I just briefly tried out Mondly VR, a language learning app that promises semi-immersion and speech recognition for not only learning to understand but how to speak. As a linguist (I have a BA in Linguistics), I have an interest in such things. ;-)
First, a link to an article about it on
The Next Web.
Now my quick thoughts. I like the idea of VR immersion language learning, especially with speech recognition to tell if you pronounced the phrase right. However, it didn't quite work for me. I'm not sure if it was because I was wearing my bluetooth headphones or what, but I repeated the correct phrases several times and got nowhere.
That said, I do like the setup. For the greetings section, you're on a bus facing a woman who says "hi" to you. You then are presented with three options as a response. I couldn't get past that phase, but based on the article above, it should take you through a simulated conversation with the woman. There are two or three other scenarios at this point, and it doesn't look complete yet (just three or so scenarios total won't take you to complete fluency), but is a very good start.
If I can figure out the microphone issue, I'll gladly keep using it and periodically pay the in-app purchase to unlock the other scenarios. Yep; only the "hello" scenario is available without purchase.