New Lingua.ly Mobile App Turns Real World Environment into Engaging Language Learning Opportunity
Mobile App Turns Everyday Content Into Fun and Easy Language Education Experience
Lingua.ly, a cross-platform solution that draws on a user’s environment and interests to create a personalized language learning experience, announced today the launch of its free Android app. The new app teaches beginner through advanced learners by turning everyday content into fun and easy language practice, supporting the educational philosophy that language is learnt best via immersion rather than through traditional textbooks and lesson plans.
As users read foreign content on their mobile devices and highlight unknown words, Lingua.ly leverages a smart mobile dictionary to provide word translation. The app then uses those words to provide personalized games and flashcards with audio, contextual and visual cues to help learners commit the unknown words to memory – a fun and seamless way to learn a language. This is the first time that an app offers a mobile dictionary that is integrated with a language learning system, benefitting classroom-based students and language app enthusiasts alike. The mobile dictionary enables users to search for and learn words in over 20 different languages.
“We’re part of a new paradigm with mobile technology poised to change the landscape of language learning,” said Dr. Jan Ihmels, Chief Executive Officer of Lingua.ly. “People learn better when they’re engaged – supplementing foreign language courses with real world content enriches the experience making language more memorable.”
Lingua.ly has an existing multi-national user base for its browser extension solution on Google Chrome and is synergized with the mobile app – so if users want to reference a word previously looked up on the browser extension they can via the mobile app. The technology that drives both the browser extension and new mobile app learns the interests and skill level of users through their word bank and online activity. It is then able to recognize which reading material is a match and serve personalized, current, web-based content in the form of articles, blog posts, short-stories, and more – making Lingua.ly’s solution the perfect bootstrap for the multitude of learners stranded on the “intermediate plateau.” The personalized content can be served in the following languages: English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Hebrew.
In addition, Lingua.ly will soon be releasing new features to the mobile app which support serving social media content to users so they can learn a language from Facebook and Twitter. These features are currently available on the browser extension.
“Successful companies understand the omni-channel opportunity to distribute learning content through the most asked-for media – smartphones, the cloud, chats, tweets, Google Hangouts, Facebook video calling—anywhere a language learner might choose to try out his or her latest expression in Arabic or Spanish,” adds independent language industry research firm Common Sense Advisory. “This in itself has a greater chance of success for language instruction companies who have the opportunity to appeal to a broader mass.”
The Lingua.ly app is currently available for free in the Google Play store in the following languages: English, Chinese, Hebrew, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Russian.
“Lingua.ly is an ingenious technology that helps you learn languages and build vocabulary in the wild as you browse the web on your mobile device,” says Lera Boroditsky, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California San Diego. “The content served to foreign language learners is engaging, relevant and geared exactly for their skill level and can grow with the student as their skills progress.”
