I'm Michael Campbell and I'm the founder of Glossika.
The reason why we started this company
was really to focus on how we can solve the problem
of getting people to breakthrough to fluency.
Most products on the market,
they're not worried about,
you know, getting people to the fluency level.
And so we've actually defined what fluency is,
and we've helped people breakthrough to fluency many times.
What you'll find here in Asia,
most of the problems with a lot of the students
is that they're very good at memorizing vocabulary
and they can pass lots of vocabulary tests,
but they're very,
very bad at actually
creating coherent sentences,
and putting those words into sentences.
So when you get sentences you have
the syntax, the order,
also a lot of grammatical stuff that goes in there.
And so this is kind of confusing for the students.
So memorizing a lot of vocabulary seems to be the easy way
to kind of get a false sense of fluency
but it's not real fluency.
The way we define fluency
is being able to say a full sentence
in one breath.
It flows from beginning to end.
So like I just said
a lot of the systems out there are focused on vocabulary.
We actually take a different approach.
We focus on syntax.
And syntax what that really means is
the position of all of the different elements in the sentence.
Where your subjects and your verbs and your objects are
in the sentence.
And so we have a list of a whole bunch
of different kind of syntactic structures,
we map them out to all of the different languages,
and then each of those syntactic structures, they have
placeholders where all of the nouns go.
And so
a lot of it is really driven by functional words, like verbs.
And so instead of focusing on
teaching our learners a whole lot of nouns,
we try to focus more on the functional words
and get more verbs out there.
And so when I come across
a different language learning method that kind of teaches me
the numbers, the days of the week or
you know even animals, I just think:
"Wow, this isn't really gonna do a whole lot for me."
Let's take for example numbers and days of the week.
Really important concepts but
but you can actually teach those in the context of full sentences
rather than just memorizing,
you know: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
because when you start speaking another language,
they usually have to change
depending on the context
that they appear in those sentences.
There's a lot of grammar attached to things.
When you're actually practicing the syntactic structures,
you're not really aware that you're doing that
because we kind of do that in the background for the user.
But when they're practicing all of these syntactic structures,
they start to recognize the patterns.
And when the patterns start to emerge,
then they start to gain fluency.
They can now use these patterns
and replace the words with their own words
that they want to use in other situations
away from the practice session.
so Glossika really focuses on syntax
to build fluency.
So based on our definition of fluency
if you're able to get through a whole sentence flowingly,
then
the way you're able to do that is with the syntactic patterns.
So when you're using Glossika, you may not even realise or notice
any of the syntax that's behind the scenes working for you,
but you should be able to pick up on the patterns.
And so picking up on the patterns now means
that you're able to use these same patterns
outside of this training session
anywhere else.
And so that gives you a sense of fluency,
That's really hard to get
when all you have is just vocabulary.
So, the way that we actually deliver this,
we deliver it through our pipeline called:
"Glossika's Spaced Repetition."
And so this spaced repetition thing,
we've been working on this for many many years,
it's an algorithm
that really focuses on
how often you're supposed to get exposure
to certain sentences and patterns
over a period of time,
a period of several days.
And this is timed together with your sleep patterns.
And so it's supposed to build up your memory,
not just of the vocabulary,
because we're not really focused on vocabulary,
we're really focused on the syntactic patterns.
When people go to sleep at night,
something happens called: "long-term potentiation"
or it's memory consolidation.
So your brain kind of takes
all of the events that happened during that day
and says: "yeah...
A lot of that stuff is sort of...
unimportant,
like, it just doesn't seem important to me"
and it throws out the garbage.
And so, the things that get left over are things that seem to have
some sort of connection with your past.
It's like, oh well, something happened today,
that kind of seems more important
and that has more anchors in the mind,
maybe it has sight,
or smell or visual anchors and things like this,
and so those kinds of memories tend to stay in longer.
So the reason why memories are staying in there longer
is because you have some sort of past anchor.
And so if we're able to create those anchors
over a period of several days,
and increase the amount of times that they actually appear
in that space repetition format,
then we're pretty sure that those
that those patterns will start to emerge naturally in the brain.
The brain will recognize the patterns,
and will start using the patterns and be able to apply them in real life.
So our original technology was based off the Glossika Space Repetition or GSR,
and we've made a huge update to that this year in 2017.
So a couple things that we've done is
we've tagged all of the data that we have in our database
with the syntactic tags.
And now we're using machine learning
to actually
learn how to tag all this data, so that allows us to
to really scale out
both across languages and more in depth
with the languages that we already have.
So we can add a whole lot more content rich
material to the platform.
And the second thing is:
we developed an algorithm that actually sorts
the content of all of these languages
from simple to complex.
And so that sorting allows us to get the syntactic patterns aligned
and deliver to the user.
Now when the users are using our platform,
they provide some feedback
and that actually provides an even better sort
for these learners.
And so what you get is a tailored made solution for every single learner
and for that learner's particular learning speed.
So if Sally over here is a slower learner
and David's a faster learner,
they're gonna get their material at a different rate of speed,
but hopefully for both sides,
they're actually going to be learning the same concepts
and gaining the same skills
in roughly the same amount of time.
So Glossika is one-of-a-kind in that we can actually
address
the languages that are not actually written down.
So this means that
a lot of languages,
I mean there are 7,000 languages in the world
and most of them are not written,
they are spoken languages.
And a lot of them are dialects.
And so you have situations where
a certain country has developed a standard language
from all of the weird dialects that exist in that country because
they're really hard to communicate between them.
So in the 19th century you had Italy create and a standard Italian language
which all Italians now use to communicate with each other
but they don't necessarily use it in their own hometowns,
they all have their own language that they use.
The same thing happens in Finland.
And so when you get our Glossika course,
the actual language you're learning,
with Glossika, for example with Finnish
is the colloquial version of the language.
Now here in Taiwan
we also have languages that are spoken
and not normally written down,
like Taiwanese and Hakka
and other forms of the Chinese language.
There are all kinds of Chinese dialects.
And so one of our initial goals is:
can we actually build a system
that can teach people
any spoken language in the world?
And can we bring them to fluency?
So that was the one of the very first goals that we laid out.
And so we've been able to achieve that.
We're able to map all of these spoken languages
to the syntax,
and sort it,
and then deliver it on our platform.
Now you can learn
languages like Taiwanese or Hakka or Cantonese
or even the colloquial version of...
of Finnish or Egyptian Arabic,
and these are languages that are not normally written.
You can learn them
directly through the audio training
on Glossika.
This also allows us...
One of our visions here at Glossika is to actually
let people who speak minority languages
to be able to learn any majority language they want.
So for example
In India,
you have a huge population of people there
who may not speak English
or may not have good command of English,
but they really want to do business with China
or they want to learn Chinese.
They're interested in learning Chinese.
So how do they learn Chinese?
Do they have to learn English first?
What if there are no good materials available
in their local language,
in india?
they might speak Bengali, they may speak Hindi or Tamil
but they might need some really good materials
in their own language to learn Chinese
If we build such a...
what I believe is a great solution for building fluency,
I want to make it available to even those people who speak
for example Bengali.
Now they can learn Chinese directly from their own language.
We can also do the same for minority languages.
Let's say they speak Egyptian dialect,
I can teach them Taiwanese.
If they speak Taiwanese dialect, I can teach them Egyptian dialect,
directly between the two.
And so,
the power here is that we're actually connecting people
originally that they had no way to connect with each other before.
And so that's one of our long-term visions.
We can actually go into countries,
maybe in Africa,
we can allow doctors access
to the local languages there,
perform surgeries and be able to communicate with people,
help save lives
and we can also allow the people
in those smaller communities
learn the major languages of the world as well.
The technology is moving along at a really fast pace these days,
and so there's a unique opportunity right now
to jump in where we can provide Glossika's technology
together with the new AR and VR formats.
We can create immersive environments.
These are exactly the kinds of tools that hotels
and food and beverage companies are looking for
to improve their frontline customer service,
and we make those immersive experiences
much more
much more effective for the users,
so that they're actually able to provide their services
directly from experiences that they have
have directly in that immersive environment
And we're really excited about pioneering this kind of technology.