LinguaTV is a German start up that offers professionally produced language learning videos, as the tagline says “we watch languages”.
I think this is a very interesting approach and the company already won a bunch of awards for its innovative platform. After the relaunch the product is even more streamlined so it’s about time to have a first look on LinguaTV.
www.linguatv.com
The centerpiece of the platform is of course the video player. For the relaunch the LinguaTV team worked together with experts in didactics, web development and of course foreign languages. The revamped player now offers captions which can be enabled or disabled and interactive transcripts. The user can simply click on a certain part of the scene and directly jump into it.
LinguaTV are also offering extra downloadable content like pdf documents or mp3 audio files including transcripts, vocabulary explanations, verb lists and other extra content.
The learning experience itself is based on incentives and awards, an approach that already is proven to be very useful in online learning. Like Livemocha points or busuu berries the learner on LinguaTV receives points which are of course compared to those of other members of the platform. But LinguaTV also measures the indivudual progress in categories like listening, reading, writing, grammar and vocabulary knowledge separately and visualizes the data in order to motivate the learner during the lessons.
Similar to Rosetta Stone TOTALe LinguaTV offer the possibility to learn together with other community members and ask questions to a group administrator about topics related to the video lessons. The aim is to boost an intercultural exchange between the different members and hence to have fun while learning a language. Again, an approach that already works well in language learning communities.
Currently LinguaTV offer 16 video courses in the five languages English, German, French, Italian and Spanish ranging from a detective story for beginners to business English for the hotel sector. All scenes and dialogues are written to be as close to natural situations as possible.
The company was founded by Sandra Gasber and Philip Gienandt in 2006 and won the World Summit Award 2009, awarded by the United Nations (UNESCO) for the worldwide best electronic content in the category “e-learning and education”, the German Prize for Internet Television (IPTV-Award 2008) und received the distinction “Highly Commended” at the European Medea Awards.
Pingback: Kirsten Winkler