Everything else is just marketing noise In the last decade, many Language learning (LL) apps and courses have been thrown into the market; among the well-established apps, I have tried courses without a teacher like Duolingo, Rosetta Stone (more on these ones later), Babbel, Busuu; vocabulary flashcard apps like Memrise; video chat apps like Tandem and audio-only chat apps like SpeakNative, and Buddytalk. I have also tried teacher-based apps like iTalki as well as some of the apps that there are for every single online language school in the world (English Central, Open English, EF, etc.) My i ..read more

Will voice assistants be our next language teachers?     When I saw a couple of years ago the demo of Google Duplex, the beta version of Google Assistant, it was a truly jaw-dropping moment to me (and many others). Perhaps you remember the dialog:   (phone rings) Hi how can I help you? “Hi, I’m calling to book a women’s haircut for a client, I’m looking for something on May 3rd.” “Sure, give me one second.” “Mm-hmm.” “Sure what time are you looking for around?” “At 12 pm.” “We do not have a 12 pm available. The closest we have to that is a 1:15.” “Do you have anything bet ..read more

The Talking gap     Why there is so much self-study content and so few talking opportunities   If you wanted to learn a language some 30 years ago, the default path was to enroll in a language school (I mean, a brick-and-mortar school), show up there at least once a week, take your lesson, come back home, eventually do your homework, repeat this next week. Or else, if you were wealthy or adventurous enough, you just moved to live in the country when the language was spoken. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but I put it in writing just to contrast how mu ..read more

Language Learning with Machine Learning       That’s a lot of “learning”, isn’t it? (at least in the title). Yes and no, because the former (Language Learning, LL for short) is done by humans, while the latter (Machine Learning, ML) is done by a computer.   The idea is to use the power of ML, one of the most prominent and fast-growing branches of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support in some way the LL student for improving her/his language skills. This sounds like a cool idea, but to make a meaningful LL application of ML, so that the LL student gets a real and tan ..read more

Language Learning Tech blog (Pilot) Though I’ve been posting some articles related to the technology displayed (or not) in Language Learning (LL) applications, this is the first post in a new series specifically for discussing the tech trends that we see, and sometimes I’ll analyze a specific product and give you my take, from the tech point of view. Why LL, in the first place?  Well, if you are here, very probably you are a LL enthusiast or even a polyglot. We, the LL community, always want to incorporate additional resources to our toolbox, to share our experiences and to help each othe ..read more