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 word three times in a week, you need that word. No editor could have known it, and no placement test would have found it.
It is why a vocabulary built from your own messages 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 words 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 words you use, and teaches you ten of them a week, in two minutes a day.
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 words have to come back over time, or the exposure disperses. That is the part Glotta adds.
How much time a day does it take?
A couple of minutes more. The point of the method is that the moment you meet the words is the same one you were already texting somebody in; the rest is part of a lesson or a few questions on the keyboard, whenever suits you.
Does it work if I am a beginner?
Yes, and that is the case where the translation earns its keep most. Every course starts with 35 words ready to go, for the first few days, before you have written enough for the vocabulary to be yours.
Which languages does it work in?
Eight: English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Dutch and Turkish. You can follow several courses at once, each with its own vocabulary, and move from one to another with a tap.
The whole loop, in thirty seconds
On the home page the scene assembles itself: you write, the sentence is translated, the words join your set, and the last one you tick off in a chat.