Learn a language from your partner

[jackbridger]

Name
Jack Bridger

Describe the problem you'd like to solve
"According to a study by Eurostat, nearly 9 per cent of marriages in the UK include a foreign-born spouse. In many of those relationships, the partners have different native languages." https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/10098089/Learning-for-love-romance-through-the-language-barrier.html

In FAC17 there are multiple people in a relationship with someone whose native language is different to their own.

It would be great to have an app to make it easier for people to learn a language from their partner.

For example: my partner's native language is Japanese but she speaks very advanced English. My Japanese is very basic so we only speak English. Speaking Japanese together is painfully slow/impossible. When she teaches me something but it's usually a one off sentence with multiple words I don't understand, so I usually forget. It's also usually not the the grammar/vocab I learned from the textbook!

Learning Japanese is fun but it's more than that: my partner's whole family and most of her friends don't speak English. So for both of us, it would be great if I learned Japanese.

Some of the challenges/opportunities

• A lot of apps teach you quite formal language, this is an opportunity to learn the language as spoken by the people you care about
• Make it fun for both sides (not too much work creating content)
• Create accountability on both sides (if the native speaker creates a lesson, the student is accountable to learn it. If the student finishes, the native speaker is accountable to create/curate more content.

Benefits

• Healthier relationships in couples that use the app (effort on both sides, greater understanding of each other).
• Healthier family relationships
• Greater ease of mobility (can sometimes be forced due to necessary relocation due to family illness etc.)
• Increased cultural awareness.

Stakeholders

• Partner 1 - language learner
• Partner 2 - language teacher
• Close friends and family of the teacher who are better able to communicate with teacher's partner
• It could work for non-couples too (e.g. close friends)

What is currently being done to solve this problem?

• Tons of great language learning apps e.g. for Japanese I've used: Duolingo, Memrise, Lingodeer, Wanikani, FluentU, Anki (Spaced Repitition program).
• Textbooks
• Traditional schools/tutors
• Online tutoring/speaking practice e.g. HelloTalk, iTalki
• Before the course, I started making a flashcard app to try to learn from my partner https://japanese-flash-cards.herokuapp.com/index.html

[samjam48]

Nice problem! I've got a lot of friends learning languages due to foreign partners... I'm not sure if you'd need to do more manual research and testing first before building a solution. (but perhaps that could come from design week)

Maybe just using a habit app to try and talk for an amount of time together and to force you to do some vocab each day. Just seems like so many ways to learn a language it's hard to enforce the right one in an all-encompassing app. But perhaps this is the point and you're trying to leverage this to just make better use out of the learner's partner as one element of the whole journey and empower them to be a better teacher.

Interested to hear more of this idea.

Good memory app - https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Feature or Idea?
An interesting framework for analysing your ideas is whether your idea is really a full solo product or a feature that is better within a different app. Requires a humble assessment of your idea but sadly realised like half my ideas are just features.

Not sure if perhaps this could work with apps for couples like this http://couple.me/

Users
Why does it need to be a couple. maybe i just want to learn Arabic and it would be nice if one of the guys on the course wants to help mentor me a bit?

I sat with one of the mentors and got him to go through the first 20 words with me i wanted to learn in arabic and just recorded him saying it into anki droid.

In my mind I think an advanced version of Anki-droid where the mentor can see your progress at learning words and record new words and phrases for you remotely would be cool.
Then you could also log in a habit tracking section if you spend 10 mins every day talking or not.
Other useful things might be a list of great TV you can watch together with subtitles. These are all different things that can kind of be done anyway and doesn't need to be in one app but perhaps it helps when it's under one roof and instructing you...

[jackbridger]

Hey Sam, thanks - really useful discussion points!

I'm not sure if you'd need to do more manual research and testing first before building a solution. (but perhaps that could come from design week)
100% - it's all based only on my own experiences

Maybe just using a habit app to try and talk for an amount of time together and to force you to do some vocab each day. Just seems like so many ways to learn a language it's hard to enforce the right one in an all-encompassing app. But perhaps this is the point and you're trying to leverage this to just make better use out of the learner's partner as one element of the whole journey and empower them to be a better teacher.

100% agree - habit app but the major difference being that you have some recordings of your partner speaking/some suggested words to learn curated by them. Definitely not intended to be an all encompassing thing.
Edit: plus all the other cool stuff you mentioned and other cool stuff anyone else mentions.

Good memory app - https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Yes I use this too! it's brilliant.

_Feature or Idea?
An interesting framework for analysing your ideas is whether your idea is really a full solo product or a feature that is better within a different app. Requires a humble assessment of your idea but sadly realised like half my ideas are just features.

Not sure if perhaps this could work with apps for couples like this http://couple.me/_

That couples app looks awesome. And you raise a really smart point - it could totally be a feature of that.

One discussion would be (for all projects) - that if it's much bigger than a cool feature, will it be good in the timeframe we have?

_Why does it need to be a couple. maybe i just want to learn Arabic and it would be nice if one of the guys on the course wants to help mentor me a bit?

I sat with one of the mentors and got him to go through the first 20 words with me i wanted to learn in arabic and just recorded him saying it into anki droid._

I totally agree there could be other use cases. The counterbalance I'd want to discuss:

"Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can't expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take the first. It's easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise. And perhaps more importantly, it's harder to lie to yourself. If you think you're 85% of the way to a great product, how do you know it's not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it's easy to know how many users you have."
http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html

In my mind I think an advanced version of Anki-droid where the mentor can see your progress at learning words and record new words and phrases for you remotely would be cool.
Then you could also log in a habit tracking section if you spend 10 mins every day talking or not.
Other useful things might be a list of great TV you can watch together with subtitles. These are all different things that can kind of be done anyway and doesn't need to be in one app but perhaps it helps when it's under one roof and instructing you...

That would be really cool, I really like the habit part and the subtitled tv is brilliant too.

Look forward to speaking about this!