Fluent in Three Months?

@budz888 A trip to Ukraine was not exactly what I’ve meant by “downloading”, furthermore, Turkish and Hungarian are definitely not what I would call “exotic” -)

Exotic for who? :stuck_out_tongue:

Anything other than English is exotic for those who exist in a monocultural, monolingual bubble.

I prefer to simply use the word ‘different’. It has meaning, unlike the word ‘exotic’. haha

Good for Moses for not feeling the need to prioritize European languages. It’s not the 19th century, so he can learn what he wants. He seems to be tapping mainly into the US market with his business. Consider that someone might pay $50,000 to $100,000 for a college education in the US (at 8% compound interest) and after two to four years of foreign language classes, might end up with little knowledge of the target language. That’s quite a market and he is certainly welcome to lure some of it in his direction. So is Lingq and anyone willing to try their hand at doing business here.

Since there is no standardized system of levels as there is in Europe, claims that one is at a certain level are often subjective and self-defining. I’m not sure his product would appeal to the European consumer. I spent significant time studying in Europe, and his product doesn’t appeal to me, but had I not spent tens of thousands of dollars for my European education, I would find his product more appealing than spending $30,000 dollars at a US university and not being able to have a basic conversation (this is the situation some students face, certainly not all).

Lingq appears to target a different type of consumer and I would say the products are not directly substitutable. At some point the Moses consumer may become a Lingq consumer. I would say the same about Benny’s products and Lingq. Moses’ and Benny’s products might be in more direct competition with each other (not sure).

Edited: geez, I made two grammar mistakes… Maybe more I haven’t noticed yet…

I’d just like to add that in the 19th century, people learned ‘exotic’ languages more frequently, out of those people who did learn languages. Hebrew, Aramaic, Sanskrit, Coptic, Classical Chinese and Classical Arabic (among others) were fairly commonly learned. Today, even learning modern Greek is seen as something a little oddball. The same can be said for Russian. Move to something like Vietnamese and you’ll get blank stares. haha Of course, ordinary people weren’t really learning languages then, so that’s the main difference. As everyday people have started learning languages more, there seems to have been a greater focus on European languages, in particular English, French, German.