I’m still investigating pains that language learners may face. I worked on two subreddits: for Chinese learning and general language learning. Both gave me a lot of interesting insights.
For example, I found that many people prefer to use an “easy way” but, as expected, don’t achieve great results – I’m talking about using such apps as Duolingo. Yes, they are super easy to use but I don’t think that learning should be easy. It should be fun, definitely, but it still should require some effort – in a case if you want to achieve good results.
Another insight that I can’t find an explanation to yet is – whereas there are tons of apps allowing to have a conversation with “study buddy”, many people are still struggling with finding them and prefer usual tools like Zoom or Skype.
Another super popular problem is that people don’t know how to start learning a foreign language. Textbooks usually look too scary and boring, apps like Duolingo – too relaxed and, therefore, not very reliable. People don’t know where to find good resources, app, what to start with, how to make a progress etc.
It all went me to an idea of a web application that would help people in practicing a foreign language. I still not distill it yet and just wrote down. I want to make another research on my second idea and then, if I’m still good with this idea, will go back, refine, and make more deeper research on it.
So far, I’ve written down:
- 34 existing apps helping with different problems
- 48 pain points
- 4 ideas of applications.
All my metrics are still the same as they were in the previous post.
In the next post I will report on the progress of my research.