Malan Chat

@drewface I'm really flattered that you think so Andrew! The background here is that I've studied 7 languages on a serious level and dabbled in a few others over the years, and I know a lot about the language learning process. I'm also very conscientious when it comes to the language learning process, and I've found that my progress is hampered by the fact that I do not feel comfortable speaking to real people until I get to a certain level of proficiency, because I don't want people to be frustrated. Creating an AI chatbot in the age of voice agents seemed like a no brainer to get myself and other people like me over that hump.

I've used a ton of software over the years and there are some good applications and a lot of bad ones out there. But what I haven't seen is anybody build an app that brings together all of the good things on one platform. I wanted to create a place where people can learn a language entirely on site without having to navigate between many different applications because I think it's just better to keep everything together. If all of your language learning data is housed in one place, it makes it much easier to keep track of what you know, what you don't know, and in the coming months I plan to add an additional AI layer which will analyze user data and autonomously tell you what you don't know and what you need to focus on.

@paris_mitton Great question. I think that Duolingo is too wedded to juicing their KPIs and as such language learning isn't their first priority. They want a captive audience whom they can convince that they are learning while they tap a few words on a screen for 3 minutes a day. My vision for Malan Chat is very much pedagogy-first, and I know that there are enough learners out there who would appreciate that approach much more.

@parth_agrawal2 Thank you for your kind words Parth! So, the core of language learning is that there are no shortcuts here. Many solutions misleadingly promise that you can learn without putting in the elbow grease, and that's just absurdly incorrect, think about all of the people you've met who have a hundreds day long streak on Duolingo who are still unable to actually produce or understand anything in that language. The way to get around that is the same as it's ever been: lots of input, lots of output. Malan Chat gives learners the ability to do just that so that they may be confident that they know what they are doing. When you make mistakes in the chat, you are able to click on your mistakes and see why you got it wrong, a really in-depth explanation which would disrupt the conversation flow if you were speaking with a real speaker of the language but which is completely nondisruptive in the chat interface. To study vocabulary, you have advanced spaced repetition algorithms at your disposal so that you may do your flashcards in a way that has proven scientific efficacy.