Language Song Learning
About
An experimental language-learning app that builds a custom curriculum around a user’s favorite foreign-language songs.
Background
Over the past few years, I’ve become a fan of the Japanese music genre City Pop (special shoutouts to Akiko Yano and Taeko Onuki). While I love listening to the songs, and have picked up a few words here and there, I wondered if I could use my natural interest in these songs as context and motivation for language learning.
Concepts
Bespoke curriculum: At the center of the program is a “curriculum engine,” that takes the combined lyrics to a set of songs and breaks them into vocabulary and grammar learning paths. The songs are prioritized, concepts are extracted, and the raw content is formed into lessons.
Custom motivational paths: One of the biggest challenges for new language learners is maintaining motivation. Using songs as the center of the curriculum helps contextualize lessons in a meaningful way. The sequence teaches individual lines, then stanzas, and finally whole songs, so there’s always some learning reward that’s personally valuable to the user.
Dynamic educational tools: I built out several different learning and practice paths based on educational best practice. Spaced-repetition is used to generate exercises, with difficulty gradually ramping up from recognition to recall to production. Exercises are generated on the fly to maintain desired difficulty, and past mistakes are turned into future challenges.