Guidance for language-learning app

[Jerry Muelver]

I've been away from RunRev for several years, and from programming in general, but now feel vague stirrings for a call to action.

I have in mind a language-learning app. The basic idea is to present a text chunk in the new language, and provide two buttons on the card, one to pop up an "old language" translation of the text chunk in a box, and the other to give an audio reading of the text chunk. The translation pieces should be separable from the basic app, so that multiple language versions of the app can be easily produced. I have developed some other language-facilitating tools on other platforms - see http://idomondo.org

I have no doubt that this is eminently do-able in RunRev. My initial question is -- has it already been done? I am not looking for fame and fortune here, just for a compelling tool to promote my utopian "one language for the world" aspirations. If someone already has such a tool available, I would love to hear about it, since it could save me about a year of development time.

[Mark]

Hi Jerry,

I have made several educational language applications for clients of mine, but I believe I haven't done anything exactly equal to your idea. I don't see why one would need an entire year for it, unless you intend to create all exercises yourself. If you like, you can contact me directly to discuss this in more detail see (http://www.economy-x-talk.com/contact.html for contact info).

Best regards,

Mark

[Jerry Muelver]

Thanks, Mark. I now the app itself would only take me a week or two, since I already have most of the pieces here in some of my previous RunRev experiments. I just didn't want to get into duplicating an effort someone else may already have done and polished up. And yeah, the biggest part will be using the tool after building it. Instructional design is always a challenge. Teaching a natural language can be especially ghastly, but teaching a constructed language is actually kind of fun. I could turn the whole thing over to the Rosetta Stone people, but they want roughly $300,000 US for the job, and will make a product too costly for my global target learners to buy and use.

I got the idea from my own development experiment in HTML - http://idomondo.org/ido-001-eng.htm - but thought maybe I could do a slicker package in RunRev.