Digital Learning VI: Specialization

For French or Italian, there is sufficient demand. It makes financial sense for publishers to produce linear learning materials for these foreign languages. That is no longer the case for Slavic languages.

So what could be more obvious than providing the learning materials online or as software, allowing them to be updated and accessed repeatedly without the need for new editions or printing costs?

Many have had this idea already, which is why the internet is now full of both free and paid educational materials and software — for all sorts of subjects, whether for reference or practical use.

When it comes to language learning, I’ve already mentioned the paid vocabulary trainer by Langenscheidt. It was fantastic (now only available second-hand, last updated in 2019) — with its extensive and well-organized vocabulary collections, example sentences, and audio recordings (i.e., synesthetic learning).

Another major plus was that you had to type in the answers by hand while learning (interactive), and do so repeatedly until they were correct.

Aside from the fact that the program only ran on Windows, its biggest drawback was that it offered only a few, already popular, foreign languages.

On the one hand, the Langenscheidt vocabulary trainer made great use of the digital medium, compared to linear learning materials.

On the other hand, it reflected the market situation for linear materials — which meant it still fell short when it came to less common languages.

While it was possible to create your own vocabulary sets or download those shared by other users, the audio recordings were then missing, and the quality of the collections could vary greatly.

This meant the Langenscheidt vocabulary trainer was specialized in three ways:

• in terms of the scope of content per language
• limited to only a few (popular) languages
• restricted to a single supported operating system