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Comment by funkaster | Hacker News Reader

The problem is the attitude "this problem is unsolved and no-one seems to be working on it. I'll fix it, even though I'm not an expert in the domain... because coding fix everything".

Don't get me wrong, this is a very common problem for engineers (I'm an engineer and I fall into that trap every now and then). But from the post, what's lacking is actually talking and working head-head with teachers and linguists and people doing language learning research, because, you know... these people have actually spent their whole life trying to teach other people languages. So they might know a thing or two, that an engineer trying to teach himself a language might be missing.

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I'm not sure where you get this.

I studied linguistics in college and one of my cofounders got her degree in linguistics from Harvard. Another of our employees is a computational linguist from Cambridge.

Additionally, all of the curriculum and much of the course methodology itself was designed by teachers who have been teaching languages both online and in the classroom for years.

We have additionally consulted active linguists and educational psychology researchers to see if there is anything else we should be looking at in their fields that we can apply.

This post was about how my understanding of the product I felt I wanted as a customer was formed. Linguists and teachers built the curriculum and work with the engineers here to see how we can apply the ways they want to teach.

If that's the case, then I'm sorry I got the wrong impression, but it was the tone on your post that led me to that. Before your reply I took a look at the about page on your site and saw the diverse team. You should've give them more credit to them and how you searched for that type of support when building the app. Otherwise it's very easy to reach a similar conclusion to the one I got.

The “even though I’m not an expert in the domain... because coding fix everything” part of your stereotype is not accurate in this case (see Scott’s reply), but even if it was, the approach and attitude you criticized is how some of the most original new solutions to tough problems have started. If someone’s bothered to make something, at least give them the benefit of neutrality by evaluating their actual output.

I think the problem with this view is that academic linguistics has a limited amount of useful information to tell people who are trying to learn a language. Absolutely people learning a language need informed linguistic advice. And our understanding of language learning is much less rudimentary than it used to be. But linguistics is a multidisciplinary, multiparadigmatic field in which there is serious disagreement over some very basic questions. Dost of the good language apps definitely include that.

But a lot of language learning is about keeping up motivation and finding ways to access and practice the target language more often, to bring down the barriers to using and communicating in the language. Good software tools can help there, because we can't all afford personal tutors at $30/hour.

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