Quick Overview
Use this app to read, listen, speak, and review. M1 gives sentence meaning practice, M2 builds vocabulary, M3 helps real conversation, M4 is chatbot practice, M5 is long-text training, M6 has games, M7 is translation review, and M8 lets you edit sessions. Optional settings below let you tune theme and voice behavior.
Optional Settings
Main instructions for using the app modules.
Quick tips: use NEXT often, click words to translate, and practice speaking.
Made this app originally for myself after hating a popular one I was trying out. I already had experience learning a new language and with educational software, and decided to apply the ideas into it. I showed it to some cousins and friends, who asked me to make a version they had access to, which eventually turned into the app you’re using.
Part of the goal of the app is also to give an option to people making a language combination that isn’t very popular. For example: My cousin was complaining that there weren’t a lot of options in Mexico to learn France, but there were many to learn English. There can be even more obscure combinations, for example not many people in Mexico are trying to learn Hindi compared to other languages. The goal with the app would be to have hundreds of possible combinations between your native language and learning language.
The other goal is to have a tool you can use at different learning levels. You can pick up this app knowing nothing about the language, but at the same time you can practice reading literature, which would require a degree of knowledge and can be used either to take your skills to the next level or maintain it. It’s very common to learn a language from having lived in another country, move back and start losing it after some years.
The design is based heavily on the idea of Anders Ericsson and deliberate practice. To give you a very simplified version:
An athlete or musician will take a small chunk of a more complex activity. Practice a specific move or note. If you’re a basketball player, it can be dunking, dribbling, shooting, etc. Practice this move again and again until you get it right. It’s not supposed to be fun or easy, but hard and repetitive. Once you develop the skill set, you can have fun using it.
There is some science as to why this works, and I’m not going to go into detail here, but long story short if you’re trying to make a learning process fun and like a game it’s not going to be the most effect way to learn if that’s the only thing you do. Going to a Zumba class isn’t going to make an Olympic athlete. My design isn’t for everyone, many people won’t like it, but I believe it to be more effective than other designs I’ve seen.
I’m not giving you points or cartoons to trigger your dopamine and get you addicted to use an app, I don’t have lessons to create a sense of progress. Just like an athlete, you know if you’re progressing if your training becomes easier, and then you increase the difficulty. Can you carry more weights? Can you run faster and longer? Has it become easier? You can sense these things, you don’t need an algorithm saying you have to move on to a new level and have experience points.
There is a movement that became popular in education software that I thought had potential but was applied wrong called “gamification.” The idea was that video games are fun and addicting, they had some secret design and if you applied that secret design outside games it would improve different aspects of work and education. Now, there are some aspects you can apply and work in many contexts, but it’s not universal, and video games don’t have a lot to teach you.
Most video games work on creating an artificial sense of mastery, You encounter a monster that’s killing you, you find a magical sword that can kill it, before it becomes too easy and boring a new monster with more health and hit points shows up, and the loop starts again. Learning a skill in the real world is hard, sometimes takes years, and a lot of the time it isn’t fun to develop them (but the skills are fun to use once you have them).
They should have instead looked at how games in the real world develop skills, like athletes and chess players. But the problem with this is that a lot of people don’t want the hard training, and it won’t sell as much software, or the software is actually harmful, as it’s the case with children. Too much screen time is damaging for a child's brain and doesn’t matter if you design the greatest education software of all time, screen time is still damaging. Many people selling educational software know this but ignore it because their goal is to sell software. The children would have been healthier playing a board game or sports with their friends in the real world instead.
To go back to the examples of the chess players, this app is one tool to learn the language. Go ahead and watch movies, listen to music, change your browser to the language you’re learning, make friends who speak the language, read books, watch YouTube videos explaining the language, grammar, customs, etc. The chess player will use software to train, read books, play against other people, study past games from other chess players, etc. There’s no single one type of activity that can give you a rounded training. Weight lifting and running alone isn’t going to make you a great basketball player, but they’re necessary to get you there.
Coming soon: Premium version of the app.
I'm also working on some games and browser extension.