Vision

Communication is the key to success

Whenever there is misunderstanding, conflict, or distance between people, the best – often the only – way forward is to improve our communication. I believe communication is the key to success, because success, be it personal or professional, depends on connecting with other people. If we use the wrong words or the wrong amount, we don’t communicate properly, the connection is forged, and we risk generalisation or hair-splitting among other phenomena. Words trigger associations which can differ vastly between individuals, which is why assuming and permitting only your own understanding of any given word in a conversation can cause misunderstandings and conflicts. To mitigate this effect we need to be ready to rephrase on the spot, which requires practice. Many things in life can be good and/or bad depending on the perspective, but what worth is any subjective perspective without the right words to pass it on? It is no coincidence that communication, for better or worse, are the traits of the most successful and powerful professions in the world: politicians, influencers, sales people, life coaches, … all have one thing in common when they are successful, they find the right words to express themselves in ways that resonate with others. If they choose the wrong words, people would either disagree and/or not feel good about what is said and dismiss it. Without communication, our thoughts and feelings remain only that and don’t evolve, and without good communication, they don’t hit the target the way they should.

The progress plateau

More advanced learners reach a plateau and have a hard time improving their skills. They get to a point where they hear new words and phrases, which they might understand but never get to use thus don’t fully internalise. Or they live in a country where they interact in the target language with locals, who are not tutors and who don't have time to repeat themselves, yet the contents of these very conversations are pure gold to any serious learner, because they are as real as it can get. Unfortunately these conversations end with no further processing and the contents are soon gone and forgotten. Closing that gap, going that extra mile (which is not a mile, it's right there, just needs organisation) is what this the AEIOU (dev)-platform intents to accomplish, maybe not now but in the future, and with the technology we have or will have at hands, we can soon progress towards that goal.

Language is our culture, our identity

Learning a language should not be about simply translating a set of words or phrases word for word. There is so much more than just the current given context at play, so much more is hidden within every phrase, expression and word. If we look close enough, we can find a little bit of culture, legacy, literature and/or history buried inside of it. Language is and should primarily be a means to an end, but it also gives us a glimpse into the past, to simpler times where one word might have meant many different things or a more sophisticated past when many different words were used to describe what we nowadays conceive as identical. Why do we study dead languages to this day? Why do we still learn Latin? Because it teaches us the history of our culture and shows us the common denominator of the languages we use today. Approaching language acquisition from this angle shows us how close the languages remain to be, because they once were unified in one single language. It can vastly enrich our vocabulary and emotional and conceptual bandwidth and thereby improve our ways of expressing ourselves and be better communicators. 

In today’s day and age, we are constantly surrounded by more and more capable computers. While they used to help us to be more productive, organised, and a better version of ourselves, ubiquitous AI is thinking and reasoning on its own, causing the computers to already or eventually replace us. 

This is not just another “technology gets in the way” moment but quite the opposite. AI is not “in the way” in a sense that it’s annoying or tedious, but rather getting a little too convenient, to the point that it compromises our own mental capacity, leaving it sidelined and underchallenged. We forget that we carry around a very efficient and proven organic computer at all times that should at least be maintained and ideally improved, but in order to do that it needs training! If we do not challenge our brain, our memory and our ability to learn, we lose our intelligence and our identity in the process, because, being homo sapiens, intelligence defines us. 

The overall vision I have for this platform, is to not pass the torch to AI and risk to lose our culture and identity, but to find the best of both worlds. To not let AI replace us or dictate our ways of thinking and speaking, but instead to let us benefit from the tools AI can provide and thereby augment our own way of expressing.

Many of us fear that our employments and livelihoods are in danger, and wonder what we will ultimately be doing in a future where AI can do everything better and faster than us. What will be our purpose if we don’t have work to do? In this scenario, an existential crisis lies ahead, and we will have to ask ourselves: What defines us? When nothing is left to work on, will we be burned out or will we be free? Was everything just a problem that required solving or was the journey the goal and will we create and find purpose in that? Here’s how this applies to language learning: Is the language you’re learning a problem that needs fixing or does it have its own self-serving purpose? How do you answer that question?

Have fun learning!

Fred