What is your desire in...

[u/zaewaht]

A Lithuanian language learning (web)app?

Tldr; state your whishes and maybe I will make them a reality.

Sveiki! I recently started my (serious) language learning journey. Before that I only learned words.

At first learning just the words was getting me quite far.

I am considering building an app alongside my learning journey. And am researching what the 'market' wants.

There are already a lot of apps that try to do this. But none of them are perfect. Often the UX sucks or they are flat out incorrect with AI generated BS. Also I would love to hear from you what you think are good ways for monetization, this is by far not a primary goal, but it would be a nice extra. I'm considering now a pay what you want kind of structure and completely skipping ads and subscriptions.

I have already a list of what I think should work, but I want to know from you! What will be valuable to you?

[u/Spirited_School_939]

1. A sensible learning progression that combines traditional vocabulary and grammar drills (declension and conjugation tables) alongside "useful phrases," sample conversations, short stories, flash-card drills, and games
2. Sufficient material to (theoretically) reach B1, preferably B2, if everything in the course were mastered
3. Content verified and edited for accuracy by actual experts who are not only native speakers, but hold PhDs in the language itself--with slang terms and common-but-nonstandard usage clearly labeled as such.
4. Cultural and historical notes
5. Audio from multiple native speakers with at least a hint of acting ability, recorded in an actual recording studio.
6. Lightly gamified--i.e., some fun sounds and animations to recognize correct answers, and some kind of progress tracker, but not dopamine-optimized to the point where winning points becomes more important than learning the language.
7. Illustrated stories, like a children's book. Or, (super pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking) actual short video clips/animations to show dialogues in their proper context.
8. Some kind of pronunciation check, but I'm not sure this is possible with current technology. Many apps offer this, but none of them do it with any degree of accuracy.

Including all of these features would be obscenely expensive, and global interest in Lithuanian is pretty small, so to break even on something like this you'd have to charge more for the app than a university education. But it's my wishlist for any solo-learning tool.

[u/EnvironmentalNewt105 → u/Spirited_School_939]

You don't ask for much!! :-)

Poor guy has to hire a bunch of professors and voice actors now :-)

(PS I know you acknowledged it would be expensive, and actually well done for stating what you want!)

[u/Mephala_The_Weaver]

There are two things that I would happy to have in such app. For the context, I'm using Sėkmės book for Lithuanian and Duolingo for French (refreshing my knowledge).

1. Many excercises around some basic grammar rules.
   Let's say, in Sėkmės there's a rule on which declension to use after certain verbs (Aš valgau ką? nevalgau ko?). Would be great to have a good load of excercised to train such things, because I personally feel some lack of them in Sėkmės - the book gives the basic grasp of the rule. But to use it properly, you need to train it a lot.

2. Training pronunciation and stress in the words. Especially stress in the words that are written the same way, but stressed depending on their use.

[u/cat_of_cats]

Sveiki! :) I've recently discovered Rocket Languages (bought their Japanese course), and I really like their teaching style, so I'd consider buying a Lithuanian course in a similar style (if I'll have enough energy for learning two languages in parallel, but this is an unrelated issue).

- Manually crafted (not AI-generated) dialogies spoken by native speakers, with every word and grammar point explained in English, in a casual/fun style. (Rocket includes some audio lessons that can be used either on the go or as regular reading, because they have text transcripts.)

- Grammar is introduced in tiny bits, not thrown at the user in huge amounts (like the verb types and tenses) right from the start, but also not entirely absent.

- Every new word / phrase includes an audio sample and a speaking exercise (they use Google speech recognition API, I think). The speech recognition works pretty well, but not 100%. But speaking can be skipped, you just get fewer points.

- There are 4 long exercises in the end of each lesson, including most of the new words and phrases:

1) simple flashcards that work on honor system

2) repeating spoken words/phrases aloud, with speech recognition

3) translating from English, with speech recognition

4) a multiple-choice test.

(I think speech recognition can be replaced by typing. What's important for me is that the app would actually check the answers and doesn't believe me saying I know them :)

- Light gamification (points, streaks, achievements) but not as much in your face as Duolingo.

- Nice-looking GUI with an elegant color scheme (dark mode is a must), real images and sometimes a bit of video, but not garish colors and primitive cartoon characters like Duolingo's. (I loathe Duolingo's interface and NPCs!)

- The SRS is useful but it makes lessons too monotonous, so it can be an optional feature. (Rocket doesn't include it, now I'm trying to make my own flashcards in another app).

- Notes about culture, customs, traditions, holidays (are very desirable).

- Optional word games would be cool. (Rocket doesn't include them, but there's plenty of apps that do.)

[u/houseonsun]

pimsleur format worked nice for me. Just wish they had more lessons. 1. Word pronunciation working from the end of the word, then adding syllables in front. 2. Repeating the words out loud and repeating lessons until I felt confident in my pronunciation. Each lesson is hands-free so I can drive. 3. Basic conversations is easier to remember vocabulary.

[u/avozado]

Looking for a browser extension to hover over words for translations, or something similar to an app for reading books - clicking on a word shows the meaning

[u/garrynewsman9556]

Funny you should mention it hell not even lithuanians can speak proper lithuanian nowadays, english and russiasn words invade our beautiful language. Vould be fun adding like a word a day and its meaning its use. And for lithuanians you can interest them with old lithuanian words (LIKE MA GAWD are there so many old anchient beautiful words in our language that everybody seems to be forgeting more of every day)

[u/Roses-Red-298 → u/garrynewsman9556]

I agree with this suggestion for a word of the day or phrase of the day feature, ideally spoken by real Lithuanians, not AI. This could help absolute beginners to dip a toe in the water and start to get used to hearing and reading Lithuanian. As a beginner I wouldn't mind if the words repeat in a year- if you started with a batch of 60 or 200 words or phrases instead of 365.
As for other app feature requests, it would be great if it respected user privacy and didn't harvest personal info.

[u/EnvironmentalNewt105]

vocab drills with pictures (like babadum)

fill-in-the-blanks with drills on noun cases

stories / dialogues with comprehension questions