Yes, I can understand and empathize with your experience. Quite honestly our current focus is more for B1+ students. That 0 -> 1 / bootstrapping of the language is much better served by traditional material that is less talking / listening-heavy.
I’m one of those 1/500 in multiple languages, and I love resources like these.
That said, if they want to make money, the beginner / false beginner market is huge.
I do think immersion is generally better, but it is not only harder, an AI app doesn't seem like it could do the right kind of immersion (missing body language, visual cues, seeing the mouth movements, and all sorts of other things one gets from watching a podcast, or even better, in person interaction).
The promise and potential of LLM based language learning apps is that you can cross that gap to full immersion in a way that has never been possible before.
Please be more ambitious.
No, that's not correct.
First off, you can provide immersion with static books. A common favorite here on HN is Lingua Latina per se illustrata ["the Latin tongue explained by itself"].
Second off, there are two reasons that traditional material doesn't do this. The biggest one is student demand; people are afraid of immersion. The second is that the traditional approach is faster. It's lower quality, and it tops out well below the level you hope to reach, but it's faster, not slower. It takes babies a year to learn to say they're hungry. It takes an elementary school class studying a foreign language less than a day.
And it's bootstrapped by 1+ year of listening before being even able to speak, let alone talk intelligibly. That's not really an appealing process to anyone beyond that age.
Listening and reading. Talking goes last. See Steve Kaufmann, for example
If you are an adult and want to spend, say, a couple of hours each week learning a language from scratch, especially without constant access to a native speaker, your initial progress will be much faster if you study grammar and vocabulary in a traditional class from a text book, than if you just try to pick up patterns from listening to the TV or something.
I can't source my claim. I attended a public lecture years ago from a researcher about exactly this misconception.