This Kickstarter sensation wants to change how you learn languages

by Andreas Rekdal
September 27, 2017

The most successful app to launch on Kickstarter came about because its creator cheated on a French placement test.

Gabriel Wyner, a Chicago-based opera singer and engineer, needed to learn French as part of his opera training. But he didn’t want to start from scratch, so he decided to make himself look more proficient than he really was.

“I thought I could weasel by in level one and a half with my Italian background,” he said. “I cheated too well, and they put me in intermediate level. So I had three months to learn how to hold a conversation in the interview put in place to make sure you didn’t cheat on the test.”

The learning system he came up with, called Fluent Forever, draws inspiration from immersive learning. For one, it starts with pronunciation, rather than words.

“It’s really hard to remember words you can’t pronounce or hear,” said Wyner. “The Hungarian word for camera is ‘fényképezőgép,’ which you can retain for all of zero seconds — until the sounds become familiar to you.”

Once the basic sounds are in place, Fluent Forever relies on images, rather than translated words, to expand the user’s vocabulary. According to Wyner, this approach makes memorization easier, because it builds a broader range of associations with a word than just the English word it maps onto.

When Wyner showed up for his placement interview three months after cheating on the test, he advanced to the next level.

Wyner wrote a post about the methodology on Lifehacker, which landed him a book deal with Random House. Now he’s bringing those lessons to life as an easy-to-use mobile app.

The app gives the user a range of words, sample sentences, recordings and images to create their own flashcards. The app spaces out repetitions at increasingly longer intervals until the user remembers the word permanently.

On Tuesday, just over one week into his Kickstarter campaign, Wyner had raised just short of $340,000 from more than 2,200 backers — more than any other app in the crowdfunding platform’s history.

Wyner attributes part of the success to a built-in customer base of around 20,000 who have already used his book and methodology to learn languages. The campaign raised $100,000 in less than 53 minutes after going live, he said.

Wyner employs six people, who manage the development of learning resources in new languages. After weighing proposals for the final app from more than 80 development firms, Wyner said he’s currently deciding between two firms who have already developed proofs of concept.

 

Images via Fluent Forever.

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