Mondly Review

Tuesday, March 28th

2023 Italian Lesson Reviews

Mondly

• Game-like platform makes it fun to practice Italian
• Free to create an account (no credit card needed)
• Affordable paid plans give you access to all features
• Novel options like augmented reality and chatbot
• Speech recognition activities are part of the Italian lessons

Some people want to learn Italian with a fun app that lets them get bite-sized chunks of practice in, wherever and whenever. Mondly can do that for you! Available as both an app and a desktop platform, this program gives you points for every lesson you complete, shows you your local and global rank against other learners, and motivates you to keep up the momentum in your studies.

A few basic features with a free account

To get a feel for the Mondly service, create a free account. You'll have to indicate if you're a beginning, intermediate, or advanced student of Italian. From there, you can try out the "Hello" starter lesson, one chatbot conversation, and the daily featured lesson. It's not much, but it will at least let you see how Italian lessons are taught by topic and how the program works.

Not much direct grammar instruction

When you finish the lesson, you can click on Redo for more practice or on the blue box to the right, where you'll get a lesson recap and maybe an explanation of the grammar that was behind the scenes of what you learned. That's the only place you'll find direct grammatical explanations: in general, Mondly expects that you'll pick up on the grammar more intuitively, without any formal instruction. Maybe, maybe not: depends on how you learn best and on what other Italian resources you're using, if any.

Subscribe and access more features, like augmented reality chats

Mondly has much more to offer once you become a subscriber. For instance, the chatbot feature that lets you practice back-and-forth conversations is only available as part of the intro lesson until you pay for a Mondly membership. Ditto that for the augmented reality capability, which lets you superimpose a digitized "person "onto the world around you and use that to interact with and practice your Italian.

Costs

• $9.99/month for 1 language
• $47.99/year for 1 language
• $89.99 one-time payment for lifetime access to all languages

Affordable - if variable - pricing

Is it worth the money? Mondly is pretty affordable, especially compared with other Italian lessons we evaluated. However, what you'll actually pay depends on Mondly's whims of the moment. No exaggeration: we found different pricing every time we visited over the course of a few weeks. More often than not, the "regular" price is $9.99/month, $47.99/year, or $89.99 for lifetime access to all of Mondly's 30+ languages. (It may even be as high as 41 languages, but again, we found differing information throughout the site.) Still, to pay under $90 and get lessons in Italian, Portuguese, Russian and dozens more languages is unbeatable.

Can't get your money back

Downside? There's no refund policy here. So, if you bite the bullet and pay for that lifetime access and decide you really need something different, you're out of luck. All the more reason to get Mondly's free account set up and try absolutely everything they offer before deciding to upgrade to a paid membership, wouldn't you say?

Not bad, but not awesome either

Among language apps for taking Italian lessons, Mondly is decent. It's a solid way to get daily practice, especially if ranking on a leaderboard makes the difference between "I don't feel like studying" and "I just need a few more points to beat that guy" . We'd prefer to see a more extensive free trial, so that more advanced learners can see if Mondly offers anything for them, or at least a satisfaction guarantee that lets people get a refund. For all of those reasons, Mondly earns a rating that puts them in "good but not great" territory.