How to make a Language Learning App?

How to make a Language Learning App?

Naveen Saraswat
Sodio Technologies
4 min readAug 22, 2017

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Learning a new language is all about getting to know an entirely new world, one that is different from yours linguistically as well as culturally. For a while now, there have been courses facilitating distance learning for new languages. What if we told you, now you can go mobile with learning a new language?

The language learning app is definitely the new way of getting introduced to a new language. An app named Rosetta stone was downloaded over 10,000,000 times by the users, recording its popularity. The other app that became popular was the Duolingo app, which was later awarded the Apple’s App of the Year.

When it comes to developing a language learning app, you need to have a process in place. There are quite a few things that you need to think through before you can put across an apt language app. Here, we will take you through the process that you will need to follow if you want a language app.

Define the flow

What exactly is the language learning flow that you are planning for the users? This might be your take off point to building an amazing language learning app.

Let’s say you are inviting people to learn a new language from scratch, from a business or corporate point of view. You might have to get them introduced to the basics of the language- the letters, and words that are mostly used. After that you might want to introduce them to the business aspect of the language. This would be your language learning flow.

In case your app plans to get them through the entire language, you might start with alphabets, proceed to words, then grammar, and finally sentences. If your app has different levels, then you will need to introduce that in the flow stage itself. Basically, the flow of the language app is very essentially before you get started with building it.

The teaching considerations

The next step is to consider the app’s teaching philosophy. If you are opting for speech based teaching, which includes audio then you might want to integrate the speech recognition API to the app. This will fetch the pronunciations, and help the listener with the language thoroughly.

The other teaching methods include text based teaching, video based teaching and image based teaching. You could also opt for a combination of these teaching styles. For example, if you are planning a video based teaching, you might need to use the video chat API, which will help in video chatting with the tutor. The teaching considerations are important if you want to build a Duolingo like app.

Are there people involved in the language app? Then probably, you could involve the necessary API. The teaching considerations are important for your app. After the logic for the language learning has evolved and teaching methods been considered, you need to move with defining the user for your app, and the experience they are looking for.

Personalizing the app

When you are building your very own language learning app, you need to profile the user you are planning it for. This is not a classroom hence, the user profile naturally changes. When you are devising a method for the user through the app, it is important to learn who would be downloading your app. What are they expecting from the app? This will in turn help you process the language app accordingly.

If you are working with young people learning a new language, you could even include real-time collaborative tools, which help them learn better. The idea is to personalize for the user planning on using it.

Focused app

Make sure you have a focused app that enables a solution for a single problem. This might help you deliver an app with consistency and in line with the user needs. If your app is focused on teaching grammar, then make sure it does it real well. You can even divide your app into levels that offer a complete and holistic language learning experience. The focused development helps in ensuring complete engagement for the users in question.

Simple and easy-to-use

This is necessary if you want the user to stay on-board for a longer while. You might want to build an easy-to-use interface that keeps the engagement high. It is necessary to make it simple, such that the learning curve is really small.

Don’t pile up your language learning app with too many features that the user is unable to concentrate on the task that they should perform. Make sure the experience attained by the user across devices with the app is consistent. If not, your user might plan on leaving your app for that of the competitor’s.

Plan the marketing of the app, and make sure you have educated your user group on the app before releasing it.

Sodio technologies have experience of delivering appropriate app solutions aligned to your business needs. Get in touch with us if you want to build Babble like app for your business needs.

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