gwyner

Excellent question!

So when I started this project, I had around 70 development houses I was looking through, which I weeded down to a 5-company short list. We had a bunch of talks and collected a bunch of estimates. Those estimates blew me away. They ranged from $175k-600k. I ultimately hired two of them for Proof of Concept work, just to see what the experience was going to be like working with them. The best of the companies was REALLY good, and they were, unfortunately, REALLY expensive.

Just to add a native iPad/Android tablet app (which I'd imagined would be not PARTICULARLY hard) was an additional $100-150k.

I guesstimated my stretch goals, but I think in light of the iPad port estimates, I don't think $200k is unreasonable at all.

That said, there's a whole different discussion as to whether I should be hiring such an expensive company in the first place, when I can get it done much cheaper through hiring my own programming team or just hiring a cheaper dev house. In my opinion, this whole app hinges upon quality execution. There are other flashcard apps that already exist. My primary goal is to make this thing phenomenally good. So I'm going to do whatever is needed to hire that company. They really were that good. :P

Maybe I SHOULD be worried about Duolingo, but I'm not. One of the things that's been interesting about building this system and the pronunciation trainers over the last few years is that they continue to sell.

My pronunciation trainers are hard to use and they're clunky. There's a 45 minute installation video. It's ridiculous. It's the sort of product that should have died really rapidly. (It's one of the reasons I've wanted to make this app so much; I really dislike having to have a 45 minute installation video for my own product :P )

And yet they've continue to sell and do well, and it's because the people who use them KNOW that they work. They SEE the results. And so they recommend them to friends, and friends continue buying them, and so on.

Language learning is a truly unique business, as far as I'm concerned. The second you give someone the ability to actually become fluent in a language, they become a zealot for your product for every year of the rest of their lives. They recommend your stuff to everyone, forever. So if I can make a product here that makes a bunch of people actually fluent in languages, then it will not be hard to turn this into a very, very sustainable business.

Duolingo does a bunch of things right, and people often have a really good time when they use it, but I've never met anyone who's told me that they became fluent in French through Duolingo.

For sure. You lose whatever you don't maintain. It's not PERMANENT loss - once you hit the ability to hold a conversation, it becomes much easier to bring it back, but it's not going to be fresh and available and solid. My French/Russian/Italian are all kind of a mess at this point.

But! You can bring them back with 2 weeks of watching a TV series. For me, that's pretty comfortable, and so I'm okay with letting them atrophy. I have an article discussing this and a video of my recovered French over here: https://fluent-forever.com/when-you-forget-a-language/

I do know of some polyglots who want their languages in tip-top shape - Alexander Argüelles to be specific - and therefore work their asses off to keep them there. I don't have that kind of work ethic and language maintenance isn't a high enough priority for me to do that. Honestly, I like LEARNING them more than keeping the ability to speak them, but your own mileage may vary.

When I do immersions, I carry around a notebook where I write down all the missing chunks to my language. Words I misunderstood, words I wanted to know, etc.

Then I spend an hour or so creating flashcards to fill in those holes, and an hour or so reviewing flashcards. (If I'm going to do an immersion, I double my daily study time)

What I found is that the study methods DON'T seem to matter all that much in the middle of immersion in terms of how rapidly you progress, which is going to feel weird and slightly disheartening. But AFTER the fact, you'll find that your overall retention is higher. So I think it's worth the time to actually study in this way, but your mileage may vary.

(As for other activities, do whatever you need to do to hear as much German as you can. Go on museum tours in German, go watch movies, go hang out in bars, go buy stuff. And run away from the Austrians looking to practice their English)

It's not just pictures alone; it's pictures in the context of sentences, which is how we learn words like ones-self in our native languages, too.

For instance: I gave him a pat on the back.

He gave himself a pat on the back.

Those are two stories that LOOK different. You'd choose different pictures for them, and when you're playing with that sentence and deciding which words to learn, you'd make different choices. (i.e., you'd probably skip the word 'him' in the first sentence, since you'd probably have seen and learned that word earlier in your studies).

It's one of the reasons why pre-packaged flashcards will flounder with abstract ideas like "himself" - how on earth would you know that "himself" is the proper word for "He gave __ a pat on the back" unless you had the experience of specifically choosing that sentence to learn the word "himself", and specifically chose a picture of some self-congratulatory guy for that sentence?