So we all want to be more intelligent, we want to have the biggest vocabularies, speak the most languages, be the most cultured and understand how just about everything works and why it does. However, that’s not an easy task to achieve if you find yourself having either a 9-5 or just busy for other reasons. However, with the help of some clever apps, you can easily pick them up on your commute to work or for an hour when you get back from your day and learn something quickly that you didn’t know before. We’ve gone out and searched for some apps that will help you do that, so here are our 10 apps that will teach you something new every day.
Blinkist (iOS/Free) (Android/Free) ($49.99 – $79.99/yr)
Blinkist Blinkist is one of the best applications out there for cheating intelligence. We say this as Blinkist essentially allows you to understand booklets in career, self-help, business and more without having to read the actual books. With Blinkist you get a 3-day free trial to try out the programme. Blinkist essentially gives you a 15-minute summary of the text you’re interested in, allowing you to learn the content in many fewer hours than reading it all. With the paid options you get things like audio versions of the texts, send to Kindle options, get personalised recommendations, highlight certain parts of the text, synchronise these highlights with Evernote and more great features.
Health IQ (iOS/Free)
Health IQ Health IQ is an iOS-only application that offers you up a greater insight into health benefits and the health sector in general. With over 10,000 questions, you can test your knowledge on health and improve your knowledge at the same time. It is an app that was worked on for over 2 years before release to provide the most comprehensive health knowledge you can find in an application. This would be great for trainee doctors, nurses or even hypochondriacs.
Dualingo (iOS/Free) (Android/Free)
Dualingo Dualingo is one of the leading applications on both Android and iOS for helping you to learn a new language. Dualingo has a clever algorithm built into it that learns what areas and what words you struggled with and repeats them later on as you work your way through the different categories of that language. With the free version you can learn French or Spanish, with the paid version you can learn many more languages and advanced your linguistic capabilities.
Velocity (iOS/Free)
Velocity If you love to read but find yourself taking far too long to finish a book and wish you could get through books quicker so you could enjoy more varied titles, then Velocity is a great application to try out. Velocity helps you to read faster using a little game that slowly speeds up as you go. It can take texts from your phone or from services such as Pocket and Instapaper to read. It will then show you a word at a time, helping you to speed read through the content you’d usually take 5-10 minutes to read. It also lets you know how long you’ve got left to read.
TED (iOS/Free) (Android/Free)
TED is an application that doesn’t really need an introduction. Over the past efw years, TED has become a massive platform for people to come and speak either about troubles that concern them, or more popularly, teach people stuff they may not have known before. The TED application simply allows you to easily search for the content that will interest you and then allows you to view it directly on your mobile or tablet. There’s no better way to learn something new everyday than to watch a video on someone teaching a lecture or teaching an audience something.
HowStuffWorks (iOS/Free) (Android/Free)
HowStuffWorks is a great application that recently rehauled both its iOS and Android apps to feature great UIs respective of the two operating systems’ style choices. HowStuffWork essentially is a list of podcasts and videos that will teach you things you or may not wanted to know about how things work. In addition, if you think you might forget to have a look, you can have a notification sent to you once a day with a summary of the best and most popular content on the service that day.
GoodReads (iOS/Free) (Android/Free)
If you’re someone that loves to read then we’d highly recommend downloading the application GoodReads on either your iOS or Android device. GoodReads is a community application, almost like a forum, where on a daily basis people discuss the latest books they’ve read and what has stood out to them lately. You can define them by genre as well, making it easier to find a book in the genre you have the most interest in. It also has the social aspect of being able to see what your friends are reading too.
Vocabulary Builder (iOS/Free) (Android/Free)
If you’re someone that has never been a massive reader, and unfortunately, doesn’t have as big a vocabulary as you’d like, then we’d definitely recommend giving Vocabulary Builder a try. The app is actually intended for exam purposes to help grow the words you use during an English exam. However, it can be used to simply learn a new word every day that you can then try and use in your everyday language the next day.
