LetMeSpeak – Learn English

What is LetMeSpeak app?

You've probably heard of gamification, where educational apps use game-like features to enhance and motivate learning. LetMeSpeak uses a variation called game-fi (where fi stands for finance) which encourages students to learn by making their learning time and progress generate cryptocurrency. In this case, the currency is the app's own, called LSTAR.

LetMeSpeak has content covering 40 topics and 6,000 of the most frequently used English words. Learners use the app in different sections, such as story, words, and grammar, to build and practice their vocabulary. The app uses effective teaching strategies such as spaced repetition and provides instant feedback. 

Sometimes learners will concentrate on single words within flashcard-style exercises; other times, they'll respond verbally to conversations and the app will listen to and assess them through the microphone.

The app's onboarding process takes you through the appropriate options to assist the app in personalising the content. You enter your motivation and complete a short assessment to find your current English language proficiency level. 

Each completed activity leads to a reward in the form of LSTAR. Students can use this for different things, such as to enhance their experience. They store it in a digital wallet on their device, which can be exchanged for real-world currency.

The app has localisation options where you choose your native language from more than 15 options, including Arabic, French, Hindi, Spanish and Thai.

What we love about LetMeSpeak app.

The app's content is superbly produced. The voices have clear pronunciation, the images are sharp and vivid, and the different scenarios used in the app add context. 

We particularly liked the realistic ambient noise when engaged in the story mode. The activities are suitable for playing on a phone and are easy to start and stop for short but frequent learning sessions. They help with written and aural word recognition, spelling, and pronunciation. A convenient feature lets students indicate that their current environment does not suit speaking into their phone, so they can concentrate on non-verbal exercises.

The app works well with speech recognition. It accurately assessed sentences where every word was correct, every word was incorrect and those with a single mispronunciation. The app highlights the wrong word in red.

What skills does it teach?

LetMeSpeak provides teaching and practice for learners of the English language. It has material and activities to support pronunciation, vocabulary building and grammar.

What age is it appropriate for?

Due to the inclusion of crypto-currency in the app, we recommend only adults download and use the app.

Is LetMeSpeak app easy to use?

Although users choose a native language for the app, this only seems to make a difference in the learning games. The app's main settings and menu remain in English which could be problematic for somebody without basic proficiency.

A lack of information about the crypto-currency side of the app compounds this. The information is available through an external link which you access via the settings icon. The LetMeSpeak Wiki option will take you to an in-depth article on the app, LSTAR and its methodology.

How will students benefit?

LetMeSpeak is an early adopter of web3 technologies to support learning. The cryptocurrency award could motivate many learners as they see their efforts translate into LSTAR with an associated dollar amount.

The learning material in the app is well made, so students do not need to fear that they would be forgoing the quality of other English Learning apps.

How will parents benefit?

We believe the inclusion of cryptocurrency makes this app most suited to adults. Parents with children over 18 may find it a helpful app to support their kids' English language development for college applications.

How will teachers benefit?

LetMeSpeak would work well to support in-class language learning for adults. The variety of tasks and immersive scenarios help to reinforce the reasons many language learners wish to develop their English language further.

Teachers cannot directly influence or monitor how students use the app, but it will provide effective practice and future talking points.

How much does LetMeSpeak app cost?

Users of the app can choose one of three one-off in-app purchases. These have relatively high prices and determine the ceiling of what you might earn in the app.

Note that each potential earnings associated with the purchases says, up to. We did not assess the current earning potential of the app as your earning rate and the value of any existing currency are likely to fluctuate over time, and the decision should be based on your research and understanding of crypto-currency.

Is LetMeSpeak app safe to use?

LetMeSpeak asks for permission to track your activity across other websites and apps. This can apply if apps use third-party advertising, but in the case of

LetMeSpeak, which does not, it will be to aid the app's marketing. You can accept or reject without any negative impact on your app experience.

To enable the app to assess your spoken answers, you must permit it to use your device's microphone and speech recognition capabilities. Obviously, it couldn't work without this.

Whether the app mines cryptocurrency while open or in the background is unclear.

What can LetMeSpeak app improve on?

Educational

For accessibility reasons, we'd like the app to use an addition to colour for communicating mispronounced words, such as underlining. Red and green highlights make sense to those with full-colour vision, but they are the most commonly confused colours by those with colour-vision impairments.

The app insists that you choose a native language from its list. It asks you to select in English, but English is not an option. If a person's native language is not on the list, English would be the best fallback option considering it is their goal to learn it.

The following personalisation options are also in English. As they ask a relatively complicated question about motivation with detailed response options, it does not make sense that they are not in the native language just selected.

Overall rating of the app.

LetMeSpeak's language learning material is excellent and effectively uses your phone's capabilities to provide convenient and supportive learning.

We aren't making a judgement on the place game-fi has to play in education. You and your students must determine its value. However, the app's underexplained and opaque crypto-currency dimension is not ideal. We expect an app to reveal all its main features upfront.

The language learning content in the app is excellent, so we have awarded LetMeSpeak five stars.

You can download LetMeSpeak – Learn English on your iOS or Android devices from the app stores. Download the LetMeSpeak – Learn English app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.