We speak 17+ languages --can you imagine a better dream team to build a free language app?! http://t.co/v8sSbhuIaF pic.twitter.com/ZK2PDl77pt
— Lingualy (@Lingualy) January 28, 2015
Israel-based Lingua.ly, a smart language dictionary startup that turns the Internet into a useful textbook for students, has raised $1 million. Local 1776 Seed Fund participated in the round, alongside Udi Netzer, Shai Rephaeli and Yochy Investments.
The latest funding brings the edtech startup's total raised to $1.8 million. The capital will be dedicated to bringing Lingua.ly's free linguistic tools to new platforms and markets. Premium features will be released on the web and in its apps later this year to allow Lingua.ly to more easily monetize in the future, said Meredith Circerchia, Lingua.ly's director of communications and e-learning, in an interview with TechCrunch.
Jan Ihmels and Orly Fuhrman founded Lingua.ly when they came to the realization that the Internet is the ideal playground for language immersion. It was then that the two set off to combine the science of language learning with the latest technology to create a new, engaging way to learn languages.
Lingua.ly has been successful much thanks to the way it operates as a real world-based tool providing content tailored to users' interests. With flashcards, a dictionary, recorded pronunciations, a repetition game for memorization and a variety of articles spanning several different interests so that users can see how words they're learning are most commonly used, Lingua.ly is doing away with the traditional textbook model with its features that provide deeper context and entertainment, too.
“The Lingua.ly algorithm is based on research concerning vocabulary acquisition from context,” Circerchia told TechCrunch. “It estimates your vocabulary in a foreign language and then finds newspaper articles that contain mostly words you know.”
Circerchia went on to add that "when most of the words in a sentence are familiar to you, you can take a more informed guess at the meaning of new terms. Even if you guess incorrectly, expending extra cognitive energy thinking about a word helps dig the memory in deeper."
The app already supports 10 languages: Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Lingua.ly plans to add more languages to its repertoire later this year.
