Language Mentor

Language Mentor - An Open Language Learning Platform


Language Mentor allows anyone - institutions, teachers, and ordinary individuals - to create "mostly audio" language lessons and make them available to individuals, groups, or the entire world. Our audio-centric format is designed to allow busy people to study while doing other things - exercising, cleaning, etc. - and thus accelerate their language learning.

Example Mandarin Chinese lessons are available, with more in the pipeline. If you'd like to give Language Mentor a spin, we suggest that you select "Chinese, Mandarin" in the setup screen. While we hope that students of Chinese will enjoy these lessons, their primary purpose is to demonstrate how Language Mentor works and, hopefully, to inspire others to create lessons for many languages.

Features for Learners:

• "Mostly Audio" format creates language study time where none existed before
• "Record/Playback" feature helps learners perfect their pronunciation
• "Loop" button allows learners to repeat sentences and phrases for as long as desired
• "I Know This" button allows learners to suppress sentences and phrases that they have mastered, and focus on the content that they haven't mastered
• Multiple "learning modes" for learning new content, translation practice, etc.

Open Platform:

• Anyone can create lessons for any language
• Lessons are published to "lesson libraries" which can be located anywhere on the Internet
• Individuals and institutions can create libraries and share them with the world
• Teachers can create libraries for their classes and for individual students
• Users decide which libraries they wish to use

Publishing Features:

• Language Mentor is a free, open platform. Lesson creators provide their library's URL to users, users add the library to Language Mentor, and Language Mentor starts downloading lessons. It's that simple. You don't pay us any fee, and there is no approval process.*
• Our lesson format allows authors to include "credits" information with their lessons. We encourage you to give credit to all contributors, including yourself.
• Lessons can be revised and updated - Language Mentor will automatically update installed lessons to the new versions.

Creating Lessons:

• Creating lessons requires some geek skills. If you are comfortable with editing audio, editing XML, and using an FTP client, you should be able to learn the process fairly easily.
• We're currently in the process of creating detailed documentation for the lesson creation process. If you're interested in creating lessons, and meet the geek criteria listed above, please contact us at LanguageCollaborative.com - we'll enroll you as a documentation tester and help you get started.
• We're currently working on new lesson authoring software which will make lesson creation simple and painless (no geek skills required). Stay tuned. :)

* We reserve the right to block libraries for any reason, including but not limited to content that is illegal, obscene, libelous, or hateful. On the other hand, we make no commitment to doing this. We support free speech. If you are concerned that we might block you content, we invite you to contact us at LanguageCollaborative.com for clarification before you start work on creating lessons.