Explainability
Finnish is hard because there's very little common vocabulary to lean on, and to
make it worse you can't even consistently recognize Finnish vocab because words
change their spelling according to a series of apparently arbitrary rules. You
just have to learn — a lot. A good teacher will help you by working through the
rules, spotting which ones you get consistently wrong and helping you understand
what you're missing. None of the language apps we found did that — they just give
you a tick or a cross, no explanations. Learning without a good feedback loop is
ten times as hard.
Offline First
We found that the best time for app practice was downtime during travel — long
train journeys, commutes, etc — exactly when mobile connectivity was missing. Or
even if it is present, you don't want to be just a click away from a distracting
rabbit-hole of internet content. A language learning app that requires constant
connectivity is losing out on some of the learner's best learning time, yet every
app or resource we found was online-only.
No Gamification
Because in our experience, learning apps that use gamification don't actually help
you learn — you just get good at using an app to earn internet points. Sorry,
learning is hard. We can help you with a strong, informative feedback loop — but
you have to put in the hours yourself.
So, we've invested in building the foundations for a new generation of learning tools
answering these needs. Getting explainability right, particularly if you keep
everything local, is hard — but if it was easy, someone else would have done it.
