Why more than 10,000 wait weeks to take a shortcut
By: Maria Teresa Gonzalez
Tags: Technical Analysis, Language, Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, Language Learning

Mastering a foreign language, as it turns out, takes between six and eight years. That’s six to eight years for expats or international students who get exposed to their target language every single day. And therefore much more for the occasional learner.

With this in mind, it’s no surprise that the brainy engineers of Silicon Valley put their heads down to find a shortcut to fluency. They came up with… an artificial intelligence?

A few months ago, I started hearing about something called Thinkin. It’s an invitation-only platform that costs €50 a month and promises the most powerful language learning routine ever made. The app is rumored to have a waiting list of more than 10,000 people.

“We have the metropolitan techies in Europe at this point,” Thinkin told me in an interview. The waiting list is actually 12,000 people long and growing rapidly, they said.

“Thinkin is the future of language learning,” mentioned Sergej Popow, one of the firm’s first customers. “ Once I started using Thinkin, I couldn’t imagine learning Spanish any other way.”

When I first heard about Thinkin, I was very skeptical. Isn’t the vast content on the internet already enough for learning languages? How could any start-up get away with charging a premium for something that was already available free? I suspected that it might be one of those expensive products that primarily function as a status symbol. But I was curious, so I spent several weeks testing it out. And it turns out that the hype is completely justified, at least if you’re the kind of person who is serious about making true progress in a foreign language.

Signing up for Thinkin isn’t easy. First, you fill out a questionnaire about your language level and motivation to become fluent to join the sign-up queue. Then, when you’re picked from the queue, there’s a mandatory onboarding session in which a language-specific expert gives you a live tutorial over video. Thinkin’s top languages are Spanish and German. It also supports French, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, and English, and is working on adding Swedish, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic, and Russian.

Thinkin is aimed at people who have spent a lot of time and resources learning a foreign language but have hit a plateau in their learning.

Some of the app’s promises sound too good to believe — such as making users think in the foreign language simply by asking them to make sentences on their own from the ground up or enabling language learners to impress even native speakers by suggesting the most impactful way of expressing any specific idea in the foreign language. But the kind progress measurements Thinkin does, I haven’t seen before. Like keeping track of how my sentences have improved compared to the day or the week before. Or telling me that with my vocabulary, I just did the equivalent of a 20 minutes conversation in German.

These features will appeal most to power users who need to learn a foreign language for their professional career or who settled abroad. Thinkin said that the app is targeted at people with at least A2 level of language proficiency and who have spent a lot of time and resources learning a foreign language but have hit a plateau in their learning. So they are not getting better at the language and are lacking the experience to speak the language independently.

Thinkin promises to help those at an intermediate-to-advanced level reach fluency in the shortest time of three months. Partly, that’s because Thinkin is based on the science of discovery learning, which means that from day one you start to develop the intuition for the language — the same power as you have in your native tongue.

I am notoriously bad at languages. But with Thinkin, I was surprised that although my vocabulary was limited, I could easily have a 15-minute conversation with my German colleagues which I couldn’t have done earlier. It made the usually tough task of speaking German feel less like a test and more like a playground which was only about having fun and learning from mistakes (everything except a test).

It’s strange, on one level, to think about learning a language in a classroom. Always it felt like the more theory I consume the faster I will have all the tools I need to speak the language. For the most time, app developers claimed gamification was the best that could amplify language learning. Yet learners aren’t becoming fluent. In fact, 90% of language learners never reach fluency. As per research, despite all the resources available, each year learning a language is getting harder than before. The inefficiencies in language learning are huge. Thinkin says removing these inefficiencies is their driving force.