# Unnamed Language App ## The Issue(s) 1. Current language tools are tailored to hobbyists leaving serious learners high and dry 2. Available Anki flashcard decks are made by non-natives and often contain a lot of serious errors 3. Flashcard solutions like Lingvist try to teach a whole language through flashcards which leaves you learning the word `querer` then `quiero` then `queremos` and a month has passed and you can understand no more Spanish than before. 4. Language tools have so many distractions and interruptions its hard to reach a flow state or consume a large amount of content in a short period of time ## The Solution A minimalist platform where users can find error-free, efficient, and intuitive content created by native speakers. No flying owls, incorrect translations, or ambiguous definitions. A platform that doesn’t try to teach you everything at once but has different exercises that lets you study what you want to learn as efficiently as possible. Decent grasp of Spanish grammar but lack vocab -> focus on flashcards for your level and specific points of weakness. Decent German vocab but struggling with cases because you don’t know the gender of common nouns -> focus learning the genders of different words. It is kind of like a gym for language learning. It’s difficult but you are guaranteed to see results if you remain consistent and put in the effort. ## Case Study To try to give a more concrete example of what this might look like - there is a website called AlgoExpert.io that was made by the YouTuber Clement Mihailescu. ![](https://i.imgur.com/EyFSqOD.png) The site lets you train coding problems often found in programming interviews. There are quite a few sites like this but what sets AlgoExpert apart is that… - It doesn’t try to teach you any coding language from scratch but assumes you’re already a serious programmer and know the basics - It trains you both on algorithm design and system design in one platform. It also doesn’t try to teach both of these at the same time but lets you choose which you do and when. - Other sites + programming books often only offer the answer in a one or a few coding languages but AlgoExpert offers each problem in most major coding languages. - Other companies rely in community generated explanations for algorithms but AlgoExpert has well-made tutorials for every single one of the problems. It is also incredibly successful. He is very open with the company’s revenue and said it earned more than $1M in 2020. More interestingly - it seems to genuinely work very well for a lot of people and be a game changer in efficiently train programmers for stressful coding interviews. In many ways this idea is the languages version of AlgoExpert. High quality and efficient content aimed at more serious language learners so that they can learn as efficiently as possible. ## Feature Set The main feature set of the app would be… * Decks of flashcards at different levels * The flashcards would focus on infinitive versions of verbs, unconjugated/genderless adjectives, and caseless nouns. They get as many root words into your brain as possible as quickly as possible. * Gender/Case trainer * La problema? El problema? * Mit dem Zug? Mit der Zug? Mit die Zug? * Conjugation trainer * Yo mostro? Muestro? Muostro? * Statistics * Simple and accessible statistics * The ability to set goals * Be able to see where your weaknesses are and how you have distributed your time between exercises. ## Monetization Having stared at hundreds of different monetization experiment results at Tandem I am confident that there is a smaller group of serious language learners that are willing to pay for language features that they think will make a difference in their language learning. The most common monetization strategy seems to be some free content (first 100 flashcards) then a paywall to unlock everything else. I also think the most important thing to get right about this project is to make sure the content is perfect before charging anyone anything. So I would want to give free access to ~100 users with functionality to report translation issues or bugs. The language app market is super saturated but the language app market for serious language learners is still quite empty. Monetizing early would also allow us to translate the content and offer many different language pairings. ## First Steps + Timeline Up until this point I have been thinking through the idea, figuring out the system architecture, checking if this exact idea already exists (thankfully not), and reading about what makes efficient flashcards/learning in general. I’ve also made some pretty ugly designs that I am too embarrassed to show here. Coding the frontend would likely not take too long and a lot of things need to happen before the frontend like… 1. Figuring out the specifics of content and developing it 2. Creating designs for the different screens 3. Setting up the backend + data for statistics 4. Setting up a spaced repetition algorithm 5. Testing the content with users 6. Figuring out copy + growth ideas + marketing I’d like to start with German just because its the most studied language on Tandem after English, in my opinion German learners are more serious language learners + have higher willingness to pay, I’m learning German so reviewing content and testing the efficiency of the app would be a lot easier. But I’d also be open to starting with French / Spanish. I also would like to start it as a responsive web app just because it’s easier to develop and if it was successful it wouldn’t be so difficult to port the code to work as iOS/Android apps. But the main point is that I’ve really wanted to work with a designer and a fellow language learner to bounce ideas off of for a long time and I think our skills could work really well together! I’m looking for someone who is also excited about providing *the* platform for serious language learners and wants to bring this thing to reality.