The market for learning the Lithuanian language is quite small.
While the market for "learn Spanish as a second language" is bigger, the much more valuable tool is one that teaches English as a first language.
What does it need?
An "input a writing sample so we can assess your starting level" tool. For an elementary student, this can be a picture of handwriting. For an adult, it is probably a recent email or blog post.
There is a balance between "the app should know the user understands words", and "asking about 10000 words at 10 seconds each is about 30 hours of unsatisfying interaction".
To a certain extent, the app will find out over time if there are gaps in a person's linguistic knowledge.
Three levels of education.
- The first level addresses "students who will struggle to read the directions". This will have to rely on pictures for many words (ball, dog, elephant) and that external education will teach them the concepts behind core verbs and grammar. The goal is to establish the ability to sound out words, and to sight-read at least 500 words.
- The second level attempts to reach a Basic English vocabulary of roughly 4000 base-words, plus derivative forms 💡 ladder, melancholy, and butter are words that likely would be included. The goal is to have a corpus that is sufficient to define any word in the English language.
- The third level attempts to include any SAT ⚙️ Scholastic Aptitude Test; the most-common test used for undergraduate college admissions words. Words like urchin, catacombs, and grandiose ⚙️ all around place 25000 on a recent SUBTLEX corpus of subtitle content would be included; as well as words like acerbic, alleviate, and conduit. At the limits would be technical words that are meaningless outside of a field of context 💡 the meaning of butanal/butyraldehyde is unintelligible if you have not studied organic chemistry.
What are the activities for the third level?
The goal is to balance "fun" with "education".
- Which of these 8 words has the given definition?
- Spell this word based on an audio sample.
- Which of these words is the antonym of a given word?
- Analogies / "word ratios". ⚙️ for example: DOG : PUPPY :: CAT : ??? has the answer of KITTEN.
- Filtering - which of these words are types of rocks? Words for people?
- Complete the sentence - which word fits?
Many of these examples very similar to tests like the SAT. Which, generally, is not considered "fun". But, with proper motivation and rewards, maybe that can be changed.