We're a small company obsessed with creating the best language learning programs. Our personal journeys learning languages around the world guide our work. We believe in great teachers. We know that learning languages isn't easy. We'll be honest when there are real challenges, and we'll work with you to get through them.
A simple fact guides our programs: we learn better when we undestand how something works. We are not children and don't learn like them; we thrive on explanations that show us how the parts fit together to form a larger whole. A language is not just an endless set of words and images, but rather the experience of a culture. The Fluenz tutor is front and center providing context, leading learners step-by-step as they advance, acknowledging the difficulties of the journey, and providing the motivation necessary to reach the final goal.
Our philosophy is simple: we think of ourselves when we design our programs. We look at each language, be it Chinese or Italian, and take it apart from the point of view of English. We ask ourselves common sense questions: How does Italian work? What's challenging in Spanish? We then create a path through each language that makes sense to an English speaker trying to learn it. This takes a lot of time, but it's the only way it can be done.
We'll never tell anyone that something is easy when it actually takes real work to master. We'll guide learners one step at a time, explain every single step, and then offer a long series of workouts that emphasize focused practice. After each building block is learned, we go on to the next phase in the learning process. We don't offer 30 languages. But we continue working and building our library slowly, keeping our focus on our users and their experience, and on nothing else.
We find it impossible to learn languages without understanding how they work. When teaching Spanish, for instance, the big immersion companies won't explain how the verb "to be" works ("ser" and "estar"), and they won't provide simple strategies for making sure that the proper word order in a sentence is observed. Their online tutors won't explain anything in English, pointing instead to pictures while repeating words and phrases.
We are idealists when it comes to how technology can revolutionize learning. We've spent years picking apart languages to figure out how best to explain their workings. We create our programs as if they were for ourselves, disregarding the trends in mass-market learning. While "no-explanations immersion" and "easy learning" avoid the costly and time-consuming labor of crafting great explanations for each specific language, we are proud to deliver custom-made work that truly challenges and inspires our users.
