I am more than excited this week to announce that JADI is now available on iOS, Android and Web. Yohana and I have been working on this project for many months and before that even there have been many POCs (proof of concept).
As we set about taking Yohana's amazing language learning content and putting it into an application we had several intentional pivots that I'm going to share in this blog post.
Day lessons
Initially we had been grouping the unit lessons by theme and what we noticed is that we started to have content that was getting larger and larger for each unit. Some students might enjoy the challenge of learning many new phrases or words in a single session but other students may not have as much time.
So we decided to make the basic unit in the app a "day lesson" and each of those days as something that could be completed in less than 20 minutes. This was one of the suggestions that came from an early beta tester. It was a lot of work to break down the lessons into smaller chunks, but it was worth it to make the app more approachable.
Input Theory Hypothesis
Input Hypothesis by Stephen Krashen is a theory on language acquisition that suggests that people gain fluency best by being exposed to comprehension input, and lots of it.
This means that when learning a new language it is far more important to expose oneself to reading and listening to interesting content (at the appropriate level) than being asked and quizzed to provide output (user submitted answers).
Most apps have a gamification aspect where a user gets points for answering questions correctly. While we do have questions that seek to validate a user's understanding it isn't the main aspect of the app and not the primary means of learning we encourage in JADI.
After realizing that the app leaned output heavy, we decided to swing the balance back towards high quality input so students could be more exposed to content, sometimes repeating, via reading and listening to encourage familiarity and understanding.
We are really proud of the podcast section of our site, if you haven't used that yet, take a look at the ability to look up words you may be unfamiliar with as you listen to Yohana share about Indonesian culture.
Dialogue
Finally we decided to include our own voices, conversations and names in the app itself by showing a dialogue between Yohana and myself at the beginning of each themed lesson. This helps students hear real conversational Indonesian and show what this is ultimately all about, conversations.
Having conversations with people is really what we aim to do with JADI. It is great to learn more about a different language and culture. To be able to read stories and understand a place as magical as the largest Archipelago in the world. However, the real thing we want to fully share with people is the ability to have conversations. It takes courage, confidence and tools to learn how to speak with native speakers and have them understand you, and also understand them. Nearly every language learning resource that teaches Indonesian doesn't properly distinguish between informal/colloquial speaking and textbook formal Indonesian.
We believe we have created the greatest resource currently available with our app and podcast. Thanks for reading about this behind the scenes look at what we did and how we changed the app to best help language learners grow.
-Bijan
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