Ready to Learn Languages by Gaming?

The No. 1 reason that most people fail at learning a language is not being able to stick with it. This may sound like the fault of the learners ourselves for having a lack of self-control, perseverance and consistency, but it can’t be further from the truth. Recall the time you decided to learn a language. What was the reason? Was it so you can travel more like a local, experience a foreign culture, meet new people and deepen the bonds with people from that culture you already know? Or was it because you want to memorize words, grammar rules, and sentences like “man eats bread.” Our aspiration is never the problem. The problem is that the daily learning and practicing in the beginning doesn’t look like our beautiful aspiration at all! This is a well documented issue in language teaching, and, under the traditional language learning methods, “requires an unusually high pain tolerance to overcome”, as phrased by a legendary learner we interviewed who taught himself Mandarin Chinese by just reading and using Anki.

So how can we make our daily practices more like the end goal? Games! And I’m not talking about the silly ones you see all the time that make you match words with their meanings and then give you a shinny star! These popular “games” are designed to give you some Pavlovian short-term motivation so you forget about the fact that your 400+ days of winning streak has nothing to do with communication fluency.

This is why we are building “Lost Abroad”, a game that fosters a sense of achievement and self-causation by enabling you to feel the joy of using the language you just learned in practical and meaningful ways. Wanna order coffee but don’t know what to say? No problem! Just listen in on the customers in front of you and click on the words they said to learn them. Once you picked up these words, you can rearrange them to form sentences to make the order. If you get the sentence right, you actually get a cup of coffee. If not, the barista will look a bit confused and you will receive encouraging but informative feedback to help you form the right sentence. To practice, you can make all kinds of different orders and/or play as the barista to make the drinks customer desire by listening to their orders. Everything you do is communicative, practical, feedback oriented and fun!

So how did we come up with all this? We are a team of language teachers and learners who are sick of the current way we learn languages and we are determined to create the perfect experience we dreamed about ourselves. Join our waitlist to embark on this exciting journey together and we can create the future of language learning!