Fluenz.com – Education Goes Mobile
[Ed: Again, I am not here to say, “Hey, you have to learn Chinese since China has the massive market and you never know one day you should expand your business there”. This blog is driven by the latest Internet/Mobile technology mainly from and to China. I have been blogging about how to learn Chinese several times, the reason is to show you the way how we are educated can be dramatically changed. Fluenz.com is all about the change, and I think they are doing it brilliantly.]
Inspiration+Innovation=be fluent, that’s the slogan of Fluenz.com. Fluenz develops language learning software to emulate the memorable experiences of one-on-one tutoring, with the goal of getting learners to reach functional fluency in languages in the least amount of time. You can learn Chinese and Spanish by using Fluenz.
Unlike many other online learning service such as ChinesePod and ChineseLearnOnline which adopt the Podcast technology to teach Chinese and offline language learning applications that rely exclusively on text and graphics, Fluenz Mandarin 1+2 and Spanish 1 use videos to seamlessly recreate the experience of a real life tutor. You can get more ideas from a few demos on site.
Alexi of Fluenz emailed me saying, “We are confident that our programs are the best and certainly the most technologically advanced of any available”. I am not sure if it is the best learning tool on desktop, but if we count its new product called Fluenz Mobile 1.0, it is the first ever commercial education tool I knew running on mobile devices. With Fluenz mobile 1.0 any sessions of Mandarin 1+2 can be transferred to your smartphone (the phones must be running Windows Mobile 5.0, which is the bit I am not sure about it. Smartphones of WM 5.0 are not popular at all.) through your computer. So addition to walkie-talkie and listening to the music, now you can watch the session and learn yourself a new language on the mobile.
Thanks to the Fluenz team, I got the Spanish 1 for a trial, a red and lovely box. I don’t know how far I can learn the Spanish since I am not good at language at all, but I can feel the passion inside it, the passion of teaching and learning with the aid of the new technology.