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Why I Started PortalLearn
I've always been interested in learning languages, but I am not naturally great at picking them up.
In 2020, stuck at home because college classes were being held online due to Covid, I wanted to learn how to read and write Urdu. I managed to do it, but had to jump between different YouTube channels as no single channel offered a straightforward path.
Then, in 2021, when I was in Kolkata for an internship, I wanted to learn Bangla, but again, I couldn't find any single YouTube channel that would help me learn the language. I looked for courses and e-books online and the only reliable and structured e-book I could find was a book - Teach Yourself Bengali - written in 1994 by an Englishman.
And as someone said that if there's a book you'd like to read, but hasn't been written yet, write it yourself.
I decided to build an app that would help me, and others, learn Indian languages.
Why PortalLearn is built different from other language learning apps
I didn't want PortalLearn to be a copy of Duolingo, but for Indian languages. Mainly because I'd tried Duolingo before and found it ineffective.
Instead, I started researching and ideating from scratch on what could be the best - in terms of efficacy and fun - way to learn a language. I went through several academic papers, tried a ton of apps such as Duolingo, Mondly, Babebel, and even Indian apps such as Language Curry, Multibhashi and Bhasha Sangam, and after months of brainstorming on my PG's terraces and parks of Delhi, I decided that interactive stories was the way to go.
The most popular method that most apps follow is too boring, repetitive, ineffective and has to rely on gimmicks such as badges, streaks and so on. They are helpful, no doubt, but the learning process itself is not very engaging.
Watching movies and TV shows is really engaging, and does help in learning a new language, but finding content, taking out 20 minutes - 2 hours or more to watch them, keeping track of new words and their meanings, is too cumbersome.
But I think audio-visual, interactive stories, in the way we've implemented in PortalLearn, offers the best way you can learn a language. And the more stories you play, the more and faster you'll learn.
Why We "Leverage" AI Sparingly
PortalLearn uses AI only sparingly. All our dialogues are translated by actual people whose mother tongue is the language that they're translating. Most of our dialogues are also recorded by actual humans, and the few that are not, are constantly being replaced.
For all the development in the field of language technology, most of them aren't capable enough of capturing the nuances of even popular Indian languages.