During the course of my master's program, I applied and got selected to join the FAU Digital Academy. One of the top accelerator programs in Germany. A one-year elite initiative for entrepreneurial and tech talents at FAU, educating future digital change makers through working on challenge-based innovation projects with international and interdisciplinary teams to enhance digitization, entrepreneurship, and innovation skills.
I worked on Limmersio. A start-up focused on supporting language learning by using NLP to replace words with the target language in native language texts.
Pitch time!
Language, it’s a very cool thing, isn't it? quite useful. I remember when I was 2 years old trying to learn my first language.
My mom taught me the proper order or a sentence, subject, verb, object.
helped me to create flashcards and spent hours and hours trying to get the proper conjugation, the gender and so on. Right?
NO! Not how it works 😬. It is all about language acquisition.
The main idea
- Acquire language through context
- Maximize input
- Make the whole learning experience a positive thing.
The limmersio method works like this, it is code mixing, you see in the image, spanish words have been replaced by english words.
We wanted to, based on your level, that part is important, follow me, based on your level, we will replace words. Where? Where you currently consume texts on your daily life.
Our core proposal was an app, centered on a browser that modifies web content with our limmersio approach.
Unfortunately our project came to a halt. Lawyers in Germany advised us that it was not going to be legally feasible to modify 3rd party content; however I was glad to see a company doing the same, really well. They got great funding and they are moving forward. Heads-up to Toucan.
The code for the MVP of Limmersio is open source and can be found here.