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Lokas — Learn Spanish 🇪🇸💃 vocabulary & conjugation, the nerd way 🤓
Lokas is an iOS app that teaches you the most frequent Spanish words and makes you review them at specific time intervals. It also teaches conjugation!
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Tom Pryor
I’m really enjoying this, thank you @kevinquisquater
I love the transparency vs Duolingo.
And that it feels more useful
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@tom_pryor Awesome to hear Tom, thank you!
May I ask what you mean by "transparency"?
Hey Product Hunters! 👋
I’ve been working on Lokas in my spare time for 3 years while learning iOS development, and 2 weeks ago I quit my job to try and become an indie iOS developer 😱. So I think it’s time to show it to the community! 👨💻
💡 Idea
I live in Barcelona, and studying Spanish vocabulary requires a lot of motivation. So I decided to build a vocabulary-learning tool myself, that would use spaced-repetition. Since I recently realized that I still had difficulties conjugating verbs after 2 years in Spain 🇪🇸, I also added that to the app!
🤔 What sets Lokas apart?
There are tons of great language apps out there, so here are maybe a few good aspects:
1. It’s not easy. This sounds like a flaw, but it is actually great for anyone that doesn’t need to be babysitted with images to click or simplified keyboards: you have to translate the word perfectly, without any help, using the normal keyboard, and you can’t forget an accent or type “un” instead of “una“ -word gender is important in Spanish.
2. It focuses on what really matters: about 2,000 words make 80% of all texts, so the lists I created contain the most frequent words. Yes, it is less fun to learn how to translate “however” rather than “the giraffe” 🦒, but you will rarely see the latter in newspaper articles or books.
3. Oh and also, I spent hours on those color gradients 😎
😇 What do I get for free?
The app is free and everyone can learn all vocabulary lists, and review them with the spaced-repetition algorithm.
Those who can afford to upgrade to Pro (9$) and support my indie dev challenge get access to the conjugation feature (and more soon).
👨💻 What’s next?
Over the next few weeks, I’m gonna add the possibility to create your own lists, add many more tenses (past, future, conditional, subjonctive…), add vocabulary lists and much more. I’ve got tons of ideas but am super interested in yours!
Thank you PH!
Kevin
PS: To anticipate the dreaded question, it is unfortunately not available on Android. As a solo developer with limited time, I have to focus on one platform at the moment.
@kevinquisquater As someone who as Duolingo, Memrise & Ananas installed on my S8, I would have loved trying out this one. I hope it'll be a success and you'll port it to Android ;) Best!
@tgerin Thank you Thibaud, you’d have been the perfect tester for Lokas! Hope I’ll have the resources to port to Android one day, but I have a long way to go to try and be successful on iOS first.
Hey, Kevin! Great app, really like UI and the idea. I wanted to learn Spanish from a long time. Please tell if you are going to release the app for 9 iOS (not only 10 iOS)?
@anna_shamkova Hi Anna! Thank you so much for your kind words! You will not like this answer but: for technical reasons, I can't add support for iOS 9. There are now less than 10% of users on iOS 9 (which I'll admit is still a lot), and there are a few things that would not work and would require too much work on my side. And iOS 12 is coming in a few months, I will probably have to focus on that to support new users.
Really sorry about that... may I ask what device do you use?
@kevinquisquater just found this but now it's showing that the app is not in the US app store. Is this app still available and in which App Store geographies?
@matejmarjanovic Hi Matej, I removed it from sales. It was buggy and lacked content. Will relaunch soon as a new app, focusing on conjugation
Thanks for this - will check it out! I've done a bunch of Duolingo and spent more time in Mexico to learn my girlfriends native language. Hoping this can help me pull through the final stretch 😅
@artofbryce Thank you Bryce! Good luck and let me know if this one is even remotely as useful as Duolinguo! Be careful: a few words will be different in Mexico. But I suspect it will only be a few % of the hundreds of words, so that will be super easy to correct once you hear them. Good luck with your Spanish learning!
@jaybaybay_18 Thank you Josh! I would suggest you not to start at the first list, but with the 10th list, etc. You will then study words that are less frequent. There are not enough lists yet but I keep adding new ones frequently. Good luck with brushing up your Spanish!
Great app. That the way that I like learning a language. Simple, but effective. I only miss the translation of the example sentence. It’s helpful if you put the example sentence In Spanish bellow the sentence in English without the word we’re trying to learn. If the English sentence for the word time (vez) is “It’s my first time here”, you can put “es mi primera _____ aquí” bellow that. I think it is a good way to learn sentences and not only words. Also, I would love to use your app to learning English. Please think about make it available in other language or let us make our own flashcards. Congrats!!!
@luis_eduardo_quirino_sobreira Hi Luís! Thank you so much for your comment and for trying out the app, I am super glad to hear that it fits how you like to learn.
- Translation of Spanish sentence: this is one of the most requested features so far, and it came as a surprise to me! To answer that need, I will either do what you suggested (but it would take a lot of place on the screen -would the English sentence still be needed, in your opinion?), or create a new type of exercise, where you would be shown a sentence with a missing word (from the words you have learned) like in your example, and you would have to find the word. After teaching you to translate the word, this would train your brain to come up with the word in real-life sentences. May I ask you if that sounds like a feature you would use?
- Other languages: it is definitely on the list, thank you! I will first check if this can become a viable business, and if that is the case and I achieve ramen-profitability, I will be able to focus full-time on it and start adding other languages. In the meantime, I will focus on only one pair of languages and will use it to perfect the experience.
- Create your own flashcard: very very happy to hear that you would use that feature. I've wanted to implement it into the app since the beginning but was waiting on user feedback to make sure they would want this as well. A few people have confirmed that they would, so I'll be working on it soon!
Thanks a lot again Luís! Un saludo :-)
Hey there,
Really digging this app! Already used it for the last two days.
What I am still missing though is some kind of list with all the words I already know.
Cheers
Ferdi
@herrids Hi Ferdi, thank you!
Interesting feedback, and just to make sure I understand correctly: would you like to be able to see a list of the words you have finished learning? If so, what would you need to see: the word in English and its translation, or just the word in English? Thank you
@kevinquisquater Hi Kevin, the Word in English and its translation. Just in english would probably not be sufficient.
@herrids Sounds good, I will investigate that idea! I had discussed it with a friend that was beta testing, so it has been asked before. Thank you Ferdi
Kevin - my fiancé is from Barcelona and we're getting married there this September. Needless to say, I'm trying to be as fluent as possible by the end of the summer. Just downloaded the app so excited to check it out. Heading to Barcelona in two weekends in case you're around from an Estrella!
@dyroffb Hi Brooks! Congratulations on getting married!!! Super happy that I might play a very small role in helping you becoming fluent by then. Message me if there is anything missing in that app to approach that goal and I'll work on it. And sure, let's meet once you'll be here!
@artem_baryliuk Hi Artem! I agree, that it would be nice :-) I addressed this point in my first comment but: I'm working alone on this, with limited time and resources, so I have to focus on one platform. But there are tons of great apps on Android to learn Spanish so let me know if you need any suggestions! Thank you
