MondlyVR app leverages the power of VR to help us learn new languages in shorter timeframes.
Learning and mastering a new language is no easy task—something I discovered firsthand when I attempted to learn French.
A friend of mine who is a language professor at Colgate University suggested I move to France and immerse myself into various conversations, pay close attention to what was being said, and use the things I see along with the sounds, smells, touch and taste as part of the language learning process. He explained to me that our brains learn faster when you have these mental placeholders as part of the learning process, and told me having these would have me speaking French in no time. This process is known as Effective Repetition, which is basically how babies learn how to speak.
Mondly, a successful language app with over 20 million downloads, and named Facebook’s “Europe, Middle East and Africa App of the Year” for 2017, looks to use this idea to make learning a new language a lot easier in VR with the launch of Mondly VR for Google Daydream.
Mondly VR, which is the first app to use VR, speech recognition, and chatbot technology, works by letting you interact in any of the realistic virtual scenarios that mirror real life experiences you might find yourself in while traveling the globe, such as checking into a French hotel or ordering food in Beijing.
As you participate in the conversation, the back-and-forth builds a basic foundation of a new language with instant feedback on pronunciation, as well as suggestions to enrich your vocabulary, allowing you to participate in a conversation without much trouble. It will even correct you when you’re wrong.
It’s this Immersive Learning Environment that takes cues from sight and sound, along with the dialogue, that shortens the amount of time needed to learn a new language as explained in a 2012 New York Times article.
Since Mondly VR is an app that you can use on your smart phone, you could use the app to give yourself a quick lesson during your flight or in the privacy of your own home. You can learn up to 30 different languages such as, Spanish, French, German, English, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian and more with Mondly VR.
Mondly VR is available for $4.99 during the month of September, after which it returns to $7.99.
