Learning a language by texting
Marta
Madrid
The time is already there
A study app asks for twenty minutes a day at a time you have to find. That is why most people stop: not because the method is wrong, but because those twenty minutes compete with everything else in the day.
Meanwhile that same person spends hours writing messages. That is time nobody has to find, because it is already taken up by something that looks a great deal like a writing exercise.
Your sentences beat a course's
A course teaches sentences an editor chose for everyone: the cat drinks the milk, the pen is on the table. They are correct and they are useless, because you will never say them.
The sentences you write to someone are the opposite: they are yours, they are about your life, and they are exactly the ones you would need to be able to say in the other language. The right material does not have to be found — you are already producing it.
Repetition is already the signal
If you write the same sentence three times in a week, you need that sentence. No editor could have known it, and no placement test would have found it.
It is why a deck built from your own conversations orders itself by importance: real frequency of use is a better ordering than any fixed path through units.
Why texting alone is not enough
Writing in another language exposes you to it, but exposure without recall is forgotten. Reading a translation makes it familiar; producing it again days later is what makes it yours.
So something has to collect the sentences and bring them back just before you would forget them — spaced repetition, the same mechanism flashcards have used for decades, but on material you never had to build by hand.
What a keyboard changes
Language exchange apps work, but they still ask you to open an app and find somebody to talk to. That is a session again.
A keyboard instead lives inside the conversations you were having anyway: there is nothing to start. Glotta is that keyboard — it translates as you write, keeps the sentences you use, and brings them back for review, without you ever having opened anything.
Frequently asked questions
Can you really learn a language by texting?
Writing messages is active production in a real context, which is the condition under which a language sticks best. On its own it is not enough: the sentences have to come back over time, or the exposure disperses. That is the part Glotta adds.
How much time a day does it take?
Not a minute more. The point of the method is that the moment you learn is the same one you were already texting somebody in: there is no session to add to the day.
Does it work if I am a beginner?
Yes, and that is the case where the translation earns its keep most. Glotta ships with a library of curated phrases for the first few days, before you have written enough for the deck to be yours.
Which languages does it work in?
Nineteen, among them Spanish, English, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Arabic. You work on one pair at a time — your language and the one you are learning — and you can change it whenever you like.
The whole loop, in thirty seconds
On the home page the scene assembles itself: you write, the sentence is translated, it stays in the deck, and it comes back when it should.