The campaign is over and rewards have been sent out. Go to www.learnyu.com for a demo lesson and write me at judith@learnlangs.com if you still want to purchase any of the perks. Prices may have changed.

Picture your perfect language tutor: patient, understanding, knowledgeable, perfectly in tune with your needs, and available 24/7.  Now, where would you go to find such a tutor?  How much would you have to pay for a lesson?  Good luck with the unicorn search.  In the meantime, we’ve created LearnYu, an online computer tutor that can be all that and more.

Inspired by Khan Academy and Duolingo, LearnYu is an intelligent learning system that will automatically optimize your learning program.  As you learn, LearnYu will also learn about you.  It will dynamically generate exercises designed to reinforce your weak points, help you build your vocabulary and improve your conceptual understanding.  With a vast knowledge base and infinite patience and memory, LearnYu is like a superhero language tutor.

LearnYu's primary focus is spoken Mandarin Chinese. We are now crowdfunding the first level, where you will learn to understand and produce practical phrases -- introducing yourself, talking about your family, your likes and dislikes, the weather and all the juicy small talk. This level will prepare you to take the HSK 1 standardized test to prove your knowledge of Chinese.  We are also already planning the lessons for HSK 2. Besides the bragging right, an HSK certificate can also help you fulfill university requirements and land a better job.

LearnYu is already live and usable, but with limited content. You can already study lessons and review them by reading short passages in Chinese and having conversations with the computer.  Try it for yourself! (Lesson 1 is publicly available, further lessons are only for people supporting this campaign at this point.)

(see the Gallery for more pictures)

Development of Level 1 is 50% complete and includes more than 1000 audio recordings (real voices, no machines!). We’ve already recruited more than 100 beta testers, who keep giving us valuable feedback. 

Your contribution will allow us to complete the work so that we can open the site to the general public. Here are some of the things we will use the money for:

• Finish writing the remaining lessons of the first level
• Record audio for new vocabulary and sentences, and edit them for lessons
• Hire a web designer to ensure LearnYu looks good across different platforms
  
• Design more user & AI conversations
  
• Add dictionary look-up
• Support optional lessons based on user interests
  
• Improve matching algorithm
  
• Allow fuzzy word recognition for simple typos
  
• Rework parts of the design
  
• Fix various bugs as they get reported
  

Over the past year, I have devoted a lot of my personal funds and thousands of hours of sweat and toil to get the system to where it is now.  I’ve managed to build it up to the point where I can show people how this approach can work.  But we still have a way to go to build the learning platform that we envision.  I want to continue to push LearnYu ahead, but I cannot do this without your support.

But with your support, I’m confident that I will be able to focus all of my attention on LearnYu and recruit the outside help I need to really achieve the level of polish I want. We will be able to complete all of the above tasks and go public before April 2015. We will also start work on level 2, which corresponds to HSK 2.

Do I need to have Facebook in order to use LearnYu?

No. Facebook login is convenient because it's a single click, but we can give you a traditional password-based login as well. 

Yes, by October we will support traditional characters. We already support simplified characters.

When will you have more levels?

If this campaign succeeds and we can forge ahead at full speed, we should be able to release a new level every 1-2 months. 

What if this campaign doesn't reach its funding goal?

We will still be able to provide all the perks and we will still develop lessons for HSK 2 and beyond. Progress will just be slower than if we could hire Chinese teachers full-time.

Will you support more languages?

Creating this kind of site for Chinese or Japanese has vastly different requirements from creating this kind of site for languages written in the Latin alphabet. That's why LearnYu will only do Chinese for the foreseeable future, though we have an agreement with the Esperanto Association of Britain to allow them to use our code to create a site teaching Esperanto. If we did do another language, it would be Japanese. But I'm a firm believer in doing one thing really well rather than trying to do everything in a mediocre way.

Can my students use LearnYu?

Yes, contact us for class or school licenses. We will soon also have features for teachers to track their students' progress through the lessons and see the mistakes they make most often.

LearnYu is a very intuitive course that takes you through one word at a time and with plenty of ways to get the pronunciation repeated, you also learn the tones quite effectively. What I found best with the way the course is built up is that you feel like you are playing a game where you are levelling up, little bars tell you how far you’ve come in the lesson and the greener they are the better you know each individual word.
I wasn’t really expecting to actually learn a lot, because my mind is full of BA projects, Esperanto and Russian at the moment. But the highly intuitive process of slowly adding words, rather than bombarding you with 20 or more words in one go, really makes you feel like you are just learning Mandarin one step at a time. I even met a Chinese guy in the bar and he was able to understand my basic: “I am Danish”  that’s a huge win.
-- Chris Broholm, actualfluency.com

I really recommend you invest in LearnYu if you're a beginner in Chinese. Already, the tool is great to prepare you for HSK 1.  With plans to add more levels and new features, it'll be unstoppable.
-- Olly Guest, chinesemusings.com

I’m Judith Meyer, the initiator of this project.  I love languages.  Like, seriously.  I’ve learned to speak 12 languages and I’m still learning more!  But of all the languages, I’ve had a special love for Chinese, which has been my particular focus for the past 10 years.  But more than just learning languages on my own, I’m passionate about understanding the language acquisition process and empowering others to learn.  In my blog LearnLangs.com, I’ve shared tips and resources for language learning for years.  I’ve also made a career out of bringing language-learning to new media, having developed web-based language courses for Myngle.com, Innovative Language Learning LLC (GermanPod101, DutchPod101, GreekPod101), and Internet-Live-Seminare, as well as various books I’ve written on the subject.  I hold a degree in Computational Linguistics, the branch of computer science dedicated to developing language-related software.  This gives me a solid technical grounding for the development of this project, which I am leading myself using modern technologies such as Ruby on Rails and jQuery. More about me.

Marina González is our amazing graphic artist. She graduated with an MA in Fine Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and then moved to Berlin. Marina has been creating the wonderful visuals you can see in the video and on the website. See her full portfolio at marina-mandarina.com.

Jesse Alter is LearnYu's sysadmin. Based in New Jersey, he ensures that LearnYu.com keeps running.

Sophia You is a very experienced Chinese teacher. She and her team of native Mandarin speakers in Qingdao, China, have been creating our Chinese lessons and audio recordings.

Together we are creating the Chinese course of your dreams. Contribute now and share this with your friends!