alt Hacker NewsYes, I can understand and empathize with your experience. Quite honestly our current focus is more for B1+ students. That 0 -> 1 / bootstrapping of the language is much better served by traditional material that is less talking / listening-heavy.
Replies
I think I'm around A2 in Japanese and find myself kinda scared by all these talking apps. I don't mind texting, because it gives me time to look up what I don't know and much more time to think about my response, but talking just makes me feel very anxious. Eventually I have to get over the barrier, but it is a barrier to entry and could scare people away.
I do think immersion is generally better, but it is not only harder, an AI app doesn't seem like it could do the right kind of immersion (missing body language, visual cues, seeing the mouth movements, and all sorts of other things one gets from watching a podcast, or even better, in person interaction).
This is demonstrably false. Natural language acquisition is almost entirely listening and talking. The fastest and most consistently effective way to learn a language is immersion. The reason traditional material doesn't attempt immersive techniques is because it is much much easier to print a static book than it is to produce interactive and adaptive content.
The promise and potential of LLM based language learning apps is that you can cross that gap to full immersion in a way that has never been possible before.
Please be more ambitious.
Unfortunately, I think you will soon learn that the market for advanced language learners is 1/500th the size of the market for beginner learners. But thank you very much and please keep focusing on us.