app in the real world.

Pronunciation module

I found the pronunciation module of Ouino very useful.

Even though I’m an advanced Spanish student, I sometimes slip into English pronunciation.

Whereas most apps just have voice recognition and recording tool, Ouino lets you compare your pronunciation with a native speaker.

You’ll have the chance to understand how to pronounce the word as there are hints written in English to help you with this.

Re-recording is possible, so if you get the pronunciation wrong, or would like to practice a word more frequently, you’ll have that option too.

I played around with the pronunciation module and found the sentence length and difficulty option helpful too.

It lets you select the length of the sentence and practice reading and recording them out loud.

Verbs and conjugation module

What I liked about the verbs and conjugation module is how it uses a visual strategy to help you retain information.

Ouino’s ‘key verbs’ focuses on the essential verbs that are used frequently in your target language. I’d recommend the ‘key verbs’ to complete beginners.

Then, the ‘verb endings’ let you begin conjugating verbs by placing the verb endings onto the stems of verbs.

It is presented like a jigsaw puzzle, which helped me to remember them.

If you’ve got an exam coming up, the ‘express verbs’ and ‘individual verbs’ categories are ideal for this.

The ‘express verbs’ category will introduce you to six verbs per lesson to help you practice verbs in a particular tense. On the other hand, the ‘individual verbs’ category works differently, homing in on one verb and helping you to learn it in different tenses.

I found this category particularly useful for irregular Spanish verbs — which can be a bit challenging.

Overall, Ouino’s a quality software package but there are some excellent alternatives which I prefer (e.g. Rocket Languages).

For others, see the resources page.

Have you used Ouino before?

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