Jakso's family has deep roots in Kerala, but he grew up with his parents in Jamshedpur. Because of this, Jakso grew up speaking Hindi fluently, but he could never speak Malayalam - even though he could understand the language. This became a problem every time he went back to Kerala to visit his family. Later on, he faced a similar issue when he went to Kolkata for his internship in 2021. One day, he opened the Duolingo app with the hope of learning both Malayalam and Bengali. But to his surprise, he couldn’t find either of these languages on Duolingo. In fact, he couldn’t find any Indian languages on most popular language-learning apps apart from Hindi—despite the fact that Bengali, for example, is the fifth most spoken language in the world.
So Jakso tried a different approach by using Indian language-learning apps. But these apps, in his opinion, had another problem: they were poorly designed, and the content simply wasn’t engaging enough to learn from.
It was at this point that he realized the Indian language-learning ecosystem was broken.
By 2022, he had started researching language-learning techniques, and in August 2023, he began building PortalLearn, with a focus on Indian languages. They very recently launched their app in March 2024, and in the very first month, they already had 63 users. By the next month, that number had jumped to 250.
While the app is completely free for users right now, Jaxo is planning to launch paid subscription plans in the future once he has enough users on the platform. While PortalLearn is still very much in scrappy startup mode and figuring out its monetization…
The next company on this list has already figured that part out.
PortalLearn is an app that teaches 9 Indian languages and aims to help you learn these languages through interactive stories. The languages offered include Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Kannada, Marathi and Gujarati. With this app, you can dive into captivating narratives, learning vocabulary and grammar naturally through context. Through these interactive stories, you can grasp language concepts, making the learning process more enjoyable and effective. These interactive stories and lessons focus on helping you hone your listening, reading, and comprehension skills.
PortalLearn offers personalization, allowing you to choose your own learning path with topics that interest you, be it cuisine, tourism, or animals. Unlike rigid course structures that dictate a predefined learning path, the platform offers you the flexibility to start with the topics that you prefer. This promotes personalized learning and keeps you motivated by allowing you to pursue your passions while acquiring the necessary language skills.
With its gamified approach, you can earn gems for completing stories and lessons as you progress. This incentive ensures that you’re not only having fun while learning, but also encourages participation. It also provides a tangible reward for progress, ensuring you stay motivated. Furthermore, PortalLearn incorporates flashcards to help you learn letters of the specific language that you’re learning more efficiently.
What makes PortalLearn different from the likes of Duolingo, Babbel and LanguageCurry is that PortalLearn helps you learn Indian languages through story context. This approach is based on Comprehensible Input method.
While PortalLearn isn’t suitable for complete beginners and doesn’t have a writing practice feature yet, it’s still an awesome app to help you practice other equally essential language skills.
I love this app! I am using it to learn my mother tongue which I sadly did not pick up very well. Nice to have this app which helps us learn Indian languages, it's much required. I like how there's a bit of gamification.
