Millions of people use language apps every day to learn new languages. Millions of new downloads of these apps occur every month. For as a good as these apps are, there is always the question what do you do:
1) to supplement your learning, or
2) when you complete the course?
There are a lot of blog articles out there that give recommendations, but all of them essentially leave you on your own. Watch TV shows, read books, flash cards, etc. There isn’t a great structured option for those that want to continue to improve.
Group classes are really popular for a range of activities. Examples include cooking classes, fitness classes like Soul Cycle or CrossFit and dance classes. People really like the structure and the community. But other than in-person language classes, which are more academic, language learning didn’t really have anything similar. We thought a foreign language book club seemed like a great idea and went looking for one. You can sometimes find a local foreign language book club, but that doesn’t help if you don’t live near it. And there isn’t a worldwide online book club.
So our idea is an online foreign language book club because reading level appropriate books is amazing for language learning. Members will be able to enter their preferred language(s) and their level. We’ll use the CEFR for language levels. They’ll be shown a list of available book clubs. A book club is led by a guide and lasts anywhere from 4-12 weeks. For example, a guide could decide to run a book club on Don Quixote in Spanish and have it last 12 weeks for B2-C1 Spanish speakers.
There would be two types of users: 1) guides and 2) members. Guides will choose a book they want to lead and then members will sign up to read that book with that club.
An example 8-week club would consist of:
- An assigned book with about 25-75 pages to be read every week
- 1 video introduction to the book by a language literature expert, who will also guide the club (this is the guide referenced above)
- 2-3 weekly questions from the guide to be answered in their chosen language in an online forum
- Online discussion forum where you can interact with your fellow club members and see their answers
- 2 live video calls to discuss aspects of the book, one half way through and one at the end.
We’re going to conduct a two phase test.
Phase 1: We’re looking for about 20-25 people who want to participate in a Spanish language book club that are at the A2-B1 level. The deadline to register for this is Friday, July 12th.
Phase 2: We’re looking for about 100 users to fill 4-5 book clubs. Languages for phase 2 will be based on demand. So if 25 people sign up for Japanese and only one person signs up for Italian, One of the clubs will be Japanese. Depending on demand, we may run one or two of these book clubs at a more advanced language level, so anyone that is interested in joining a club should sign up regardless of skill level. The deadline to register for Phase 2 is, Friday, September 13th.
Our goal is to be done with testing at the end of 2024 and then have our official launch, with enough guides for at least 20 languages across all skill levels.
Finally, during the testing phase, everything will be free. So if that sounds interesting to you, please sign up! Or sign up to be a guide!