I'm Etiene, a Software Engineer from Brazil, who went to Engineering school in France, did my final year project in Germany, went to the UK for a masters in Computational Linguistics, and now am moving to Spain! Besides my native language, I have seriously studied 5 other languages, and reached fluency in 2. I love doing that just for fun too. Sometimes I dabble with a new language for a short time out of curiosity. During this time, I tried dozens of paid and free apps, learned a lot both on my own or in formal classes, learned in immersion or from my home, and did all kinds of variations you can imagine. Having autonomy over my learning process does not mean studying alone, it means having control and responsibility for my learning, and deciding what deserves my attention and effort. Today I'll start sharing with you what I learned along the way!
Once I have done this a few times, the awareness of how hard it is to overcome some specific obstacles when directing my own learning starts forming a pattern. I started creating Polygloss because of my own frustrations learning German and the gaps with the market solutions I have tried in addressing those patterns. Because everyone has their own struggles going on, my mission with Polygloss is to foster an environment where people can develop their language skills under their own supervision.
The biggest market gap in mobile apps for language learning is handling the intermediate stages of learning. There are multiple great apps already with a standard beginner curriculum: Duolingo, Babbel and Ling, for example. They are great if we're learning one of the popular languages available and we're just starting from scratch. There are also some apps dedicated to language exchange, but they require a certain level of conversational skills a lot beyond what the first group of apps can give us. But there are very few solutions between the basics and advanced.
Better solutions for this stage need to be found because the importance of this gap is massive. The intermediate stage is the hardest and most important stage of learning a language. This might sound counter intuitive. How is the advanced stage not the most important one? Basically, once we reach an advanced level, we can already do most of the things we need in that language. It is then a matter of doing it better: more elaborately, with less mistakes, more fluidly, etc. In fact, many native speakers don't have themselves the language skills of a C2 level, the top of the European proficiency scale used in language teaching and assessment.
I believe the reason this gap in solutions exists is mainly due to how hard it is to create materials for intermediate level students. But what are these difficulties exactly and how are they addressed with Polygloss?
There are two important characteristics about the vocabulary of a language: