Updated Drops Review

So Drops has “Dropped” a MAJOR update.

It’s been out for about two weeks now, and I’ve gone through it pretty extensively. So here is my updated review.

What I love

- Better Categories

. There are now more vocabulary sets, and they are sorted into categories that are much easier to navigate. They also have clearer titles which helps you find the set you need. Some of the sets appear to have been rebuilt so that they are more topic specific. For example, the food vocab set Restaurant Talk appears to have been changed into three sets with new vocab added.

- New words

I’m not sure if there is more vocabulary or if there are just more sets. There are new topics and categories, but some share words with existing sets, so it’s hard to determine. I will say that it feels like any new vocab they would have added for the past six months when they weren’t releasing any new topics was just saved up to be released all at once. Whether these words were hidden in topics I thought were unrelated to what I was learning or were genuinely new, I am loving how much I was able to expand my vocabulary with this new update.

- Better for finding topics/vocab related to other sources

There are a lot more categories/lessons now. More importantly, they are more functional categories which are labelled more clearly. This makes learning topic-specific vocab much easier; it also makes it easier to find the vocab you’ve learned in a course or another app. There seems to be a set for almost anything you might need.

Want to watch a romance movie? There is a whole set on romance in the entertainment section. Detective shows more your thing? There’s a set for that as well. Planning on watching some news clips? There is a general news set and many sets on various news topics. It’s so much easier to navigate. Going to be working in a new language and need some workplace vocab? There are now over 27 sets to help you learn what you need to know.

What I don’t like:

- Issues that I had that haven’t been resolved

There are two issues that I have had with Drops in the past that don’t seem to have been addressed. The one that bothers me the most is the issue with sound quality. Because they use different people to be the voices for different words, they are at different levels. Sometimes I have to game up the volume to be able to hear a word, only to be blasted by the next recording. With some sets, this is more of an issue than the others. It’s a little thing, but I have reported it multiple times and hoped it would be addressed in the update. Maybe in an upcoming update.

- Now, all the topics that I started are scattered over different topics

Again a fairly minor annoyance. I had been working my way through different sets based on how relevant the topic was to my current level, what content I was consuming, and my goals with the language long term. Now all those topics have been broken up and resorted into new sets, sometimes even moved to new topics. This means that it looks like I have barely finished any sets at all. It felt like starting from scratch. If I were someone who rage-quit rather than double down, I might have quit using Drops. This is the downside of gamified apps. If you lose so much progress in the game from a major update, you’re going to lose players. Luckily, I am the type to double down, so I spent the past two weeks doing almost two hours a day completing all my sets.

Final thoughts:

The positives of this update far outweigh any negatives. I’m enjoying being able to find more sets that apply to my learning journey. It’s nice to be able to find what I am looking for more easily, and my vocabulary has almost doubled, thanks to the update.

I will be re-reporting the sound issue. Just because something is better doesn’t mean there isn’t still room for improvement. I will still be putting in reports about the sound issues and other little things that still need fixing. I’m also hoping they add a vocab set for planner users so I can incorporate my language learning more into everyday things.

So if you were on the fence about trying Drops, I would say an emphatic go for it. You get two free sessions a day, and you can also get a free week’s trial of the unlimited version, which is a great way to jump start a language-learning journey.