Learning a language through immersing yourself in everyday situations

The whole application was in fact built of two separate applications with different features, different goals, created for different user personas. One was for the teachers who wanted to design their own lessons and find students online, and the other one was for the students who wanted to learn a new language with an app. The key was to combine these two apps into one consistent platform that would be available for teachers and learners.

When learning new languages, we learn to read, write, we try to listen and understand as much as possible. But how to learn to speak in a foreign language without an actual human interaction? In order to let the app understand what the user says and analyze it, we needed to use speech recognition that would translate spoken language into text which can be later analyzed by the app.

People quit learning foreign languages for different reasons: they are bored, they find it difficult, they don’t get instant gratification (the progress is too slow). The challenge was to keep them engaged and motivated to they don’t quit after a few lessons.

The drag’n’drop interface in the admin panel helped the teachers without advanced computer skills design lessons in an easy, intuitive way and share them with those who want to learn new languages.

When we joined the project, the speech recognition code was already written but it was inefficient and didn’t work properly. In order to make sure that the app provides its user with the best possible experience, we decided to rewrite the speech recognition feature in a simpler way.

In order to keep the learners engaged and motivated, we used a trick that would help them monitor the progress and give them a sense of gratification faster than with a regular learning curve. Completing lessons let the users gain XP points which indicated the progress they made but also let them compete with their friends.