Cross-Cultural Communication: Learn Languages in a Virtual World

“May you live in interesting times”, a popular expression goes. And indeed, we are. Why? Because we are contemporary with some of the most exciting technologies that have ever existed. And these technologies are bound to change our lives for the better.

Today we will talk about a piece of technology that has been around for a few years but only recently got everyone’s attention: Virtual Reality (VR).

Virtual Reality is what gamers worldwide have dreamed about for decades: a way to be completely immersed in a different environment. The best VR gamesuse VR technology to build fascinating worlds where people can completely dive into.

But VR is much more than just fun: it can be the technology that sparks a learning revolution in geography, history, biology and especially in the way we learn foreign languages . Imagine being able to teleport to Barcelona and talk to a fluent speaker to improve your Spanish. This, from the comfort of your own home by putting a VR headset on. That’s exactly what the future holds in terms of language learning. In a way, Virtual Reality appsare the ancestors of teleportation.

That’s exactly what we, here at Mondly, have been working at since mid-2016. Officially launched a few months ago, Learn Languages VR by Mondly is the first Virtual Reality app to use Speech Recognition and Chatbot technology to help you learn languages in an immersive way.

“A practical approach to language learning likely to be widely adopted.” – Forbes

How a Virtual Reality app can change the way you learn a foreign language

As most language learners know, the secret to learning any language faster is having real conversations with fluent speakers. That’s easier said than done in real life, but here’s where the Mondly Virtual Reality app comes in.

In a nutshell, the Mondly VR app allows you to have conversations with virtual characters in 30 languages, from the comfort of your home. The powerful VR technology is coupled with state-of-the-art speech recognition so that your voice is understood and analyzed in real-time. This translates to you getting instant responses and feedback on pronunciation so you can build your confidence in speaking a foreign language. Having conversations with foreigners during your travels, making foreign friends and even impressing interviewers with your language skills becomes doable.

“The Mondly experience leverages the immersive quality of VR” – Digital Trends

The first version of the VR app has 3 available scenarios that will get you ready for some of the most common situations you might experience in real life, especially when you are visiting a foreign country:

• The Restaurant, where you can practice ordering food and drinks in small bistro
• The Train, where you can have a casual conversation with a fluent speaker
• The Hotel, where you can check in and book a room with a view

“Mondly encourages its users to practice in everyday scenarios such as ordering food and drinks in a restaurant.” – ZDNet

Each scenario is available in 30 different languages: from the popular English, Spanish, French, Arabic or German languages to the more exotic ones such as Mandarin Chinese,Vietnamese or Indonesian.

The Virtual Reality app is created on the back of Mondly’s success. With over 20 million downloads of the Mondly apps (iOS , Android , Web ), we analyzed the way people in 190 countries learn languages to create an immersive way to absorb new words and phrases in a foreign language. As recognition for building such a useful VR app, we have been featured in Facebook’s Oculus Store .

“Mondly’s VR language-learning app is the closest thing to actual immersion” – The Next Web

Of course, such an exciting app couldn’t escape the vigilant eyes of the media. As a result, our VR app has been featured by dozens of media outlets such as Forbes, Digital Trends, The Next Web, UploadVR and many others. We’re humbled by their interest and this fuels our passion for new technologies even more.

So, if you want to get a taste of what the future of language learning looks like, give our VR app a go. If you don’t own a Gear VR headset yet, that’s ok. You can still enjoy the Mondly apps (iOS , Android , Web ), which have a built-in Chatbot you can have a virtual conversation with.

What other technologies should we build? Share your ideas in the comment section. If you are a fan of new, innovative technologies, share the article with your friends.

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• Download Mondly

The full list of languages you can learn with the Mondly VR app: British English, American English, German, French,Italian , Spanish, Russian, Romanian, Greek, European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Arabic, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Persian (Farsi) and Thai.

Get Mondly VR