Meaningful Interaction for Fluency

You know how they say that it takes a village to raise a child? I agree, but I'll extend and warp the metaphor a little further - it takes a village to raise a child (or an adult) to speak. To speak grammatically, knowledgeably... eloquently. One of our main foci at langoLAB is to harness the foreign language-speaking community and to give them a place to interact, so that each user's experience directly benefits other users. My own passion for this stems from personal experience - from feeling isolated in a teacher-centric atmosphere in high school and college. We would sit, facing front, listening to overly complicated grammatical explanations. One person would ask a question, the teacher would answer him and we'd move on to the next task at hand. Or we'd stare down at our books, while someone read a sentence out loud and we'd repeat. Sometimes we wrote tests, sometimes we conjugated verbs, but we lacked the most valuable thing for fluency in a language: interaction with native speakers.

In order to speak well, you need hours of interactions with people fluent in the language you're studying. You need to discuss a variety of topics, recognize different styles, emulate dialects, and otherwise immerse yourself in the language and culture. I haven't forgotten the disillusionment I felt while studying in school. A lot of the indignation is still there, at a system that let me down. At TechStars, we're trying to channel that energy into producing a product that really addresses the problem.