15 English Learning Apps Worth Installing, Picked by Your Weakest Skill

You open the app store, search "learn English," and get back a few hundred results that all look identical: same round icons, same promise of speaking fluently after three months. You install three of them. First week, you open all three. Second week, just one. By next month your phone screen has three more icons nobody touches anymore.

That's rarely the app's fault. Most of the apps on the list below are decent and used by plenty of real people. The problem is you installed them in order of popularity instead of in order of what you're actually missing. Someone with weak listening who downloads a verb-conjugation app can study as hard as they like and their listening will still be weak — the only difference is now they can conjugate verbs.

So this list is organized by skill, not by fame. Every app has been checked to make sure it's still alive and still updated this year, and every entry has one line that states plainly where it's weak, so you know what you're trading off. Before you read on, answer one question: listening, speaking, vocabulary, or grammar — which one is holding you back the most right now? Pick one, then jump straight to that section.

• Quick-pick table of 15 apps
• Four apps for listening
• Two apps for speaking and pronunciation
• Five apps for vocabulary
• Two apps for grammar and writing
• Two all-in-one apps with a learning path
• What to use if you want completely free
• How to pick correctly for your situation
• Frequently asked questions

Quick-pick table of 15 apps

If you only have ten seconds, read this table and download exactly one thing. The "free" column describes the shape of the plan, not the price, since price changes with promotions and by region.

Name	Strongest at	Best for	Free?
WELE	Dictation practice with real podcasts	People who can catch individual words but lose whole sentences	Free tier available
BBC Learning English	Short listening lessons, released on a steady schedule	People who want real content and are solid from intermediate level up	Free
LearnEnglish Podcasts	Podcasts with a clickable audio script, adjustable speed	People who like following a long series	Free, with a paid ad-free version
Cake	Short sentences cut from real videos, with Vietnamese translation	Beginners who want sentences they can use right away	Free
ELSA Speak	Scores pronunciation down to individual sounds within a word	People who mispronounce things without knowing where they go wrong	Free tier, paid to unlock everything
HelloTalk	Texting and calling with native speakers	People who need real conversation, not a script	Most features free
Anki	Reviewing right before you're about to forget	People willing to build their own deck of cards	Free on Android and computer, one-time payment on iOS
MochiVocab	Vocabulary with a built-in path, Vietnamese interface	People who want a ready-made word set to start studying right away	Free tier, paid to unlock everything
Quizlet	Community's ready-made card sets	Students reviewing for class	Free tier, Learn mode is in the paid plan
TFlat	Offline English-Vietnamese lookup, image translation, screen translation	People who need quick lookups in Vietnamese	Free, with a VIP plan
Memrise	Hearing words in clips of native speakers actually talking	People tired of studying words off blank flashcards	Free tier, paid to unlock everything
LearnEnglish Grammar	Grammar exercises split across four levels	People who only remember a rule after doing exercises with it	Free, with extra question packs for purchase
Grammarly	Catches mistakes while you're writing	People writing emails and reports in English	Free tier available
Duolingo	Keeps you touching English every day	Beginners, people who tend to quit halfway	Free with ads
Busuu	CEFR-based path, corrections from native speakers	People who want structured study and to know where they stand	Free tier, paid to unlock everything

Four apps for listening

Listening is the skill Vietnamese learners study the longest and improve at the slowest, because there's no trick to it. You can't guess your way through it the way you can with reading, and you can't just pick easier words the way you can with speaking. The four apps below attack listening in four different ways, and you should choose based on your current level, not on whichever one looks the fanciest.

WELE, for people who catch individual words but lose whole sentences

WELE is a dictation platform: you listen to a podcast clip and type out exactly what you hear, and the system grades it word by word and points out where you missed something. The library has more than 800 listening pieces with transcripts, sorted by topic and difficulty, and the words you get wrong come back in review using spaced repetition instead of just disappearing. What it addresses is the gap between "getting the general idea" and "hearing every single word clearly" — a gap passive listening never touches.

What WELE doesn't do: it's not a grammar course, and it's not a pronunciation coach. If you need someone to correct how you produce individual sounds, or a grammar path starting from zero, look elsewhere in this article. There's a concrete five-step method for doing dictation without burning out, and you can try it right away in the dictation practice section or preview the podcast library first before deciding.

BBC Learning English

This is the longest-running free app on the list and it still puts out new lessons regularly. Inside you'll find familiar series like 6 Minute English, The English We Speak, News Review, plus groups of lessons on grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, and this year BBC added a section for lower-level learners as well as unscripted everyday conversation. All the audio can be downloaded, so listening offline during your commute works fine too.

The weak point is that the app gives you content but doesn't push you to actually practice. You could listen to thirty episodes and still not improve much if you're just listening passively. The right way to use it is to pick one episode, listen, then do one more active pass through it.

LearnEnglish Podcasts by British Council

If you like listening to a series with characters and a plot, this app is easier to get into than the news. Its best feature is the interactive audio script: you click the exact sentence you missed to hear just that sentence again, and you can adjust playback speed without the voice getting warped. The app downloads for free, with a paid version to remove ads.

Limitations to know upfront: most of the content targets intermediate level, the library isn't expanded regularly anymore, and complete beginners will find the pace a bit fast. For beginners, the apps for absolute beginners roundup will fit better.

Cake

Cake takes short clips from existing YouTube videos, cuts them into individual sentences, adds bilingual subtitles, and lets you replay each sentence as many times as you want. After listening, you say the sentence back and the app uses speech recognition to flag where your pronunciation is off. The app is free and adds new example sentences daily, which makes it well suited for picking up a handful of usable sentences every day.

In exchange, each sentence stands fairly isolated. You pick up a lot of fragments but it's hard to build a sense of a long piece of speech, and the difficulty depends on whichever video got picked that day rather than scaling up with you.

Two apps for speaking and pronunciation

Speaking gets blocked by two different things: you mispronounce something and nobody points it out, and you don't have anyone to talk to. The two apps below solve those two things, and they don't replace each other. If you want to see the full range of options for this skill specifically, there's a separate article on speaking-practice apps.

ELSA Speak

ELSA listens to you read aloud and then zeroes in on every single sound within a word, pointing out exactly which vowel, which final consonant, or which stressed syllable you got wrong, instead of just returning a right-or-wrong verdict. For Vietnamese learners, this is the most worthwhile part, since classic mistakes like swallowing final consonants or mixing up two similar vowels are very hard to catch by ear on your own. The app has a free trial tier, and the paid version unlocks the full set of lessons and AI role-play conversations.

One thing worth being clear about: accurate pronunciation doesn't automatically bring listening comprehension along with it. You can pronounce things very crisply and still fail to catch a native speaker talking fast, because those are two separate skills. The theoretical groundwork for this is in the English pronunciation article.

HelloTalk

Unlike the apps above, HelloTalk doesn't teach you anything. It just connects you with someone learning Vietnamese who wants to trade for English. You message, send voice notes, make video calls, and there's a correction tool right in the chat window so both sides can mark mistakes for each other. Most of the language-exchange features are free to use, with a VIP package for extra perks.

The downside is that the quality depends on who you meet. Some people correct your messages very carefully, some send two lines and vanish, and you have to filter for yourself. This is a place to practice reflexes, not a place to learn new material.

Five apps for vocabulary

Vocabulary is the part easiest to find an app for, and also the easiest to waste effort on, because memorizing a list and forgetting it completely two weeks later is normal. What makes the difference isn't how many words are in the app but whether the app makes you meet a word again right when you're about to forget it. If you're not yet sure how many words you need and how to study them, read how many vocabulary words to learn and how first.

Anki

Anki is a flashcard deck with a spaced-repetition algorithm, free on computer and Android, with a one-time purchase for the iOS version. Its strength is that you decide everything yourself: what goes on the front and back, whether to add audio or images, importing whole decks shared by the community. Anyone who's gotten used to it almost never goes back to another app.

The price you pay is a dated interface and a settings menu that can put off a beginner on day one. If you just want to open it up and study rather than fiddle with configuration, the two options below are much easier going.

MochiVocab

Made by a Vietnamese team, MochiVocab has ready-made vocabulary courses organized by topic and reminds you to review right when you're about to forget, following the spaced-repetition principle. The interface is in Vietnamese, each lesson has only about a dozen words so it starts off very light, and there's a lookup feature to save words you come across elsewhere. You try a few lessons for free, then unlock the whole thing with a paid package.

The limitation is that you're studying a pre-made word set, so if your work requires a very specific vocabulary, you'll still have to supplement it yourself.

Quizlet

Quizlet's strength is its enormous bank of decks made by users everywhere, so for almost any lesson in class you can find a matching deck within seconds. Making a new deck is also fast, and sharing it with your whole study group is convenient.

The drawback is clear: Learn mode, the study mode that adjusts difficulty to your progress, is in the paid package, while the free version has ads. And because the cards are made by strangers, quality swings wildly, so you should check a few words before studying the whole deck.

TFlat

TFlat is an English-Vietnamese dictionary you can look up offline, with text translation, translating text in images, and translating whatever's showing on your screen. For Vietnamese beginners, a clear definition in Vietnamese is still much faster than guessing meaning through an English-English dictionary. The app is free, with a VIP account for word-list management and exam-prep vocabulary packages.

It's a lookup tool, not a study program, so don't expect it to teach you how to use a word in a sentence. That takes context, and context comes from somewhere else.

Memrise

What sets Memrise apart from other flashcard apps is its library of short clips of native speakers saying exactly the words you're learning, at real speed and in a real voice rather than a text-to-speech voice enunciating every syllable. The app also has a chatbot conversation feature so you can practice using the words you just learned. There's a free version, and a paid version unlocks all the content.

One thing to weigh is that the app has changed direction quite a bit over the past few years, and the community-made courses from before are no longer the focus. If you used the old Memrise and are coming back, be prepared to find a different product.

Two apps for grammar and writing

Grammar is the part Vietnamese learners study the most and get wrong the most, because most of the time we learn the rule without using the rule. The two apps below attack two different ends: one makes you do exercises, the other catches mistakes while you're writing for real. If you want the full list of options for this skill specifically, there's a dedicated article on grammar apps, and the foundational piece is in the English grammar article.

British Council's LearnEnglish Grammar

The app splits exercises into four levels from beginner to advanced, with more than a thousand questions and about a dozen different exercise types like fill-in-the-blank, word reordering, and matching. Each grammar topic has enough exercises ready for you to do until it feels familiar. The download is free with a sample question set included, with extra question packs purchased in-app.

It teaches rules very concisely but doesn't teach you how to hear that structure in a sentence someone actually says, and that's usually where you actually trip up.

Grammarly

Grammarly isn't a study app, it's a tool that catches errors while you write emails, messages, or reports. The free version already fixes spelling, grammar, and suggests tighter phrasing, and it runs on your phone keyboard and in your computer browser, so you don't have to open a separate app.

The risk is that it's easy to become dependent: you write carelessly then hit fix, and the part of your brain responsible for remembering the rules never gets used. The healthier way is to proofread yourself once after writing, then turn on Grammarly afterward to compare.

Two all-in-one apps with a built-in path

Sometimes you don't need to pick a skill, you just need a place to start and a ready-made path. These two apps do that best.

Duolingo

No app is better than Duolingo at pulling you back every day, and for someone who's quit English three times, that alone is worth something. The English course follows the CEFR framework, the free version has all the core content along with ads between lessons, and this year Duolingo opened up some sections to free users that used to be paid-only, including a feature that explains why your answer was wrong.

The limitation anyone who studies long enough notices: the sentences in the lessons are read clearly and briefly, a far cry from real people talking over each other, swallowing sounds, and constantly changing speed. Duolingo gets you into the game, it doesn't get you out into the real world.

Busuu

Busuu builds its path around the CEFR framework and has a placement test to put you in the right spot, so you always know what level you're at and what you're still missing. Something rare in other apps is its community feature: you submit a piece of writing or a recording, native speakers in the community correct it and explain why, and in exchange you correct Vietnamese for them. The free version lets you study the basic lessons and receive corrections, while features like offline study or grammar lesson groups are in the paid package.

The drawback is that the wait time for corrections isn't fixed and the quality of the corrections varies by person, like any community-based model.

What to use if you want completely free

If your budget is zero, you can still put together a complete set. Here's how to combine them without paying a cent:

• Listening: BBC Learning English and LearnEnglish Podcasts are both free, and you can download lessons to listen offline.
• Active listening: WELE has a free version to start dictation practice, you can see the tiers ahead of time on the pricing page.
• Speaking: HelloTalk offers most of its language-exchange features for free, enough for you to speak every day.
• Vocabulary: Anki is free on computer and Android, TFlat is free for lookups.
• Grammar: LearnEnglish Grammar downloads for free, Grammarly has a free version good enough for daily email.

One note about the word "free" in app stores: almost every app is free to download, the difference is when you hit the ceiling. Some apps block you after a few lessons, some just insert ads, some unlock almost everything. Before paying for any of them, use it continuously for a week first.

If you're more used to studying on a computer, English-learning software for desktop is also a real option: Anki has the most complete computer version, Grammarly runs in the browser, and web-based learning platforms open straight in the browser without installing anything. The list of usable sites is in the web and app for dictation practice article.

How to choose for your situation

The four most common situations, and the matching set of apps. Pick one line, skip the other three.

• You're starting from zero, basically starting over. Duolingo to keep up the rhythm, Cake to pick up short usable sentences, TFlat to look things up quickly in Vietnamese. Don't touch news podcasts for the first few months. The detailed roadmap is in the article learning English from zero.
• You have a job, and you can only scrape together fifteen minutes a day. Pick exactly one app and one fixed time slot. One short dictation session carries more weight than thirty minutes of scrolling through random content, and how to schedule it is covered in the article fifteen minutes a day.
• You're preparing for an exam. Stick to one official set of materials for that exam, and use apps only to shore up your weak spots: Anki or MochiVocab for vocabulary, LearnEnglish Grammar for grammar points you keep getting wrong, and dictation for listening.
• Your listening is weak even though your reading and writing are fine. This is the largest group, and also the one most likely to pick the wrong app. You're not short on words, you're short on the ability to break a stream of sound into words. Take the listening level test to find out where you stand, then practice actively instead of listening in the background.

One general rule for all four groups: install at most two apps at a time. Three or more, and each one only gets a few stray minutes, and none of them gets a strong enough dose to make a difference. If you'd like to build your own roadmap, the article self-studying English goes deeper into that.

Frequently asked questions

How many apps should I install at once?

One for your weakest skill, plus one for looking up words. More than that and you'll spend more time switching between apps than actually learning.

Is learning with free apps enough?

It's enough for the early stage and enough for most day-to-day needs, as long as you study consistently. Money usually buys extra convenience, more content, or grading features, but it rarely buys results for you.

Which app is best for beginners?

There's no single best app for everyone, but if you had to pick just one for a complete beginner, Duolingo is the easiest to get started with, and Cake is the one you should install alongside it so you're hearing real sentences from the very first week.

Can fifteen minutes a day actually improve my level?

Yes, if those fifteen minutes are active study: writing down what you hear, speaking out loud, testing yourself. Fifteen minutes of scrolling through multiple-choice questions just to keep a streak going changes almost nothing.

Can apps replace classes and teachers?

Apps can replace the repetitive drilling part, the part a teacher can't sit with you doing every evening. What's hard for an app to replace is someone who can see exactly where you're stuck and explain that specific point. If you're able to study with a teacher, let the app handle the drilling and let class time handle untangling the problems.

If you've read this far and you're still unsure, choose based on your symptoms, not on a ranking list: if you can catch individual words but lose whole sentences, start with listening dictation; if you're not sure where you're weak, take the vocabulary test first before installing anything else.