Designing a language learning website as a product of my journey to be a polyglot.
How the insights from my Spanish learning journey, as well as those from others, are being integrated as features for a website.
Learning a new language can be a long and difficult journey and getting a language partner makes that journey easier.(I am not trying to depict language learning as a gruelling task, just highlighting the efforts put into the process). Having a language partner comes with a lot of benefits and that is why I got one to help me learn Spanish. About my Spanish learning journey, it has been going very well. I am now able to have simple conversations with natives. I ask them however, not to speak too fast.
“ No entendí. Por favor, ¿ puede repetir eso más lentamente ? “
Once, I had a conversation with a native and she congratulated me on my Spanish . No need to tell you how proud I was feeling.
What is a language partner and how can he/she help ?
A language partner is a person you exchange with in order to improve your language skills. Mostly, language partners learn each other languages. And this kind of relationship comes with a lot of advantages.
- Immediate feedback, you will be more likely to remember a correction if it is made on the spot and in a real-life situation. My friend corrects me after a few sentences and I take notes.
- Immersion, by having real conversations with a native, you are more likely to master small talk and everyday life expressions. You will also sound more natural.
- Mutual support and motivation, it is always useful to have someone that motivates you along the way. My language partner encourages me when I am beating myself up ( which I do a lot ) and it is quite helpful.
- Ressources sharing, there are many ressources on the internet to learn a language. You won’t necessarily know which ones are the best. I myself come accross ressources to learn French that teach expressions no one uses .Your partner can serve as guide and provide ressources too.
- Cultural exchange, you can learn about the culture of your language partner. This is my favourite part as I love learning about people’s cultures.
“ Learning a language is like gaining a window into someone else’s culture.”
As you might already know, I am incorporating the methods I use to learn Spanish as features on a website. It is a personal project . (Here, I am not really sticking to the traditional UX method but it is something along these lines tho).
I started by reasearching about language partners but rather than sending questionnaires , I went to a Reddit sub called r/languagelearning and read for hours the opinions and experiences of people about finding and learning with language partners. The vast majority of them were agreeing that having a language partner was a good thing. However, there was a problem they often mentioned: finding a partner they really connected with or that was a serious learner could take time.
I wrote the insights I gained from this research session and mindmapped about a feature that I soon called the “ Language partner feature”. The problem statement was “ Users need a way to practice real-life conversations over shared interests with serious language partners. “
This feature should allow users to quickly get the best matches to practice with, to save their time and energy.
The user flow for this section of the website will consist of 4 simple steps for new users.
Step 1: User input native and target languages
Step 2: User chooses interests
Step 3: User input learning goals
Step 4: User chooses from suggested partners
As you already guessed ( because you are smart ), the users will be matched based on their mutual interests. As for the seriousness of the users, it will be measured through their participation, and their involvment on the website. That is the most reliable way I found for now.
Hope you enjoyed reading this article. I will share more about this personal project and my Spanish learning journey in next articles.
¡Chao!
