Language Mentor - A Free and Open Language Learning Platform

[dmccarroll16]

Hi All,

 

A few years ago I posted to this forum announcing the release of Language Mentor, a project of mine. I'm posting again now to let people know that a more polished version of Language Mentor is available.

 

Language Mentor is a couple of things. It's a free language learning app for mobile devices. It's also an open platform which allows anyone to create lessons for any language and publish them to the world.

 

At this point over 60 lessons have been published on Language Mentor for Mandarin Chinese.

 

The world is full of language learning apps. Why might you want to check out Language Mentor? I'm so glad you asked!  :)

 

I've designed the app to meet a specific need. It's not the be-all and end-all of language learning. Instead, it's specifically designed to be an audio-centric app that allows people to learn languages while their hands and eyes are busy doing other things. You can use it while you're walking, stretching or doing housework. In other words, it allows you to study without taking time away from your busy day.

 

Language Mentor is laser-focused on efficiency. Podcasts are great, but if you use them for language study you will repeatedly find yourself in a situation where you've learned most of a lesson, and have to repeat the entire lesson over and over in order to study the last ten percent. Ack! Language Mentor elegantly solves this problem by providing an "I Know This" button which allows you to mark the parts of the lesson that you've learned, and study only the remaining parts.

 

The app also has other useful features - but rather than making this email a lot longer, I suggest that you learn more by visiting our website at LanguageCollaborative.com and/or install the app on your phone and give it a try.

 

If you're curious about the content of the lessons you can find scripts at LanguageCollaborative.com/index.php/blog/categories/language-lessons-mandarin-chinese.

 

Finally, if you have any feedback about Language Mentor I'd love to hear it. You can reply here, or post on our website's forums.

 

Enjoy  :)

 

Douglas

 

[Leslie Frank]

Nice project you've developed. I'm the type of person that likes the instantaneous world that we currently live in though, and the multiple occasions I had to wait for this or that to download tested my patience, but I was finally able to start a lesson so that was exciting but then the actual lesson started and it was a tad too static for my taste. I respect that you guys have a comprehensive vocabulary for the topics at hand, but I guess I just can't get into the traditional, learn lots of vocab types of learning. I rather hear and learn conversations, then learn the vocab as they come up from the conversations. And as far as podcasts are concerned, you don't need to hear the whole podcast to get to the 10% you want to relearn, just move the track marker to where you need to hear the audio. I think there's a huge audience for your app though, because there are those who are looking to go through the slew of HSK tests, who can benefit from your app. I need to talk to clients in the target languages and it's just easier for me to learn as I go along (you figure out the vocab as they come up in conversations, at least the gist of it for which you can figure out more in detail afterwards).